On an archeological dig in Arizona, a fight breaks out between Yuri, the irritable and violent foreman, and three of his workers right when they find something beneath the sand. One of the men, a Native American named Tommy, ends up with a badly bleeding wound on his arm and is taken into town to have a doctor stitch it up. The head of the dig, Noel, is then shown the find by Yuri: a skeleton that appears to be both humanoid and lupine in shape and form. One of the workers, Joel, utters the word "yetiglanchi" upon seeing the skeleton and is then dismissed by Noel, who tells his fellow archeologist, Natalie Burke, not to say anything to the Native American workers about the find. Later, while looking at the removed skeleton in a building, Noel explains to Natalie that a yetiglanchi is the Navajo equivalent of a werewolf, specifically a witch that can take the form of any type of animal simply by wearing its skin. Meanwhile, Tommy is brought home after having his wound stitched up but is still in bad shape, and when Joel sees him, he orders an ambulance called for him. At the hospital, Tommy begins to grow hair on his face, the structure of which is also changing rapidly. The next day, at the dig site, Yuri learns about Tommy's being in the hospital and goes there, disguising himself as a doctor in order to get into his room; there, he takes a sample of Tommy's blood. Late that night, with the full moon high in the sky, Tommy completely transforms into a werewolf and, after killing several people in the hospital, escapes. However, Joe and another coworker, Bill, knowing that Tommy will head for his home, wait for him with rifles armed with silver bullets and fire upon him when he shows up. The next day, Paul Niles, a writer and occasional journalist, arrives in his old hometown of Flagstaff and takes up residence at his late mother's home. After meeting the very bizarre groundskeeper, Sam, and Carrie, the house's saleswoman, he's invited to accompany the latter to a birthday party for Noel. There, he meets Natalie, and when he learns about their discovery, he offers to help publicize it via the connections he has out in New York. However, Yuri, who attempted to create another werewolf out of a security guard, only for said werewolf to end up dying, becomes angry when Natalie shows Paul the skeleton and attacks him, cutting him with the skull. Like Tommy before him, this passes the affliction of werewolfism on to Paul, and Natalie may be the only person who can save Paul from both himself and from becoming a freak put on exhibition.
Even though it's set in Arizona, few of the actors in the film are American and all of them either can't act or don't care enough to try. It doesn't help that their roles give them little to nothing to play with. Case in point, our ostensible lead, Paul Niles (Federico Cavalli, or Fred, as he's billed here), besides not showing up until 25 minutes in, might as well be a plank of wood, as this guy has no charisma or personality to him at all. He just shows up in Flagstaff, prepares to move into his mother's old place, and tags along with Carrie, the house's seller, to a birthday party that just happens to be for Noel, the head archeologist of the dig, which is where he meets up with Natalie Burke (Adrianna Miles), another plank of wood. That's probably why the two of them have an instant attraction: neither of them have a personality. For one thing, she can't pronounce "werewolf,"; she always says, "Wur-wolf." For another, there's one moment where she says "is," even though she's talking about two people. Third, her accent comes and goes periodically (she sounds Russian for most of the movie but then, in one scene, she comes off as southern). And fourth, she has virtually no emotions. When Noel is first telling her of the yetiglanchi, she says, "This is absolutely fascinating," in a voice that's flatter than a pancake, and she has the same tone whenever she's yelling at Yuri to stop beating on someone (she never does anything to make him stop other than repeatedly saying, "Stop it!") and when she tells him she's not going to let him and Noel exploit Paul as a werewolf. Oh, yeah, like I said, she and Paul become lovers. After having known him for all of 24 hours and trading one kiss during the time, which gets interrupted, there's a scene where she stops by to see him, looks at the bad gash on his upper back from where Yuri whacked him with the werewolf skull, and then, next thing you know, they're shagging (there's an alternate version of the movie, one with the Arizona Werewolf title, that has a more graphic sex scene between them than what you see in the common version). As for Paul's metamorphosis into a werewolf, it just consists of him acting animalistic in a manner that's impossible to take seriously and even though he has a strong feeling that something strange and terrifying is happening to him, he still decides to go out to a bar with Natalie and play pool with her. He ends up transforming there and going on a "rampage," showing why you should always listen to your gut. And by the end of the movie, after Paul has fully transformed and killed Yuri, Natalie is now suddenly a werewolf too, even though there was never a moment where she got bit, scratched, or cut herself on the bones. (I guess it could be due to her doing the horizontal mambo with Paul that one time but that's stretching it.)
