Review of American Werewolf In London, An: Special 21st Anniversary Edition

Introduction

After cult smashes ‘Animal House’ and ‘The Blues Brothers’, writer/director/occasional stuntman John Landis finally got to make his pet project: a modern update of the Wolfman story, mixed with a culture clash romance and plenty of morbid laughs. Just pre-dating `Evil Dead`s giggles n’ gore first, frights later policy, `An American Werewolf in London` piles on the ghoulish humor and gratuitous carnage in a manner that reminds us that it was once okay to enjoy such things for their own sake, without coating them in smug intertexts and self-reflexive cliches. When two American back-packers are attacked by a mysterious creature on the Moors during a full moon, survivor David (David Naughton) is haunted by disturbing nightmares and occasional visits from his decomposing buddy Jack (Griffin Dunne). With the help of posh but randy nurse Alex (Jenny Agutter), David strives to find out the truth about his condition, but not before he endures a most painful transformation.

Video

Not too bad, there is a fuzziness to the image in general, and the contrast isn’t as sharp as we might expect from a digitally remastered print, but there’s nothing worth getting upset about.

Audio

Despite an eclectic soundtrack, with particularly memorable Lynch-style ditties (from Creedence Clearwater and the like), recontextualised perfectly into Landis` horrific/comic landscape. However, the 5.1 mix is fairly uneventful, lacking any significant use of the surrounds and not really adding anything to the regular stereo experience.

Features

The ever enthusiastic Landis pops up periodically on the various featurettes (perhaps most memorably in an amusing silent reel of outtakes playing a hirsute extra who is ejected through a window). The best of these is without doubt the excellent behind-the-scenes footage that explores the film’s experimental make-up effects, an investigation which is both humorous, obsessive and strangely suspenseful. The interviews with John Landis and make-up designer Rick Baker aren’t bad, and neither is the commentary track between Naughton and Dunne. It just seems that there isn’t enough here to justify a ‘special edition’, never mind a two-disc set. What you get is fine, but it doesn’t get you very far.

Conclusion

The fact that the only thing that hasn`t dated is Rick Baker`s astonishing make-up and gore effects (I can`t decide what`s more amazing, the justly famous transformation scene or the flap of skin flapping around on Griffen Dunne`s neck) only adds to the trashy appeal of this glorified Troma movie. It has the feel of a big-budget student film, with all of the indulgence, scrappiness and youthful disaffection for tonal-equilibrium which that implies.

The performances are better than expected from this sort of thing, and it’s pretty much as polished a production as Landis was ever capable of delivering, particularly in the impressive finale, as Naughton’s werewolf snarls and snaps heads off of unsuspecting Londoners in Piccadilly Circus. As the years pass, it becomes more apparent that it is a movie of set-pieces: the underground scene, the transformation, etc, and the connective tissue is rather too redolent of B-movie exposition to be anything but penance for more good stuff (although a scene where Naughton meets up with his past victims is gloriously twisted.)

Landis never quite nailed these heights of anarchic pleasure again (he slumped into the rather more restrained Reaganist mold of Eddie Murphy and Michael Jackson for the rest of the 80s). And although ‘An American Werewolf in London’ never quite holds together, it delivers more than enough slick slaughter for even the most rapacious gore-hound. Unconvinced? Well, any film that is totally unrecognizable from its horrendous sequel (‘An American Werewolf in Paris’) has to have something going for it.