Howling II: Stirba – Werewolf Bitch (1985)

aka Howling II: … Your Sister Is a Werewolf

Coming to the funeral of his sister Karen, Dee Wallace Stone’s journalist character from the first movie, Texan sheriff Ben (Reb Brown) soon finds himself in curious company. Occult investigator Stefan Crosscoe (Christopher Lee) attempts to convince Ben that his sister had arranged her own on-camera murder to prevent turning into a werewolf for good. Karen’s former colleague Jenny (Annie McEnroe, doing an awkward Jamie Lee Curtis impression) is willing to buy into Stefan’s ideas quickly enough, but Ben needs a bit of convincing.

Fortunately, werewolf attacks are a good argument against scepticism, so soon, everybody’s on board with Stefan’s tales about the mighty werewolf queen Stirba (Sybil Danning) and her plan to turn more werewolves into wolfier werewolves, or something. Anyway, she needs to be stopped right quick. Stefan invites his new allies to accompany him to the small town in Transylvania that’s closest to Stirba’s secret lair in a big ass castle nobody appears to know how to find – not even Stefan’s local allies who must have lived in its neighbourhood for decades.

Needless to say, things turn weird in Transylvania.

Where Joe Dante’s first The Howling is still one of the best werewolf films ever made, Philippe Mora’s sequel is bad in so bizarre and wilful ways, it is also pretty damn fantastic without being good or best in any way, shape or form.

Aesthetically, this attempts to mix 1985 post-punk style, bits and pieces of gothic horror and a backlot Europe that manages to feel like an off-beat dream despite the backlot for once having been in actual Europe - Czechoslovakia to be precise. In practice, this means unholy yet weirdly compelling clashes between the kind of leather outfits favoured in movie BDSM and apocalypses and the cobwebby castles which are Christopher Lee’s natural habitat. A guy wearing an absurd medieval closed helmet and little else guarding said castle with an automatic weapon is the sort of thing you can expect here in every single scene. The film is nearly Italian in this regard.

Villagers that are having a folk horror village fete (probably to give Lee Wickerman flashbacks), a little person zombie attack that echoes Don’t Look Now, and a truly off-putting werewolf orgy to the jolly sounds of the film’s new wave theme song are only part of the film’s attractions. For the sleazebags among us, there’s also an incredibly ridiculous werewolf threesome between Danning, Marsha A Hunt’s character and whoever plays the guy trying to imitate wolf sex noises with them that’ll haunt your dreams (and not in a pleasant way), suggestions that Lee is the ten thousand year old brother of the equally ancient Stirba and the two once had a bit of an incestuous thing going on between them, and general horniness whenever nobody gets killed.

Our heroes are absolute idiots without any concept of strategy or any sense of self-preservation, jollily walking into traps like the giant idiots they are. Fortunately, Stirba’s not much better at her job either. I’m not sure what Stefan did with his life before becoming an occult investigator, or what his qualifications for the role are, apart from his knowledge about the movie’s curious werewolf subspecies that can only be killed by titanium instead of silver. But then, I’m not sure why our werewolf matriarch mostly spends her time having sex, shooting lasers and casting spells instead of doing anything werewolf-y, nor why there’s quite as much staking of werewolves going on here. Yes, titanium stakes, of course. Those are even more phallic, probably.

I am unsure if Mora is in on any of this being as funny, absurd and weird as it plays out, but then, that’s a not an uncommon reaction to Mora’s films for me. On the one hand, if he’s in on the joke, he keeps the straightest directorial face possible, on the other hand, how could anyone not be? The only point in the movie where I’m sure someone involved in the production is consciously taking the piss is in the ending credits, when Danning’s “iconic” moment of ripping her top off is repeated seventeen (of course people, including me, have counted it) times, intercut with outtakes from the movie one can only read as reaction shots to Danning’s breasts. Christopher Lee seems to approve of them.

The rest of the movie, I have no idea. What I do know is that Howling II is the perfect portrayal of the dream life of some male 80s teenager who also happens to be a fan of pulp writing.