While we're talking about Yuri, I'd like to point out how his hairdo is absolutely amazing, in that it simply will not stay consistent. Just about every time you see him, his hair is different, both in color and in style. When you first see him, it's fairly short and dark, but then, the next day, when he shows back up at the dig site, it's now brown, longer, and more ragged-looking. When he goes to the hospital, disguised as a doctor, his hair is darker and better groomed; the next night, at Noel's birthday party, Yuri's hair is back to a lighter brown and the style has changed yet again; it's different again when he fights with Paul in the museum's laboratory the next day; and when he shows up at the bar near the end, his hair goes from now having gray in it, to no gray at all when he sees Paul changing in the restroom, to back to gray when he calls Noel to tell him about Paul. It's one of the most glaring instances of bad continuity I think I've ever seen, and I'm pretty sure I would have noticed it even if Mike and the bots weren't pointing it out every time it happened.
Joe Estevez, Martin Sheen's younger brother, has a brief role during the movie's first act as Joel, a digger who recognizes the skeleton that's unearthed as that of a yetiglanchi and is quite disturbed by it, to the point where Noel sends him away. He and his two buddies, Bill (Randall Oliver) and Tommy (Jules Desjarlais), often run afoul of Yuri, with the opening scene showing the latter two getting into a fistfight with him when he's inexcusably mean to Tommy, a fight that Joel tries to break up a couple of times before he's finally successful. Tommy ends up getting badly cut on the skeleton (although, it's filmed so poorly that you're likely to not even realize that's what happened until they actually mention it the next day) which, in turn, leads to his becoming a werewolf. Joel recognizes this when he sees Tommy after Bill brings him home from having the town doctor take a look at his wound and tells Bill to call an ambulance. That night, Tommy gradually starts to become the werewolf, though he doesn't change fully until the next night, wherein he breaks out of the hospital and makes his way back to his house. However, Joel and Bill, knowing what's going on, are at the place waiting for him, armed with rifles loaded with silver bullets, and when he shows up, they gun him down. None of them, including Joel and Bill, are seen again after that.
I can remember a moment in the movie Ed Wood by Tim Burton, where Ed Wood is asked if he knows anything about filmmaking; someone should have asked Zarrindast that same question, because if this movie is any indication, he didn't. In fact, I don't know if I like the idea that he had the nickname of "the Persian Ed Wood," because that's kind of an insult to the real Ed Wood. I can get far more entertainment out of all of his most notorious efforts combined than I can a single moment of Werewolf, as the pace is horrendous. It's 94 minutes long (at least, the cut without the graphic sex scene is) but it moves at a snail's pace, with scenes taking an eternity to play out, be it due to overlong shots of people standing around, doing nothing (like when Joel loiters around the dig site after Noel tells him to leave or when he sees Tommy transforming in Bill's pickup truck), similarly lengthy establishing shots of locations (when the hospital where the transforming Tommy is being kept is first shown, the movie hangs on the outside shot of it for nearly fifteen seconds), or plain boring dialogue scenes, like those between Noel, Yuri, and Natalie early on or a scene between Paul and a taxi driver when he first arrives in Flagstaff. Even the werewolf transformation, which should be the money shots, take an eternity. When Tommy transforms at the hospital, it takes two nights for him to finally become the werewolf and before he finally gets up and starts attacking people, we have to watch him sitting up in his hospital bed, writhing back and forth, and snarling, as he gets progressively hairier in-between shots. Paul's change is even harder to sit through, as we have to suffer through a montage of him first sitting around, then lying on his bed when he suddenly starts snarling, and a nighttime shot of him grabbing the bed's head, arching his spine, and flexing his shoulders back again and again, all while making silly growling sounds (like Crow said in the MST3K riffing, he looks more like he's trying to let out a massive fart, with the way he's gyrating). They also put random cuts to the werewolf skeleton during this sequence, as if we couldn't figure out what's going on. And even after all that, in the next scene, he's still not a werewolf. Instead, you get the moment where Natalie comes by to see him and they end up having sex. The same goes for when Paul changes in the bar near the end of the movie. It takes an eternity of him watching a game of pool between Natalie and Yuri before we get to the moment in the restroom where Yuri sees him nearly changed (we never see Paul go into the restroom, by the way; the scene just cuts to Yuri being in there and, wham, there's Paul).
