Howling: New Moon Rising (1995) – Review

That this seventh outing of the Howling franchise uses “New Moon Rising” as its subtitle is a bit disingenuous as there is more old than new in this particular outing and what new we get ranges from awful to embarrassingly bad. This film is also known as Howling VII: The Mystery Woman, which was a somewhat more honest title, if still quite a bit inaccurate, as what follows is more a home movie gone astray than it is a mystery.

Howling VII: Mystery of “Where did the Money Go?”

The film opens with a worn-down detective (John Ramsden) investigating a dead body found in the desert and he is aided in his investigations by Father John (John Huff), a priest that the Vatican sends out to uncover supernatural shenanigans, but this “plotline” shares screen time with that of Australian drifter Ted Smith (Clive Turner) who has arrived in Pioneer Town for his own investigation, which could be because all of the inhabitants are wanted criminals, but to be fair, all these people are really guilty of is incredibly bad acting. With this movie writer/director/producer and star Clive Turner attempts to tie together this film into a half-assed continuity with his previous entries. We get Father John telling the Detective about the events of Howling V: The Rebirth, which allows this film to recycle footage from that entry and reveals that the werewolf known as Mary Lou escaped Budapest and is now in America. Then later in the film Marie Adams (Romy Windsor) shows up to tell Father John about the events of Howling IV: The Original Nightmare. It’s clear that at this point in the franchise Clive Turner had no money to even produce the most rudimentary werewolf film and thus he relied on footage from his previous movies. The bulk of Howling: New Moon Rising’s 90-minute running time consists of a group of hillbillies hanging out at a bar, where they dance and tell corny jokes, which one has to admit is not really what a viewer of a Howling movie expects to see. Then to add insult to injury what werewolf action we do get is shot through a red filter and is basically unintelligible.

Howling VII brought to you in “Blood Vision!”

Stray Observations:

• If you thought the only thing missing from The Howling franchise was hillbillies then this entry certainly fixed that.
• When dialogue consisting of lines like “This urinal sure is small” is considered the height of witty banter by Clive Turner, you know you’re in trouble.
• Do you like line dancing? I certainly hope you do because by watching this film it’s clear that writer/director/actor Clive Turner really likes line dancing.
• I’d say the only thing Clive Turner likes more than line dancing is country music singer George Jones who is mentioned more often than are werewolves in this film.
• We learn that it takes three years for a werewolf to reach maturity and on that anniversary during a full moon because once again we’re ignoring the original film, it will gain the power to make others of its kind. Sure, why not add even more idiotic mythology to the franchise that at this point, anyone still watching is beyond caring.
• Although not credited, Clive Turner claims he also served as the accountant and secretary for the film.

“I also worked Craft Services, swept up each night and took out the trash.”

The cast consists of a group of non-actors who couldn’t deliver a convincing line of dialogue if a gun was put to their collective heads, lucky for them there isn’t a line of convincing dialogue to be found in this movie. The mystery itself is a cobbled-together mess with footage of actress Elizabeth Shé, who played Mary Lou in Howling V: The Rebirth, ending up on the editing room floor and thus we get a crap explanation of “werewolf possession” which allowed Clive Turner to choose a random character in the movie to be revealed as the werewolf. And what of this film’s titular werewolf, well to say it looks like it came from a high school production of Teen Wolf would be giving the filmmakers too much credit.

A total of five seconds of new werewolf action and this is the best they could do?

I’m not sure what Clive Turner’s intent was with Howling: New Moon Rising, other than the desire to hang out in one of his favourite towns and get all of his hillbillies friends to act in it, because the end result was a convoluted mess that could actually lower the IQ of anyone subjected to this thing. It should also be pointed out that this isn’t one of those “So bad it’s good” movies as not only is it poorly executed, horribly acted, and completely lacking in scares but it is also monumentally boring, something I can’t forgive in a film about werewolves. If this was Clive Turner’s idea of a vanity project he needs to see a psychiatrist as he must have some serious self-esteem issues.

The new moon that gave us this should have stayed behind the clouds.