Bad Wolf

You can blame today's Liveblog on a guy named Joe. Until I read this column he wrote, I was going through life blissfully unaware of the fact that this movie even existed. Now that I know, I must watch it and you must watch it with me, or at least read my real time comments about it. I haven't seen this. I don't really want to but I'm firing up Netflix Instant anyway. I present to you the 1987 film...HOWLING III.

0:05:00 -- After opening credits that consisted of nothing but white titles on a black screen showing unrecognizable names set to music that, so far as I can tell, was played by the director's nephew's tuba band, we see, well, quite a bit for 5 minutes. The filmmakers wasted no footage because so far they've packed in some residents of the Australian Outback standing around a dead werewolf, some guys in Siberia being attacked by a werewolf and American Intelligence Operatives implying that the bulk of America's spy activities during the Reagan years consisted of listening to the Soviets talking about werewolves. To top off the movie's inaugural 5 minutes, we see a college professor showing his students some unintentionally hilarious footage of the 1905 incident that he thinks is some sort of ritual where aborigines gently poke a woman in a werewolf suit with spears. He's amazed that the wolf mask looks so real so I think he's talking about some other wolf mask footage because he's clearly not talking about this.

Excuse me for a moment. HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!!! Thank you. Please resume reading.

0:12:30 -- If you never saw 1981's The Howling, it's not bad. That, at least, looked like it was made by people who could tell their asses apart from their elbows, unlike this movie. As far as I can tell, this "sequel" bears zero relationship to that movie apart from the fact that both have werewolves. If this movie's Wikipedia entry is accurate, my suspicion that the producers already had a werewolf movie in the can and paid to slap the Howling III title on it is confirmed. Anyway, the professor, Beckmeyer, basically flew to Washington D.C. and strolled into the White House while the Secret Service blithely escorted this stranger to the President though the fact that he holds the meeting in his bathrobe makes him look less like the American President and more like the publisher of a men's magazine. Beckmeyer must have amazing people skills because I can't figure any other way you could arrange a meeting with the President of the United States to inform him that there is an impending werewolf threat with no evidence to back it up. I could have evidence that Al Qaeda had a nuclear weapon aimed at the nutsack of every man in the country and I might get a meeting with the undersecretary in charge of cheese price coordination. Also, a hot werewolf girl named Jerboa ran away from her werewolf clan in the Outback and went to Sydney where she landed a movie role and no, I did not just make all that up.

0:30:00 -- Three of Jerboa's fellow werewolf chicks go to Sydney looking for her dressed as nuns. The internet assures me that Sydney has a population of over 4 million and that it's twice the size of New York City but this movie assures me that it's small enough to pretty much trip over anyone you're looking for as Beckmeyer says he really wants to examine a werewolf and walks right by the movie set where Jerboa is working while the three werewolf women keep going to places where Jerboa has been. Jerboa, meanwhile, has hooked up with some douchewad named Danny. Werewolf girls must be turned on by douchewads because she has sex with him on the first date. I'm wondering how to explain the next part but the only way I can think to do it is to come out and say she has a pouch. Because, you know, Australia and all so I guess the werewolves have pouches. It's scientifically accurate. Look it up. Danny kind of looks the pouch over but after that the subject is closed for him. You know, I've been desperate enough for sex that I wouldn't have questioned if a girl had a hump or a conjoined twin but a pouch? I would at least ask about it the next morning over a breakfast of Weet Bix and Vegemite after bragging that I know what is and is not a knife if she'd ever at least had that pouch looked at. Anyway, Jerboa gets hit by a car and is brought to a hospital where the doctors who aren't horny douchewads like Danny take notice of the pouch. Unfortunately, the three werewolf women track her down there and kill everyone except, unfortunately, Danny before taking her back to the Outback.

Oh look, some more of those "realistic" wolf masks. If you'll indulge me once more...HA HA HA!

1:00:00 -- OK...all right...I just can't think of where to begin. The stupid is so thick you could sell it by the slice. I could write a book about this movie alone. First off, this movie lacks anything even vaguely resembling competent filmmaking. I truly believe that you could teach random people off the street the rudimentary usage of movie equipment and not come up with anything worse than this. To sum up, Jerboa got herself pregnant by Danny Douchewad. Even though she ran off before, her tribe sees no reason to put any sort of security on her so she sneaks off again and has a werewolf baby that crawls into her pouch. Believe it or not, this is the most believable and logical thing that has happened in the past 30 minutes. Back in Sydney, a famous ballerina who was also a werewolf spontaneously wolfed out while Beckmeyer just happened to be in the audience. Beckmeyer, a genius, straps her down WHILE LEAVING HER ARMS COMPLETELY FREE and starts to examine her. No one, certainly not a genius like Beckmeyer, could have foreseen that her arms being free would allow her to take wolf form and escape and then she winds up with Jerboa's tribe and she and the rest of the tribe get captured again and fuck it, let's move on.

Do they really all dress like the Road Warrior down there?

1:38:00 -- At first, I thought this script was written before it was named. I am now seriously convinced that they had no script and just made this shit up as they went along. Beckmeyer helps the ballet dancer, Olga, and Thylo, head of the marsupial werewolves, to escape military custody. The ease of this escape tells me that they were being guarded by trained hamsters and that their cages were locked with sticks of gum. The Australian military responds to this mortal threat to society by sending two YES TWO soldiers after them. After Thylo sacrifices himself by turning into a super wolf and taking out that elite two solider unit, Jerboa, Danny, Beckmeyer and Olga all set up house in the bush. The Australians must have said screw it and given up because literally years pass. Jerboa and her douchewad lover decide to sneak back to civilization. They figure that the best way to remain inconspicuous and evade the authorities is to, and this is true, get into the movie business. So I don't have to repeat myself, everything I'm about to write is from the actual movie and not made up by me. Jerboa becomes a famous actress and Danny becomes a director and none of the world's governments who now see werewolves as the #1 threat in the world notice. Years later, one of Beckmeyer's old friends tracks him down and tells him that everything's good now and that society is just fine with werewolves after the Pope said they were cool. Beckmeyer becomes a lecturer at a southern California university where all the students speak with Australian accents and Jerboa wins an Oscar. After Dame Edna, yes, THAT Dame Edna, makes a cameo appearance as an Oscar presenter, cameras start flashing on Jerboa and she turns into a werewolf live on television. Did I mention that strobe lights make werewolves involuntarily change? Well, they do. I don't know why it's a bad thing that she changed on camera since people are cool with werewolves now but she did and it was bad and Dame Edna just stood around screaming and podiums got knocked over and some generic 80s song started to play as the end credits rolled because that's all that happened. Try not to crash Netflix's servers by everyone trying to watch this all at once. Take turns.

He's single, ladies. See ya later.