Fromage: The french word, for cheese
Cheesy: informally meaning to be cheap, unpleasant, or blatantly inauthentic. i.e. "This movie is cheesy."
About 4 years ago in the cold, busy space of The East Texan newsroom at Texas A&M University-Commerce while watching the acting "greatness" of William Shatner in the unforgettable "Kingdom of the Spiders," a great man named Jared Watson had an idea. A simple but entertaining one.
In seeking out entertainment, there are those of us that understand that fun movies can be very bad. Unfortunately, not all bad movies are very fun. So why not turn our pain in watching the bad ones into pleasure for all.
And so Fromage Du Jour: A Weekly Look at Film Cheese was born. With a late night, a room full of commentators and a couple of beers, Jared and later on, myself, would tackle the horrors upon humanity that could only be wrought by a combination of the words, film and direct to video, for nearly three years.
It's been almost a year since it's all been brought to an end and while anybody else would be happy to go a year without watching something like "Dance-Fu," "In the Name of the King 2," or "So Undercover" starring Miley Cyrus, I can't help but feel a tad unfulfilled. Sure the hole in me that is making me feel incomplete may have been punched into me by the very films that I continued to revisit but the call to return to the battlefield is just too powerful to resist.
Fromage Du Jour may be gone but its spirit lives in on in the heart. And in to kick it back off again, I think it's time to dust off a few old favorites and get back into the saddle.
As a werewolf enthusiast, the 1981 horror film “The Howling” holds a very special place in my heart. Despite a handful of admittedly hokey moments, the film is for all intents and purposes, the last good mainstream werewolf movie put out by Hollywood. It was fun, creepy, and actually had something to say about the animalistic tendencies of human nature. The film is furthermore one of the most infamous examples of a series being run into the ground by some terrible sequel after terrible sequel, most of which are direct to video releases.
Therefore, you can imagine my dread upon the discovery that the series was getting a continuity reboot in the form of “The Howling: Reborn.” However even entering with the low expectations set by a series that has the spine to name one of its films “Stirba: Werewolf Bitch,” I am still attempting to recover from the utter shock at just how boring this thing is.
“The Howling: Reborn” follows the “plot” of high school loser Will Kidman as he goes through his last few days of school, coming to terms with his potentially newfound lycanthropy. His daily trials and tribulations including surviving the school bullies that seem to have a sudden deadly interest in him, getting the girl he likes to notice him through his stalker-esque tendencies of watching and drawing her at a distance and trying to survive until graduation all within the span of one day. If the above synopsis sounds unenthusiastic, than allow me to sum up the loosely tied together events of “The Howling: Reborn” in a significantly more concise manner. A kid goes to school, then goes to a party, then goes to school and goes about his day, thinking he’s a werewolf for no logical reason.
There’s a lot of laughably bad material to cover in this film. The actors are giving performances that the “Twilight” cast would laugh off. The dialogue teeters between regularly lame and cringe worthy in its cliché nature and stupidity so often that I’ll be thanking god for the rest of my days that I didn’t suffer an aneurism from watching the movie in its entirety.
The soundtrack is bloated with some of the most god awful, manufactured, and commercialized rock and alternative music that I have heard associated with a film in quite some time, complete with an acoustic raping of Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear The Reaper” that nearly brought me to tears of pain and the less said about the utterly horrendous special effects on the werewolves themselves, which are seen for a grand total of less than 20 minutes in an hour and a half long feature and look more harmless than Anthrocon furries, the better.
Letting go of all of those issues however, “The Howling: Reborn’s ” biggest problem, as you could probably discern from the synopsis, is that it is just plain boring. Nothing happens in this movie. It’s like watching Peter Parker go through an entire day of school for an hour and a half, only to start experimenting with his spider powers five minutes before the credits hit, with no discussion of seeing him become a superhero, whatsoever. The entire plot of this film could have been told in less than a half hour and yet it is stretched to a 90 minute runtime.
The experience of watching this film is like watching a cut of “Twilight” about werewolves instead of vampires that wasn’t good enough to make theatrical distribution. Let that thought marinate in your heads for a while; a version of “Twilight” so bad, it didn’t even receive the silver screen treatment.
½ Shatners out of 4
Bottom Line: This film descends into Nega Shat territory so fast, that it actually bounces back up above zero based on sheer comedic value.
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