Review - The Howling Reborn (2011)

“Full Moon. New Blood.”

Director: Joe Nimziki

Stars: Landon Liboiron, Lindsay Shaw and Ivana Milicevic

Writer: Joe Nimziki

I liked the first Howling movie, but I won’t say I was blown away by it. To be honest I have a perverse love of Howling 6: The Freaks. But who wouldn’t like a movie with vampires and werewolves (I’m ignoring you Twilight). But the reason I bring this up is I’m not precious about the series, and I am not against a remake or rebirth if you will, as long as the movie is good. Sadly what we have here is something that is just horrid. Normally in my reviews I try to be fair, and highlight some of the positives in the movie. This is going to be a bloody hard review to do. With that let’s get Kraken (Yes I know) and put a silver bullet in this bastard.

The biggest problem in my mind is how the remake approaches the issue of appealing to a new audience. Quicker than you can say “Bella is the most evil character ever to grace literature,” the movie goes down a very Twilight angle, with teen angst being the key theme. So with the relationship between Will (Landon Liboiron) and Eliana (Lindsay Shaw) front and centre a lot of the emotional pull has to come from this development. Needless to say the development just doesn’t work. It’s too quick, too forced and just doesn’t bloody work when they head down the path of love soothing the savage beast within. I groaned when love beat Freddy Krueger in the second movie and that was a hell of a lot more developed than this movie. Another problem is in the character of Kathryn (Ivana Milicevic) who seems to be evil because she’s a werewolf. That’s it. It’s hard to explain how bad this is, without spoiling the movie. But needless to say when we find out certain things about her, her evil plans seem very out of the blue.

Without the solid foundation of a credible story, the actors really struggle with what they are given. I didn’t find any actor’s that bad but none of them really stood out to me. If I’m going to give any compliment, it will be to Landon Liboiron who does okay, and maybe with a better script could have been good. Oh wait there is an actor I have a bone to pick with, and that’s Jesse Rath who plays Sachin. He’s basically the equivalent of Randy from Scream, the problem being is his character is badly written, and Jesse Rath plays him with such hyped up energy I wanted to transport into the movie and slap him. Everything about the character annoyed me, including his digs at movies of old. You know its okay to take the piss out of older movies, if you can back it up and be a good movie.

Visually the movie is fine, and I’ll give Nimziki some credit that the movie didn’t look like ass. Well it looks okay for what budget he had; however there are some special effects that just look really bad. An explosion just looks like it’s layered over footage, and some of the werewolves look like BATS! You see there are alpha wolves that look like actual werewolves, and all the others are werebats. God damn it how hard is it to make werewolves look like werewolves. I shouldn’t even need to say that, but there you have.

Simply put. Don’t see this movie. It’s a bad werewolf movie, it has plot holes bigger than the forest moon of Endor, and its characters really don’t make much sense. It thinks it’s a lot cleverer than what it is, and honestly is a movie that gives remakes a bad name. I hate being so down on a movie, but to be honest its made me appreciate the originals a lot more.