Line #1 YMMV/TheHowling


1	!!Individual Pages:
2	* ''[[YMMV/TheHowling1977 The Howling (Novel)]]''
3	* ''[[YMMV/TheHowling1981 The Howling (Film)]]''
4	* ''YMMV/HowlingIIStirbaWerewolfBitch''
5	* ''YMMV/HowlingIIITheMarsupials''
6
7	!! General YMMV:
8	* AdaptationDisplacement: The [[Film/TheHowling1981 first film]] is based on the book of the same name...wait, what book? Yep, there was [[Literature/TheHowling1977 a book]], written by Gary Brandner and published in 1977, though few people have heard of it in comparison to the much more famous film. The film's basic plot follows the book (woman goes to stay in the countryside after a traumatic experience and gets terrorized by werewolves) but it's otherwise a rather loose adaptation. The book also had sequels, although the movie sequels don't follow them at all besides borrowing a few plot points here and there.
9	* SugarWiki/AwesomeArt: The ''Revenge of the Werewolf Queen'' comic book follow-up has great artwork, with the werewolves especially having a lot of detail
10	* BigLippedAlligatorMoment: ''New Moon Rising'' has a '''very''' odd moment where Ted starts out telling people in the bar about how a bad guy tried to mug him the night before, but he fought him off. Then, apropos of nothing, he asks the other characters to put their hands on their zippers (!) and starts singing the beginning of [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_in_the_Heart_of_Texas Deep In The Heart Of Texas,]] only instead of clapping after the first verse everyone moves their zippers up and down real fast.
11	* CompleteMonster: [[YMMV/TheHowling1977 Max Quist]]; [[YMMV/TheHowling1981 Eddie Quist]] & [[YMMV/HowlingIIStirbaWerewolfBitch Stirba]]; see those respective pages for details.
12	** ''The Rebirth'' & ''New Moon Rising'': [[BigBad Mary Lou Summers]], aka Cheryl, is revealed as the werewolf haunting the Budapest castle, killing all other guests while drawing out the fear and terror to sow more distrust. After [[ManipulativeBitch manipulating]] another guest named David after eliminating all the others, Mary Lou murders the werewolf hunting Count before tearing David apart. Later returning in a rural town after murdering a woman to claim her identity, Mary Lou continues her murders while trying to [[FrameUp frame]] an innocent man as the werewolf.
13	** ''The Freaks'': [[BigBad R.B. Harker]] is a vampire who runs a traveling circus, while enslaving people as "freaks" to be exploited in the show. Harker is also a Serial Killer who murders for food and pleasure wherever the circus goes, often eliminating those close to his chosen acquisitions to steal any attachments from them. Having killed the family of the werewolf hero Ian, including Ian's child sister, Harker seeks to [[FrameUp frame Ian]] for the killings and [[CopKiller murders a police officer]] when he works out the blood on Harker's hands. Finally, Harker drops all pretense of civility to attempt to murder Ian and all his friends.
14	** ''Reborn'': [[BigBad Kathryn Kidman]] was once a normal, well-adjusted woman before being bitten by a werewolf. Seventeen years after her supposed death, Kathryn has become an Alpha Werewolf and fully embraces her lycanthropy, believing the only morality in the world is [[TheSocialDarwinist every being for themselves]]. She meets her son Will and plans to recruit him in a werewolf army as part of a conspiracy for world domination. It's later discovered Kathryn's pack own a secret club where they infect its guests, keeping them hostage with the corpses of their victims. Kathryn believes Will's loved ones made him soft, so she abducts her former husband to force Will to kill him. Will refuses and Kathryn kills him instead, along with Will's best friend, before setting her sights on his new girlfriend Eliana, planning to force Will to kill her for holding him back. Kathryn eventually gets tired of Will's defiance and decides to [[OffingTheOffspring kill him too]].
15	* ContinuityLockOut: This doesn't apply to most of the films, as they have very loose continuity between them and feature standalone stories. However, the plot of ''New Moon Rising'' generally relies on the viewer having seen ''The Original Nightmare'', ''The Rebirth'' and ''The Freaks'' to understand most of what's going on (to the point it reuses footage from the previous films in some of its scenes), especially as the BigBad is revealed to be [[spoiler:the same villain from ''The Rebirth'']].
16	* FirstInstallmentWins:
17	** The first film is easily the most famous and well-regarded of the series (some people aren't even aware there ''were'' sequels); it's generally lauded as one of the best werewolf movies ever made, up there with ''Film/AnAmericanWerewolfInLondon'' as far as some audiences are concerned. The sequels are all seen as vastly inferior, with even the better-received ones barely qualifying as SoOkayItsAverage (and after the third movie they all went DirectToVideo).
18	** This extends to the novels as well; the first is the most well-known because it was adapted to film twice, but the sequels are even more obscure because they never officially made it to the big or small screen; some of the films do incorporate a handful of plot points but not enough to be recognisable as adaptations. ''The Marsupials'' is credited as being based on ''The Howling III: Echoes'', but they have next-to-nothing in common besides portraying the werewolves more sympathetically than previous installments (they're technically not even were''wolves'' in the film, but rather were''thylacines''); ''Reborn'' is credited as as being based on ''The Howling II'' but they share no characters or plot points whatsoever.