Most of the time, the cinematography is decent, especially in the scenes that take place out in the Arizona desert, but then, you have scenes that are obviously shot day-for-night, with a blue filter on the film that often makes things hard to see. However, the editing is totally broken, as the major sequences involving the werewolves, both at the beginning and near the end, cut back and forth between the full-bodied monster and static close-ups of this silly-looking puppet head (which looks nothing like the full-body werewolves but I'll get to that shortly), the backgrounds of which are so dark and vague that they could be almost anywhere. Even worse is the sequence of events surrounding Paul's first kill as a werewolf. After we see him and Natalie getting it on in his bed, the film cuts to a couple in a jeep who are preparing to do the same, when the werewolf attacks. Following his chasing after and killing the girl, we cut to him back in his bed as a normal man, reading a book, when he changes again, leading to the moment between him and Carrie when she shows back up. This all seems to happen within the span of one night, but Natalie disappears after the sex scene and doesn't show back up until the next morning. You could say that, after they had sex, she left and Paul then turned, went out, and attacked the young woman, but again, why did he turn back to normal, only to change again in the next scene? That's far from the only instance of bad editing, as you see shots of the same-sized full moon literally every night over the course of the story, nighttime establishing shots that change to dusk in the interior scenes, people running from rural environments to the middle of nowhere between frames, scenes cutting very abruptly, and so on.
There are even sound issues with the film. Sometimes, the characters will be muttering something in such a way to where you cannot make out what they're saying, like they didn't have a boom mike on the set for those moments. It also makes use of a lot of stock sound effects, with the opening fight between Yuri and the workers consisting of grunts and punch sounds that I first heard in the Goldeneye game for the Nintendo 64, a high-pitched "eee" scream for a woman that I'm sure you've heard in numerous things since the 90's, and stock wolf howls. The sound editing sometimes gets screwed up in bizarre ways, as well. When Yuri calls Noel to tell him that Paul has become werewolf, you see a slow pan across the lab to where Noel is sitting, listening to him on the phone, but Yuri's voice is so clear and loud that you would think he was in the room with him and it's only when it abruptly cuts to a shot of Yuri using the bar's phone that you realize he's not there. Moreover, when the werewolf chases the woman through the wilderness in the middle of the movie, the sound design goes completely bonkers: there's another set of screams along with her own, you hear screams when she's clearly yelling, "No!", and there are a number of other wolf howls and snarls going on along with those the werewolf is already making. But the weirdest instance of sound comes from an establishing montage inside the museum in the sequence leading up to when Paul gets cut by the werewolf skull. As the camera pans through the various exhibits, you're bombarded with all sorts of random animal sounds, meant to be those of the animals represented, only for it to end on a shot of a mastadon skeleton accompanied by the roar of the T-Rex from Jurassic Park! I assumed that these sounds were meant to be coming from speakers in the exhibits but then, after that last roar, everything gets abruptly quiet and you don't hear them ever again. Once again, I'm left dumbfounded by the choices made here.
