Howling II: Stirba—Werewolf Bitch aka Howling II… Your Sister Is a Werewolf (1985)

(In French, On Cable TV, August 2021) I’m not going to claim that werewolf thriller The Howling is a wonderful movie (I found it a bit dull), but it’s vastly more ambitious than this lazy attempt at a sequel, which heads almost immediately from Los Angeles to the cheaper shooting realms of eastern Europe for a mixture of folk horror, bland leads, vampire-inspired plot elements and people in hairy makeup passing themselves as werewolves. Fortunately, Christopher Lee is here to keep our interest as a werewolf hunter— but he can’t be in every scene of the film when he’s in a supporting role. There’s quite a bit of sex and nudity here, with no one claiming that it’s there for artistic merit: it’s very much in the exploitation vein all the way to an end-credit sequence in which the same shot of an actress baring her chest is repeated seventeen times in-between reaction shots of other characters taken from elsewhere in the film. If that’s not damning enough, I’m not sure what is. (B-movie queen Sybil Danning reportedly limited filmmakers to one nude shot as per her contract, and that’s what they did with it.)  It does give Howling II a crass and dirty feel — while the East European shooting location does allow the film to punch above its weight in terms of visuals, the script is the same kind of tripe that low-end horror sequels did so often in the 1980s. It’s not, to be fair, actively painful to watch: there’s a ridiculousness to it that makes up some unintended entertainment, the main song is catchy, the actresses are attractive (if you dig a bit, the film will give you a splendid excuse to read all about the extraordinary life of Marsha Hunt, of The Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar” fame) and even a performance by Lee in a terrible film is something to be appreciated.