19	* FranchiseOriginalSin:
20	** ''The Howling 2'' was criticized for having too many comedic elements, to the point where it could no longer be taken seriously as a dark werewolf horror film. Thing is, the original had numerous comedic and satirical elements as well, but they were done more subtly. Indeed, the humor in the original was not conventional humor but rather SelfReferentialHumor that warmly referenced the werewolf genre and the associated tropes and cliches within it, and managed to be subtle enough to not take away from the iconic werewolf horror that ''The Howling'' ended up establishing. ''The Howling 2'', however, featured openly humorous elements that weren’t even satirical homages to werewolf fiction but rather just in-your-face, low-brow humor that really dampened the horror.
21	** As the budget for the sequels got lower and lower they began to get criticized for the lack of screen time for werewolves, with most shots being done at a distance. Presumably, this was to help mask how poor the werewolf effects were with the low budgets. But this problem is also featured to an extent in the original, the difference being that in the original ''The Howling'', the teasing glimpses of the werewolves served as a buildup to TheClimax, rather than being the consequences of budget restraints. It helps that once the werewolves ''do'' show up onscreen in the first film, they're usually quite impressive to behold, whilst some of the sequels' special effects are so bad it makes the werewolves pretty underwhelming, adding to the disappointment.
22	* {{Narm}}: [[spoiler:Karen's]] werewolf form in the first film looks like a lovely fluffy terrier. Though that's ''still'' easier to take seriously than the flashback footage from the second film, where she looks like a gorilla wearing some joke monster teeth.
23	* {{Sequelitis}}: None of the sequels are regarded as being anywhere near as good as the original, failing to capture the same blend of dark humor and horror that made the first film work so well, though even among the other sequels ''Howling IV: The Original Nightmare'' and ''Howling: New Moon Rising'' are regarded as being particularly awful (''The Original Nightmare'' was intended as a TruerToTheText adaptation of the novel, but came off more as a bland, cheap-looking remake with little in the way of suspense, while ''New Moon Rising'' is seen as a boring, badly-acted and confusing mess with even fewer redeeming qualities that ''IV''). On the other hand, the comic book sequel that completely ignores every film sequel, ''Revenge of the Werewolf Queen'', is regarded as a worthy follow-up.
24	* SignatureScene: One of the most memorable scenes in ''Howling IV: The Original Nightmare'' is the TransformationSequence, which involves the poor man’s flesh and muscle completely melting off into a puddle, from which the werewolf rises. Besides being memorably [[BodyHorror gory and horrific]], it’s also held up as one of the redeeming scenes from ''The Original Nightmare''; the special effects are pretty decent (considering the movie's low budget) and viewers have noted it’s one of the more unique and creative depictions of a werewolf transformation.
25	* SoBadItsGood: Applies to some of the film sequels; while none of them are seen as particularly good films (especially compared to the first film), some viewers enjoy them as campy 80s / early 90s horror schlock with hilariously bad and over-the-top special effects, dialogue and acting, not to mention some really wacky plotlines and scenes. According to certain reviews, this particularly applies to ''Stirba: Werewolf Bitch'' and ''The Marsupials''. The main exception is ''New Moon Rising'', which is widely agreed to be bad in a completely unenjoyable way due to its boring plot, endless {{Padding}} and lack of werewolf action.
26	* SpecialEffectFailure: Applies to most of the sequels, to varying extents. ''III'' has especially awful effects, with no real transformations to speak of, barely any gore and really bad werewolf prosthetics (all the more shocking considering that the effects come from acclaimed Aussie makeup artist [[Film/BodyMelt Bob]] [[Film/BrainDead McCarron]]). ''New Moon Rising'' manages to be even worse, with its werewolf being realized via a cheap mask and some lame CG morphing effects.
27	* SurprisinglyImprovedSequel:
28	** ''Howling V: The Rebirth'' and ''Howling VI: The Freaks'' are widely considered a major step-up in quality from the previous three films -- though as WebVideo/ObscurusLupa pointed out, that just makes them SoOkayItsAverage instead of SoBadItsGood. These entries attempted to do away with the goofier elements of the first two sequels and feature more suspenseful, horror-focused plots (''The Original Nightmare'' had tried to do the same, but was hampered by its low production values and poor pacing), and also featured improved special effects for the werewolves. Either way, it didn't last, because ''The Freaks'' was followed up by ''New Moon Rising'', which many audiences consider to be so awful it's unwatchable (while ''II'' and ''III'' are considered by some to at least be ''entertainingly'' bad).
29	** ''The Howling Reborn'' is a mild improvement over ''The Howling: New Moon Rising'', though this [[DamnedByFaintPraise isn't saying much]] considering ''New Moon Rising'' is widely considered one of the - if not ''the'' - worst of the ''Howling'' sequels. ''Reborn'' at the very least has an actual plot that's easy to follow and some dramatic tension, even if the execution isn't the best, which is more than can be said for ''New Moon Rising''.
30	** The comic book sequel to the original film that ignores the sequels, ''The Howling: Revenge of the Werewolf Queen'' is often considered to be better then all the film sequels and a far better follow up to the original film. Unlike ''The Howling 2,'' which was based off a vampire spec script that was modified to be a sequel to ''The Howling'', and ended up going in a bizarre direction with none of the surviving characters appearing, ''Revenge of the Werewolf Queen'' logically followed up on the ending of the original, naturally continuing the aftermath of the original's climax with the surviving characters.
31	* SugarWiki/VisualEffectsOfAwesome: Among the sequels, ''VI'' has easily the best effects after the original, though ''IV'' has surprisingly decent effects too (albeit only in the last ten minutes), considering the obviously extremely low budget of the film.

Context YMMV / TheHowling