You'd hope that the werewolf effects would at least be decent but, like everything else here, they leave a lot to be desired. A major issue is that they can't keep the look of the werewolves consistent. Sometimes, they look like your typical, old-fashioned, Wolf Man kind of designs, consisting of men with lots of hair on their faces, hairy, clawed hands, and vaguely lupine features, which tend to be decent enough makeups most of the time, even if you can often see the edges of them. Moreover, Paul's werewolf makeup is undermined by the fact that he's often wearing at least one bit of white clothing when he changes which, especially during the third act, make me think of Michael J. Fox in Teen Wolf when he's at the school dance. Other times, they either use that aforementioned puppet which, as Mike and the bots mentioned, looks more like a really ugly bat than anything wolf-like, or a suit that makes the creatures look like big, black bears with dog heads (as you can see, you don't get a good look at the suit, as it's only used in nighttime scenes; just think of a less impressive mixture of the werewolves in The Howling and Silver Bullet and you've got the idea), neither of which look at all like the makeups used on the actors. Sadly, the werewolf skeleton that's at the center of the movie is the best effect, and even it gets things anatomically wrong by how it has fossilized ears, despite the fact that ears aren't made of bone. And no, there are no really good gore effects either. You just see some bloody slash or scratch marks and streaks of blood that more like red paint. That's it. No torn out throats or innards or bitten off limbs or anything of that sort, which you hope for in a good werewolf movie.
I hate that this movie sucks as much as it does, because I like the idea of a story where the werewolves are connected to a discovery that proves an old, Native American legend is true. What's ironic about that, though, is how Noel originally tells Natalie that a yetiglanchi is not a werewolf in, "Our traditional white man's, movie monster sense," explaining about how they were able to assume the forms of various animals simply by wearing their skins... and then, the actual werewolves they give us are 100% in the traditional movie monster sense, in how they look, operate by the full moon, and can be killed with silver bullets. I also though the idea of someone becoming a werewolf by cutting themselves on this skeleton was an interesting way to pass on the curse but it's never carried out very memorably. Finally, I like the idea of this kind of story taking place in a setting that's non-traditional. One of the reasons why I like Silver Bullet as much as I do is because of how it plants a werewolf story in small town America, and here, they had an opportunity to do such a story in both the Arizona desert and a rural town nearby (I like the former setting so much, in general, that I would have liked to have seen the whole movie set out there). One of the few compliments I can give the movie is that the actual locations they used of the desert, the town, the museum, and Paul's house all look nice (it's amazing they were able to shoot at such nice locations, given the tiny $350,000 budget they had) and it would have been great to have a really good werewolf movie set in such environments. But, if you couldn't tell by now, they blew it completely.
The "action" scenes are also shot and put together in a very clumsy manner. While the opening fight between Yuri and the diggers is okay for the most part, like I said, you can barely make out the moment when Tommy cuts himself on the werewolf skeleton, as you're only given a distant shot of Yuri shoving him to the ground, with no close-ups showing his arm getting cut on anything. After that, it takes an ungodly amount of time to finally get to the point where Tommy becomes a full-blown werewolf and runs out of his hospital room into the hallway (he's still wearing the backless hospital gown, which reveals no hair on his back whatsoever, but he apparently took the time to put his jeans back on, despite being a werewolf). There, he attacks a security guard, who attempts to fight him off with a punch, only for Tommy to come back with a slash across his face, even though you can tell his claws never touched the guard's skin, before grabbing him by the throat, pushing him up against the wall, and holding him there until he chokes to death and his body falls to the floor. Tommy then heads down the hall, sending one guy running for it, when the movie abruptly cuts to the countryside, where a group of people are now hunting the werewolf. At Tommy's home, Joel and Bill are waiting for him, armed with rifles containing silver bullets, when he appears nearby and we get our first cuts between the werewolf suit and the close-ups of the puppet head. The two of them get in closer, aim and shoot (when Bill shoots, you hear a gunshot but you don't see a flash or smoke discharge from his rifle's barrel), and the werewolf falls backwards onto some brush and expires.