Battletruck (1982)

aka Warlords of the 21st Century

The apocalypse has come and gone (again). After the Oil Wars, the remnants of humanity have divided into the usual camps, though there do not seem to be any mutant cannibals around.
Former military man Straker (James Wainwright) cruises the empty highways of New Zealand with his bands of crazy thugs in an armoured truck, always looking for fuel and people to crush under his boot heels. Just after his awesome crushing technique has gotten him possession of a large underground fuel depot, the girl Corlie (Annie McEnroe), with whom Straker has a rather complicated relationship, escapes from the fascist's loving arms.

Straker's men are just beginning to catch Corlie and bring her back again, when the motor-biking Hunter (Michael Beck) appears and rescues her. Hunter is the proverbial post-apocalyptic loner living his life in the mountains, fuelling his bike thanks to the wonders of chicken shit, and really having no room for other people close by. Consequently, Hunter loads Corlie off at a base democratic commune named Clearwater he is somewhat friendly with.

The people of Clearwater are quite good at living a dignified post-industrial life, or as dignified as life gets when you mainly live on turnips, and do take in Corlie. Unfortunately, Straker isn't too far behind still looking for the girl. Obviously, he has no moral qualms with steam-rolling some radical democrats. For the moment, Corlie escapes Straker and seeks help with Hunter, who will have to change his loner ways a little to help her and Clearwater out.

Harley Cokeliss's Battletruck is, despite of a production credit by Roger Corman's New World Pictures (at a point when that company was still able to produce good B-movies), a film shot in New Zealand by people from New Zealand.

In tone, the film is one of the slightly more serious post-apocalyptic films, not just without giant insects and mutants, but also clearly trying to paint a somewhat believable picture of a world after a third world war that doesn't seem to have become very nuclear and the destruction of most oil fields and fuel reserves. Unlike in most films of the genre, people don't dress in leather and latex and drive dune buggies around (though the second vehicle of the bad guys is relatively close to one), but look as if they were actually dressing in scavenged clothing as well as home-made ones, clothing clearly chosen to keep them warm in a world without central heating. Instead of cars, what we see of people use horse drawing carts made from car parts.

The same goes for the few buildings in the film - most everything looks as self-constructed by amateurs as is to be expected, yet also like the kind of building one could imagine to see people construct in their situation. The only aspect of Battletruck going somewhat in the direction of the silly are the few motor vehicles; these still look pretty home-made with their dubious "armour" which just doesn't seem all that useful or probable. At least the vehicles do fit stylistically into the rest of the film's production design. I also don't think you are allowed to make a post-apocalyptic movie without improbable vehicles like the VW Beetle thing Hunter drives during the climax, so Battletruck just had to get with the program.

The scavenged and home-made look of the film goes quite a way in providing it with the proper post-apocalyptic mood, but the real star of the movie is director of photography Chris Menges's work. Menges - who by now has won two Oscars - shoots the properly awe-inspiring and beautiful landscape of New Zealand with an eye for natural light and the inherent strangeness of nature. It's a truism that, if you can't afford much of anything on your budget, but have the right landscape around you, you can still make a film that looks like several million dollars, in particular if you have a DP of Menges's quality. It also sure doesn't hurt to have a director with Cokeliss's talent for using a small number of buildings and vehicles so economically the audience mostly won't notice how small that pool actually is.

On the negative side, there really isn't that much substance to the film's script. The characters and their relationships - with the exception of that between Corlie and Straker - are a bit too simple, the political allegory so obvious I can't even get snarky about it being an allegory (the lowest form of subtext), and the pacing of the film's second half turns from slow to snail-like.
Despite these misgivings - and what I think is the curious attempt to sell the film as taking place in the post-apocalyptic USA via bad accents - Battletruck's visual power and the lived in feel of its post-apocalyptic world are more than enough to recommend it, at least to post-apocalypse movie enthusiasts like myself.

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