HOWLING IV : THE ORIGINAL NIGHTMARE (1998)

HOWLING IV: THE ORIGINAL NIGHTMARE (1998)

Tagline: A terrifying journey into the gaping jaws of death... 

(Horror, Drama, That Store Clerk Chick Is Probably A Werewolf) [R]

I know this is going to sound crazy. Maybe it is, but, I saw her here. And the expression on her face... was like... something horrible was happening right here in my living room. Like, I don't know what.

In this one, a successful author named Marie decides to take some time off in a small town called Drago with her husband Richard because of a nervous breakdown. She keeps having visions and noticing strange things about the people in town. That is because they are freakin werewolves. 

1 year after the release of HOWLING III, HOWLING IV went direct to video. Yes, like actual video since DVDs weren’t really around at the time. The idea here was to try and re-capture the horror of the original and in many ways, this one was pretty much the same story. Take out the creepy porn shop and dude picking a bullet out of his head and this is pretty much the same thing as part I. 

By modern horror standards, this movie is really slow-moving. Unfortunately, the attempts at a setup are lost because we have already seen this movie. There is a wacky nun-related subplot that is not only unnecessary it never even really comes into play until the film's climax. We get a few decent performances by B-movie horror standards and Dennis Folbigge (Dr. Coombes) does a pretty solid job but it doesn’t take long for the werewolf effects to resemble a full-blown “we don’t know what we are doing” fest than actually lending credence to the genre. Some of the effects are so far from having anything to do with werewolves that it's practically comical. It is actually hard to imagine how seriously bad this series ended up after such a triumphant intro, having said that, HOWLING IV is certainly the third best in the series trailing REBORN (which is growing on me) and THE HOWLING. 

If you buy a DVD that has a collection of flicks on it that are horror-related, it is highly likely this puppy is on it. For whatever reason it has shown up a lot more recently than it did when it first came out. It is also not shocking this is closer to the original than anything else in the series because they were both based on the same book. 

I give this one a 4 out of 7 but barely. It’s not bad enough to be a 3 and is one of the very few films in this series worth checking out.

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