With reverential wink-wink allusions to its classic horror film predecessors and director Joe Dante’s trademark cartoony vibe coloring the ominous action’s edges, The Howling may not be as polished or effective as John Landis’ 1981 An American Werewolf in London, but it’s still a perverse, satirical contribution to the oft-maligned werewolf genre. Beginning with a masterful scene in an adult video store’s seedy viewing room that cannily plays up lycanthropy’s inherently sexual undertones, Dante’s thriller (written by John Sayles) primarily takes place at a therapeutic rural retreat where TV newswoman Karen White (E.T. matriarch Dee Wallace-Stone) finds herself surrounded by a band of anti-establishment werewolves. With her vegetarian husband transformed into a carnivorous monster and the serial killer she helped vanquish in NYC seemingly roaming the woods as a hairy meat-eating beast, Karen’s curative getaway quickly devolves into a nightmare, and Dante – as would become his penchant, infusing this genre exercise with subtle (and not-so-subtle) socio-political criticism – finds plenty of targets to rip into it, including modern television news (think Network, but with more flesh-mutating special effects) and the culture of self-help quackology.
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