The Howling: Reborn caught my attention when flipping channels on the tube. And since it was very late at night my resistance to bad films was very low so I kept watching. Surprisingly enough it managed to entertain me somewhat. Mind you I was not aware that I was watching a Howling film since the title was given was in Spanish. Only after looking up the translation it was beginning to dawn on me that this title doesn´t deserve to be part of the franchise.
It´s been a while that I have seen the original and some of the sequels. While they are far from masterpieces all of the Howling films I have seen excelled in the special effects department. Plus they succeeded into making werewolves dangerous and menacing. Reborn is a totally different beast. It´s so far removed from what The Howling was that it almost has become a parody of those films. I guess they were going to tie into the success of Twilight since Reborn predominantly features a fatalistic love between a boy and a girl who can´t be together. The boy (played by Landon Liboiron) recently discovered he is a werewolf and naturally the girl (played by Lindsey Shaw) is therefore incredibly attracted to him. And of course the boy tries his best to avoid getting tangled up into a relationship with her because of it being too dangerous. Sounds familiar? To be fair they did have a nice chemistry and it certainly was nice to see them interact. Actually it was very amusing to see main character Will realizing that he was not like other teens. It almost rivaled the charm of Teen Wolf (the movie with Michael J. Fox). Except that one of course is far superior and so much more funny. I found myself enjoying the film quite a bit until they showed the transformations. They are horrendous. The beautiful practical effects are replaced with the most crappy CGI animations you can imagine. To make things worse you can tell that the actors are wearing werewolf costumes. It looked so fake. That is unacceptable. Still I would not let this get in the way of fun and focused on the action.which was decent enough. I only wished that all the people involved would not take it so seriously. Because how can you when the wolves look like overgrown puppies having bad hair days?
Overall it was decent enough and managed to keep my interest although it failed to shine in the departments the franchise is famous for. And would that not be the minimal requirement to revive the franchise (if that was their intention)? Only suitable for very late night viewings.
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