Time to get caught up on a couple of the more interesting
Blu-ray discs to cross my desk in recent weeks. I plan on doing one of these
grab-bag posts every so often, so if nothing tickles your fancy this time,
maybe we’ll find your fancy-tickler in an upcoming installment. And if the
promise of having your fancy tickled isn’t enough to keep you coming back for
more, I give up.
Howling II: Your Sister Is A Werewolf (Scream Factory)
When the legendary Christopher Lee passed away recently,
tributes flooded the internet from fans of every generation. Odds are you may
have watched one or two Christopher Lee movies yourself in honor of his memory.
With well over two hundred titles to his credit, there were certainly plenty of
options, from his iconic Hammer Films to cult favorites like The Wicker Man and Gremlins 2 to more recent turns for filmmakers like Tim Burton and
Peter Jackson. And yet, I can almost guarantee that nobody’s first choice for a
Christopher Lee Tribute Night was Howling
II: Your Sister Is A Werewolf.
Blessed/cursed with one of the most ridiculous titles of all
time (even better/worse in its original form, Howling II: Stirba - Werewolf Bitch), this is the only movie in the
surprisingly resilient Howling franchise to at least nod back to Joe Dante’s
original. Although it may be overstating things to call the connection a nod.
It’s more like a dismissive wave goodbye while shooting it the finger.
Reb Brown (Yor, the hunter from the future, himself!) plays
the brother of Dee Wallace’s character from the first film. Lee turns up to let
Brown know his sister was a werewolf and talk him into trekking to Transylvania to take on Stirba, the werewolf queen (Sybil
Danning).
I’m somewhat fascinated by the Howling series. For all intents and purposes, this is the anthology
franchise that Halloween III: Season Of
The Witch tried and failed to become. The Howling movies have nothing in common apart from their titles and
the fact that they all have something to do with werewolves. Oh, and one other
common denominator: none of the sequels are particularly good. Director
Philippe Mora would go on to make one more entry, 1987’s goofy Howling III: The Marsupials. Howling II is more trashy than goofy
with some very 80s costume choices and more than a few what-were-they-thinking
moments. You can’t really recommend this movie to anyone but the audience for
this movie knows who they are, anyway.
This is a typically impressive Scream Factory release with
plenty of extras that are a whole lot more interesting than the movie itself. You
get two audio commentaries (both worth listening to), interviews with Reb
Brown, Sybil Danning and makeup FX artists Steve Johnson and Scott Wheeler,
alternate footage, stills, the trailer and more. If I can’t recommend the
movie, I can certainly recommend the disc. It’s a worthwhile entry in the
Scream Factory lineup.
Ladyhawke (Warner Archive)
If you were a fan of fantasy films back in the 1980s, you
probably look back at ’85 and ’86 as two of your favorite years. Those years
gave us Ladyhawke, Legend, Labyrinth and even a few movies that didn’t start with an “L”, such
as The Black Cauldron and Highlander. Each of these movies has
their ardent fans but unfortunately, none of them were colossal mega-hits. As a
result, fantasy remained a pricey and dicey proposition at the box office for
years. Hard to believe these days, after Peter Jackson has made six epic
journeys to Middle-earth and Game Of
Thrones has conquered TV.
Of these ‘80s fantasies, Ladyhawke
was probably the most conventional, a straight-forward fantasy-romance about
two lovers under a curse that transforms her into a hawk by day and him into a
wolf by night. But Ladyhawke works as
well as it does because it’s told with conviction and sincerity by an unusual
group of collaborators.
This was one of two movies directed by Richard Donner
released in 1985, debuting just two months before The Goonies. Donner was actually in need of a bit of a comeback at
the time. The runaway success of The Omen
and Superman had been followed by his
removal from Superman II and the
critically successful but little-seen Inside
Moves. Since then, he’d released just one movie, the loathsome Richard
Pryor/Jackie Gleason anti-comedy The Toy.
Ladyhawke kicked off a winning streak
for Donner that lasted for the rest of the decade.
Rutger Hauer and Michelle Pfeiffer are ideal as the cursed
lovers. This would be one of the few attempts at transforming Hauer into a
conventional Hollywood leading man, an effort
that was probably doomed from the start. Hauer’s intensity makes him anything
but conventional. Back in ’85, Hollywood
still wasn’t sure what to do with Pfeiffer, either. It’d be a couple more years
before she truly came into her own and audiences got a chance to see what she
was capable of.
Then there’s Matthew Broderick, acting as though his agent
got his clients mixed up and sent him to the wrong set. It’s too harsh to say
that he’s the weak link because the movie still works but his performance
absolutely clashes with the old-fashioned grandeur around him. Broderick gets
top billing but the movie belongs to his costars.
Ladyhawke was not
well-served on DVD, making Warner Archive’s Blu-ray a welcome upgrade. Vittorio
Storaro’s cinematography looks absolutely spectacular on this disc. The only
extra on board is the film’s trailer. A commentary by Richard Donner would have
been nice but the movie’s modest fan base ruled that out. Even so, the disc is
worth picking up for its technical improvements alone.
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