A long time later, you have the sequence where Yuri decides to turn Vic the security guard into a "modern, man-made werewolf" by injecting him with the blood sample he took from Tommy. After Yuri wakes him up after the injection, Vic heads out to his car, as his shift is over, and begins to change on his way down there. He makes it to his car and gets into the driver's seat, with Yuri watching from his own car nearby. Vic sits in the driver's seat for a little bit, growling as he continues to change, before driving off down the road, with Yuri following him. This leads into a long, dull sequence of the two of them driving around, passing by the same gas station several times in a row, while Vic gets more and more wolf-like as he drives, a ridiculous sight if there ever was one. It culminates in Vic driving into some random oil drums in the middle of the room and crashing, while Yuri watches from nearby as his plan for a man-made werewolf literally goes up in smoke. Fortunately for him, he gets another chance the next morning, when Natalie brings Paul in to see the werewolf skeleton they unearthed. Coming into the lab and starting a fight with him for no reason, Yuri shoves Paul against a counter, and when he gets kicked in response, Yuri punches him against the counter again, grabs the werewolf skull, and slashes him between the shoulders with it... or, at least, that's what you're supposed to think happen, but the skull obviously doesn't even touch Paul. Still, his back is bleeding from this attack and Paul quickly leaves the building, as Yuri screams at him to get out.
As awful as the movie has been up to this point, this next scene puts it right over the top. Following Paul's first embarrassing hints of werewolfism and his and Natalie suddenly getting it on, we cut to this younger couple who's planning on doing the same in the back of a jeep. After the guy gets turned off by his girl asking if he brought a raincoat with him so she can cover herself up with it, he climbs back into the driver's seat and, realizing that she has the keys on her, starts amorously searching her for them. The film cuts to the werewolf, who's not only out in the middle of a dirt, country road while the jeep was parked somewhere in town, but is also hunkering down to the ground, moving like he's attempting to do yoga, while making nutty faces at the same time. The guy never sees him but the girl does, as she stupidly jumps out of the jeep and runs, while the werewolf is still moving like he's doing the worm rather than chasing her. Now, she's out in the middle of the country, running down a dirt road, as the werewolf, completely ignoring her boyfriend, chases after her. She runs into a mud puddle (she already has mud on her clothes before she hits it) and stumbles through it like it's quicksand, falling near the edge of it and acting unable to get up. The werewolf, who does a sideways shuffle at one point, closes in on her through the puddle, grabs her, and shakes her back and forth before looking like he's blowing a raspberry into her neck rather than biting into it, as he's supposed to be (admittedly, I'm saying that because Tom Servo made that noise when he did it). After overacting and baying at the moon, he finally walks away after supposedly killing her, even though he clearly didn't do anything to her.
As I said before, even though he's turned back into a normal man when we see him in his bed in the next scene, he changes again and starts thrashing around in front of the bars at the head of the bed while growling and snarling. That's when Carrie suddenly shows up again at the house and goes upstairs to see Paul. Hearing something in the bathroom across from the stairs, she slowly (and I do mean "slowly") walks towards it, when Paul, now a werewolf again, stumbles into the doorway. He lunges at her and grabs her at the banister next to the top of the stairs before throwing her over the railing, causing her to land on the stairs down below her and tumble down to the bottom. He then stands up there, growling and posing, endlessly flexing his paws, while Carrie, completely unhurt despite how far she fell down, manages to escape out of the house, when the movie suddenly cuts to the next day.
