THE HOWLING: REBORN

I thought I was in for an hour and a half of bloody flesh-ripping carnage after the brutal opening scene, but The Howling: Reborn ended up really only as scary as a dark Harry Potter movie.

Speaking of Harry Potter, high school nerd Will Kidman (Landon Liboiron) actually looks more than a little like the teen wizard, with his mop of dark hair, pale skin, and oh-so-long lashes behind his round nerd glasses. But now that Will has turned 18 and it is graduation, he is suddenly deciding to stand up for himself, and maybe even talk to the hot girl Eliana (Lindsey Shaw), whom he has been crushing on for years. See, Eliana is cool and dates bad boys... but she senses something in Will, and maybe she is even a little bored...

Odd things start happening. Will feels, uh, stirrings and a pack of thuggish boys take a wolf-pack interest in him. What the heck is happening? It is the old boy-turns-into-a-man metaphor as Will finds himself strong and even his eyesight improves (curiously, even his glasses start to get more fashionable—I believe through an inconsistency problem—before they are crushed by a bully).

Oh, but you have to have bad guys. The wolf pack has an alpha leader named Kathryn (Ivana Milicevic), who would be one hot cougar if she wasn't already lycan. Kathryn has a connection to Will, and once he finds out, he won't be happy.

The Howling: Reborn is actually surprisingly watchable, in a Teen Horror Lite way. After the initial scene, it is really not too gorey (which was kind of a relief, honestly... I was afraid it was going to go in the direction of Saw gore, like so many movies these days). There is a concentration on the budding love (oooo!) between Will and Eliana, and they are both played by appealing actors. And, like I said, hot werewolf chick was HOT.

Alas, The Howling: Reborn stumbles as soon as you see the beasties. I actually laughed as one of the upright werewolves staggered into a scene as though the actor couldn't see his way through the elongated snout of the costume. There is some decent lo-fi CGI transformation, but ones the wolves are running around in costume, well, it kind of takes away from the moment. And the set-up of a fortified high school that looked kind of like a castle in the middle of New York City was kind of head scratching.

Still, this movie was mindlessly entertaining on an evening where I really wanted to shut off my brain. Once I realized that every other scene wouldn't end with ripping flesh and a pile of entrails, I actually kind of enjoyed it.

BLU-RAY NOTES

There is a making-of featurette where the cast and director praise each other so effusively that you'd think they created a Shakespearean masterpiece. There is also a storyboard gallery, and a feature commentary by Writer/Director Joe Nimziki and Lindsay Shaw, who plays Eliana.