An American Werewolf in London is one of those cult movies I always meant to see but never did (much like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which I’ll review later in the month). I knew it by reputation as a darkly comic horror film, perhaps similar to Evil Dead II or Dead Alive.
One of the reasons it took me a while to see it was that it was a werewolf movie. I’m not a big fan of werewolves. I understand the appeal of vampires; Frankenstein’s monster is cool; demons, sea monsters, zombies I like. But werewolves seem boring to me. They’re big dogs, essentially. And their gimmick strains even the most flexible imagination: the victim only turns into a werewolf at each full moon? Why? Are werewolves affected by gravitational forces, like the tides? And then there’s the problem of mass conversion. Whether the victim turns into a giant wolf-man or a pure wolf, the weight ratios are going to be different, and that just bugs me; where does the extra mass come from (or go to)?
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The first of the Evil Dead films I saw was?I’m fairly certain?Army of Darkness. At the time, I thought it was one of the greatest things I’d ever seen. Then I saw Evil Dead 2, deservedly called the best of the trilogy. Finally I saw the first film, which is good but hard to take. Now having seen Army of Darkness about 10 million times, I can’t stand to watch it anymore. But Evil Dead 2…now that’s a classic film. I can watch that over and over.