The next night, Paul again starts to change while at a bar with Natalie, as he watches her and Yuri, who cut in on them earlier, play a game. We have to endure another excruciating scene of him slowly changing, the movie cutting back and forth between him and that stupid-looking puppet a couple of times, as well as showing us a pointless pan across a mural atop the wall. After Yuri loses the game, and while Natalie takes up the challenge of some random biker guy, he goes into the restroom and finds Paul there, in an advanced stage of transformation. And I don't mean he walks in on Paul; I mean, he went in there, did his business in a stall, and came out to find Paul slumped over a sink. Where was Paul between this point and that last time we saw him near the pool table? After Yuri exits the restroom, Paul follows suit and walks out of the bar, smacking down a random guy who's coming in, biting another guy in the neck, and then running after some kids down the sidewalk. He runs into another random person who fights him, and manages to land some blows, before Paul grabs him and tosses him aside, when the police arrive. He runs and stumbles over the hood of a car that comes in, the driver asking what he's doing, when he runs right across the car, heads to a truck parked next to a building behind it, and uses that to climb up onto the roof. There, he stands up, holds his arm out completely, and snarls and growls some more before going wherever he goes next.
Paul heads back to his house and this is where you have that ridiculous confrontation between him and Sam, where Sam does nothing but stand there, fretting about seeing a real werewolf in front of him. After the werewolf spares his life for whatever reason, Paul runs upstairs to his room and huddles over in a corner. Natalie then arrives and, after telling Sam to use his shotgun on anyone who tries to break into the house, goes upstairs and confronts Paul, who drapes his paws across his face in a melodramatic manner. She sits across from him, trying to get through to him by telling him that she loves him, what Noel and Yuri plan to do to him, and that she wants to help him. Yuri then pulls up outside, which Natalie sees out the window, and as he stands by his car, waiting, Paul explodes through the window, lands on top of another car nearby, and runs off, with Yuri having no reaction at all. Natalie comes out the front door and she pursues Yuri, who himself is pursuing Paul into the nearby hills which, again, seem to be within a stone's throw of this little rural neighborhood. Yuri stops and looks right at the camera before continuing the chase, and Natalie does the exact same thing just seconds later. After an overlong sequence of Yuri chasing the werewolf up into the wilderness, we get another montage of cuts between that puppet head and Yuri walking around, searching. When he's confronted by the werewolf, Yuri's only reaction to him lunging and clawing at him is to cross his arms in front of his head in a pathetic attempt to shield himself. We never see the claws make contact with him and yet, bloody cuts start appearing on his face, around his nose. An abrupt cut occurs where Yuri stumbles across a dirt trail, only to be confronted by the werewolf again, and after some more bad attempts at shielding, he collapses to the ground, the werewolf closes in, and Yuri shields himself some more before finally expiring. Natalie comes across Yuri's body, has no reaction to it, and then looks around her environment. The film cuts to the stairwell in Paul's house, with a long tracking shot of Natalie as she makes her way up the stairs to the bedroom, the camera not showing us her face the whole time. She sits down at the foot of the bed, staying there for a few seconds, then she hears something and looks and sees that Paul is there. She walks over to be with him and it's then revealed that she, for no reason, is a werewolf too, as I think to myself, "Kiss... my... ass."
In terms of sound work, Keith Bilderbeck has had a long and varied career, starting all the way back in 1989 and continuing to work in films, television, and video games to this very day; as a composer, however, Werewolf is one of only a handful of movies he's worked on and when you hear the score, you understand why. It's just as bad as everything else in the movie. It's loud, obnoxious, and overbearing, trying to have a tribal Native American sound to it, complete with drums and chanting, as well as throwing in loud horns that sound like a boat is departing (again, that's a joke that the riffers made) and constant wolf howls, but it becomes a cacophony of annoying noises to the point where you wish it would shut up. But, as if that wasn't bad enough, both the opening and ending credits are set to this horrendous tribal song that, as soon as you hear it, you want to turn the movie off. I can't do justice to how bad this sounds with simple words. Look it up yourself on YouTube.
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| This title screen is as static in the actual movie as it is here. |
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