Review of An American Werewolf in London (1981) by Edith N — 24 Jun 2010

Yes, We Get It--Moon.

I'm really surprised at how few songs with the word "Moon" in the title John Landis knows. He wanted a total of five different covers of "Blue Moon"--Bob Dylan was briefly Christian and wouldn't let his version be used in an R-rated movie, and Elvis's estate was tied up in litigation at the time. He wanted "Moonshadow," but Cat Stevens had become Yusuf Islam or whatever he was calling himself and not allowing his secular music to be licensed. So he had to settle for a mere three covers of "Blue Moon," Van Morrison's "Moondance," and "Bad Moon Rising," of course. But you have to feel that there were more options available to him. If you're going to overdo a bit, overdo it right. Six songs aren't enough, especially if one of them is just the same song done three times. It feels sloppy.

David Kessler (David Naughton) and Jack Goodman (Griffin Dunne) are American college students on a walking tour of Europe, and they've started in Yorkshire, like you do. They're on the moors on an ominous night, and ominous villagers tell them to stick to the road, because apparently that will keep werewolves at bay. Anyway, they ignore the villagers and go tromping across the moors, get lost, and get attacked by a werewolf, because otherwise, we don't have a plot. Jack is killed, and David is in a coma for three weeks and, naturally, hauled to a hospital hundreds of miles away in London. When he regains consciousness, Jack appears to him in varying stages of decay to tell him that he, Jack, is the walking dead because he's been killed by a werewolf, and David will become a monster at the full of the Moon, which of course David doesn't believe, because would you? But Jack is telling the truth, and he is also telling the truth that the victims will walk the Earth until the bloodline of the werewolf is severed.

Except I'm confused about that. They tell David that he is the last of the line, and if he dies, the curse is lifted. But that only works if David really is the last of the line. And does this mean that all the victims of all the werewolves back along the bloodline depend on someone committing suicide or otherwise being killed? And if any of those werewolves create more than one other, what does that do? I really don't think the mythos has been thought through; I think it's just a cheap excuse for the resolution of the film. Probably it's intended to heighten suspense, but anything which gets me overthinking has, at least for me, failed in its goal. There is also the issue of sustainability. What does that Yorkshire werewolf eat? If it lives on sheep, doesn't that present a pretty serious drain on the local economy? If travelers get killed regularly, wouldn't someone have to take official notice? Do the villagers know who the werewolf actually is, and if they do, why don't they do something about it? If they don't, shouldn't they try to find out?

Yeah, I know. Shut up, turn your brain off, and watch the damned movie. But we've established that I have a hard time doing that, and it actually works better if the plot is very simple. I'm sure people think this one is, and in some ways, they're right. At its heart, this is Guy Becomes Hideous Monster and Must Deal With His Fate. It's just that the setup around it gets complicated. It requires a long line of coincidences which don't reliably make any sense. Like, and let's be honest, the idea that no one in David's family comes to London to be with him. He ends up living with Alex Price (Jenny Agutter), a nurse from the hospital, which primarily seems a ploy to keep him in London. He calls his parents collect from London, and it seems to be the first time he's been in touch with anyone from his family. Jack says that David's parents were at Jack's funeral, but why aren't they at David's bedside? But if they are, and if they take David home, we don't have a movie.

Okay, there's the makeup. The transformation scene is pretty impressive, though the way it starts is pretty silly. Rick Baker won the first competitive Makeup Effects Oscar for this movie; I strongly suspect they came up with the category to give it to him. It was the first of Baker's six, the first of ten nominations for makeup. (And one for visual effects, which seems out of place.) I seem to recall Chainsaw and Dave singing Baker's praises in their essay in [i]Summer School[/i]. And, in fact, he did the makeup effects in the werewolf movie which came out earlier this year. Baker did, and does, good work. However, the makeup is only a small part of the film, really. Oh, it's important, but it's not as important as, say, plot and acting. It's plot and acting where this movie fails, and watching it just for the makeup seems silly to me. You might as well just look at pictures, or just the relevant clips.