BEING HUMAN

Tonight is the season premiere of the American version of Being Human, the Syfy channel show that offers the steadiest stream of supernatural beefcake. (Sorry, Warehouse 13.) From the previews, it looks like the werewolf and the vampire get to do a lot of angsty craziness as usual, whereas the ghost is still mopey.

I am particularly excited to see the return of Sam Huntington as Josh, our resident werewolf-slash-puppy-dog. I mean, look at those eyes:

I have been a fan of this guy since his role as Mimi-siku in the Tim Allen-vehicle Jungle 2 Jungle. (The 90s was a simpler time.) And while I have since grown out of my love for that movie, the same cannot be said for Sam, who has been a great screen presence in movies like Not Another Teen Movie, Superman Returns, and the woefully underappreciated Dylan Dog: Dead of Night.

So show your appreciation and check out the premiere of Being Human. At the very least, you will get some TV-friendly werewolf violence.

Seriously. Can we just Photoshop that ghost out of there...

DYLAN DOG: DEAD OF NIGHT

First off, let me just say that Cemetery Man with Rupert Everett is one of the worst movies I have ever seen. It has a cult following, but I hated it with a passion and thought that it was pretentious, stupid, and endless. When I found out that the comic that inspired this movie was about to be readapted with Brandon Routh, I was curious. If it was even slightly passable, then the bad taste of Cemetery Man would be washed away completely.

Well, guess what, ladies and gentlemen. I have some great news. IT WAS SLIGHTLY PASSABLE! Yay! Mr. Routh was dreamy and superheroic as ever, but his voiceovers were awful. Sam Huntington (also of Superman Returns fame) was adorable, but a little of him goes a long way, and I think he wore out his welcome by the fifteenth freak-out.

But you cannot go wrong with a werewolf Peter Stormare chewing scenery like a madman. That guy can out-crazy Nicolas Cage. So see the movie for him… for beefcake… and for some nice creature effects. Just don’t expect anything revolutionary.

WEREWOLVES: THE DARK SURVIVORS

I could not find a poster for this film,

so I decided to use the greatest poster ever made.

Werewolves: The Dark Survivors is the weirdly racist account of all the African American contestants on the CBS reality show Survivor. Actually, it is the equally ill-advised two-hour special on Animal Planet about the true story of werewolves. It’s a mockumentary, or at least it tries to be.

Basically, the special is a combination of fake interviews and werewolf reenactments from the channel’s stable of reenactment actors. Unfortunately, the kind of actors that are believable in five-minute intervals as snake victims and crocodile wrestlers don’t exactly emote well in two-hour stories about blood curses and family rivalries.

But the biggest problem with Werewolves, its fatal flaw, is that it doesn’t fully commit to the mockumentary format. The entire thing is narrated by one of the main characters, a werewolf who ends up dead by the end of the film. He’s meant to guide us through the angsty world of werewolf drama, but it’s not emotionally engaging enough to accomplish anything. This doesn’t work as a fake documentary, or a real fictional narrative. It’s meant to be able werewolves, but its format is closer to the miss-matched hide of a second-rate Frankenstein knock-off.

Werewolves: The Dark Survivors has turned into a sort of perennial Halloween time-filler on the channel, but it mercifully hasn’t spawned a series of narrative features for Animal Channel. Check it out if you’re a car-crash-rubber-necker. Otherwise, avoid it like a curse.

The trailer is pretty thrilling, though.

Too bad the movie itself was fifty times longer.

HOWLING 7: NEW MOON RISING

STATS:
HOWLING 7: NEW MOON RISING
1995
Directed by, written by, and starring Clive Turner (a modern day Orson Welles)

WHA’ HAPPENED?
Not a lot. There are more scenes of line-dancing than werewolf violence, hence the film's original name: Howling VII: Please Don’t Watch This Because It’s All About Line Dancing. Actually, the film depicts a small town panicking after a body is found. The townspeople suspect werewolves because they are townspeople, and thus extremely stupid. A red-haired cowboy from Australia saves the day. And… that’s about it.

WHAT YOU SAY?
[Last lines of the film] "Oh, we thank you so much for this beautiful benefit. Thank all of our neighbors and our friends and Ted, we're sorry. I was looking at Pappy with that tail on his hat and I thought about a song that I wrote just for him and the cleaning lady."

ISN’T THAT SPECIAL?
I always, always, always wanted to see this film. I had heard that this was the worst werewolf movie ever made. I heard it had some truly nonsensical dialogue between non actors. I heard it made people’s eyes bleed. I just HAD to see it.

I also knew that it was written, produced, and directed by its Australian star, who got the part because he happened to be a minor character in two of the other Howling sequels. I love those kind of auteur-driven films, because they’re usually bad in a very self-indulgent way. And that, my friends, is the best kind of bad. Also, he looked like this:

Before I saw this man, I had no idea why

us red-heads always got such a bad rap.

More topically, I wanted to spotlight this film because I knew there was an upcoming sequel-slash-reboot of the franchise. It looks similarly awful, but it’s clearly targeting the teenage demo, instead of the living-in-a-ghost-town-and-cooking-meth demo.

SHIRTS AND SKINS:
This film uses actual townspeople at a small, rustic ghost town. Let me repeat: real people who still live in a ghost town. There is no nudity and I am so, so grateful.

BLOOD AND GUTS:
There is a grand total of two legit murder scenes, and both of those aren’t worth mixed nuts. More egregiously, there is very little werewolf action. The glimpses of werewolf that we go catch are so poorly computer-animated (ahh, the 90s) that you gotta thank the stars that the lighting is so bad.

Pictured: the werewolf mid-attack

RANDOM THOUGHTS:

Perhaps the creepiest, most atmospheric scene in the whole film involves line dancing. And absolutely no danger whatsoever. Just line dancing. If that doesn’t pique your interest… then I don’t blame you. Because this film is really dull.

OK. IS IT GAY?
No. Thank God. It’s as gay as Larry the Cable Guy… and only half as scary.

Seriously. This film has a reputation for being so-bad-it’s-good. Don’t believe the rumors. This is way too boring to be fun. It’s like watching an episode of MST3K without the talking robots.

MERIDIAN

STATS:

MERIDIAN

1990

Written and Directed by Charles Band

Starring Sherilyn Fenn and others

WHA’ HAPPENED?

The girl from Northern Exposure falls in love with a beast and his evil twin. Seriously. I cannot be any more specific than that, because there are some things that man is not meant to type.

WHAT YOU SAY?

"Perfect body. Smooth. Classy."

"Do not cry. I need you to love me."

ISN’T THAT SPECIAL?

I love Charles Band. I love direct-to-video horror films from the early 1990s. I wasn't expecting Tolstoy, which is fine with me. I freaking hate Tolstoy.

SHIRTS AND SKINS:

This film has lots of nudity. Seriously. Very Skinemax. I half-expected Emmanuelle to pop up and say a monologue about something. (Because that's what those movies were about, right? Monologues?)

And admittedly, some of that nudity happened to be male... but it was all slightly hairier than I would like.

BLOOD AND GUTS:

Nope. Everyone was too busy sexing.

RANDOM THOUGHTS:

I think I would like this movie a little more if the tragic beast character didn't remind me of Sloth from The Goonies.

Hey you GUYS!

OK. IS IT GAY?

Sure. It's all about tragic romance and beautiful people and epic love stories that transcend time and space. There are also best friends who tell it like it is AND wildly inaccurate depictions of circus gypsies. I believe that at least some of those things would be of interest to the gay demo.