From the very first frame, it’s clear to even a single-celled organism with a solitary intelligence quota point that The Howling: Reborn is an ode to incompetence. The Direct-to-Video wonder — helmed by an unknown, untalented writer/director named Joe Nimziki — is nothing more than a bunglingly bad and all-too-obvious attempt to meld the worlds of Harry Potter and Twilight along with just about any other semi-popular motion picture fad they could think of. All one has to do is note the presence of Harry and Bella look-alikes as the lead “teenagers” here and listen to any of the movie’s horrendous dialogue in order to observe this.
And sadly, those turned out to be the movie’s strong points. The film’s abundance of awful acting, makeup, special effects, writing, editing and direction make it unwatchable on any level.
The bastardized effort at a story finds a reclusive high school senior — the Harry Potter clone (Landon Liboiron), whose mum was slain by a werewolf whilst he was still in the womb — who yearns to be with the film’s bad-girl (but at least tanned) Bella double (Lindsey Shaw). After lots of idle narration from our hero and some dull endeavors at movie humor by some kid that looks like my lovechild with Zach Braff, said main male character discovers that he himself is a lycanthrope. Then he finds out his mother is still on this particular plane of existence and that she is also a shape-shifter.
Blah, blah, blah. This movie sucks. It even has the audacity to claim it’s based off of Gary Brandner’s 1979 novel, The Howling II — but that’s just one giant steaming pile of man-dog-made doo-doo since it has absolutely nothing to do with it or any of the other entries in the Howling film series. And, if this is supposed to be a reboot, it’s an extremely terrible effort, one that I doubt would even make enough money in the Direct-to-Video market to warrant another entry.
And to think someone wasted a perfectly good permit to use Echo & the Bunnymen’s “The Killing Moon” (well, a remix) on the soundtrack on this tripe. I hope they all get parvo for that.
Supplemental features for this forgettable flick from Anchor Bay include an audio commentary, a making-of featurette, and a trailer. They should have included a free pooper-scooper with it, so that the millions of dissatisfied, disillusioned and disappointed people who unknowingly pick this shit-fest up could dispose of it properly.
