Alicia I love this movie so much

Pluskylang Great Film overall

Gurlyndrobb While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Fleur Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

qmtv I got this movie in a 8 movie package. The first movie The Prophecy with Christopher Walken was horrible. This movie Barfing IV is worse.Here's the problem: The story sucks. Apparently this is closer to the book than the first Howling. I saw the first movie many years ago, and don't remember it as being this horrible. The script, the dialogue, the stupid non-important, non-consequential scenes. It's so incredibly boring. The acting is horrible all around. You could tell Romy Windsor, the main female actress is trying. But trying does not mean you should be in front of the camera. Maybe as a model. Not as an actress. All the rest of the cast sucks completely. The worst actor here is the husband. Again, he is no actor. Maybe as a clothing model. This guy has zero acting talent. The wife's boyfriend. He was slightly better than the husband, but what the hell was his story line in the movie. The former nun, acting is whatever. How does she go from being a nun to a civilian and all of a sudden she has a car, fancy clothes and can stay in hotels? Where did she get the money for all that? This movie is consistently bad all around. The camera work sucks. The editing is whatever. Best part is when that couple gets killed by the water halfway through the movie. And guess what, they screw that up too with some completely inappropriate music. I mean this thing has to be seen to be believed. There are scenes where the husband and wife are in the cabin talking about some stupidity. The camera angle is like, OK, we got the shot, roll the film. Nothing special going on. Conversation is not moving the film forward. We don't get to see any wherewolfs, or wolfmen, or whatever the hell they are until the last 10 minutes. The worst transformation scene ever! Worst, and ugliest costumes and that includes the human wardrobe. Take a look at that double button down vest on the doctor. This is one stupid and ugly movie. Sets suck, take a look at that town and the cabin. Crappy music, crappy dialogue, crappy non acting, no chemistry, no packing, no atmosphere, no surprises, no nothing.If you can bare to watch this it would be a test in discipline and endurance. It took me two sittings. I have read most of the user reviews and some of the critic reviews. And You Call Yourself a Scientist! critic reviews was most entertaining to read as they give a very good account of this mess of a movie. There should be a book written about this movie. Screen for screen description of how not to make a movie, and what is wrong with each scene, and an overall serious takedown of the screenplay and the movie overall. Now, that would be entertaining. Then they should produce a remix of this movie with 50's TV laugh tracks. Then we are in the realm of full blown entertainment.As it stands, this thing is garbage. No value at all. It is not so bad it's good. It is not so bad it's bad. It is so bad, you fall asleep. I still believe Suspiria is the worst movie ever, simply because a lot of people actually love it. Which is inconceivable. But, there is room at the bottom for Howling IV.Complete Failure! F, 1 star. One thing it does do, it elevates other crappy movies like Star Wars Force Awakens to entertainment level.

Leofwine_draca This plodding and deathly dull entry in the HOWLING franchise is only notable for a couple of decent special effects scenes in the last ten minutes of the movie, but unfortunately you have to ensure the previous eighty minutes before you get to these bits. The first eighty minutes adopts a predictable mystery template, as a young writer moves to a strange old town in the middle of nowhere, and hears howling noises coming from the wood. Is she going mad, or are there really wolves living out there? Does anybody really care? The answer is, unfortunately, no. The film is cheaply made and director John Hough, formerly of the Hammer Horror stable, really doesn't distinguish himself at all, providing a bland, TV-movie look to the proceedings.The film's mystery is a really run-of-the-mill one, with the bad guys being obvious right from the start, so the whole conspiracy angle just falls flat. It doesn't help that lead actress Romy Windsor (THE HOUSE OF USHER) is so…well…normal, either. She's just there, and undistinguished from a million other low budget scream queens of the 1980s. A minor plus point of the film is the '80s setting, which allows for a cheesy mulleted hero – played with gusto by Michael T. Weiss – something I have to say I enjoyed a little. However, the film is so cheap that most of the voices are dubbed in, which makes it just look even more amateurish. Exploitation stalwart Harry Alan Towers was on board as producer, but the film doesn't have much of the gusto of his other movies.However, the last ten minutes ARE decent. There are torn throats aplenty, a pack of dogs with glowing red eyes which look pretty damn cool, and a massive werewolf beast inside a church. For horror fans, best of all is the excruciating sequence (yes, even more excruciating than AN American WEREWOLF IN London) in which a guy melts down to a fleshy skeleton before growing back into a werewolf! The latter two effects are courtesy of Steve Johnson, who really distinguishes himself with these gooey offerings, a definite highlight of the film. It's just a shame that, as fast as the fun begins, the film ends on a low note. If only these things had happened half an hour in and continued from there, it might have been a decent movie

SoapboxQuantez08 The only flaw I want to emphasize is that the early scenes in this film, much like the opening credits, are too quick to be effective. This one (however) is more faithful to the novel than the original, and once you get past the first 15 minutes, it doesn't seem so rushed. Romy Windsor plays the vision-bound, introverted, semi-tolerated Marie. Neither Marie, nor her husband Richard, nor their friend Tom, believe in werewolves. Janice, an ex-nun, is the only one considering a werewolf-existence possibility. Marie/Richard met her in Drago, and Janice's belief in demons is probably what paved the way for her werewolf suspicions. Along the way, some peeps have vanished, including a hitch-hiking couple and the long-dead sister Ruth. When Marie discovers that the sheriff covered-up the disappearance of the pleasant hitch-hiking couple, or attempted to do so, tempers flare. There's more than one way to skin a wolf (or cover it's tracks), and it isn't by lying to red-riding hood. You can't run a successful werewolf business without breaking a few nuns, as it turns out. The lethargic and apathetic sheriff would probably agree. The main complaint here is the scarce on-screen werewolf time. But in my opinion, this is redeemed by acceptable performances, just enough atmosphere, and a classic 80's score.

capkronos Joe Dante's THE HOWLING (1981) was one of the great cult horror hits of the 80s and a lot of that had to do with the director's ability to infuse a good sense of humor into the proceedings without sacrificing the scares in the process. However, it also took major liberties with the source novel of the same name by Gary Brandner, which displeased some fans. This third sequel attempts to right that wrong by presenting a more faithful version of the first book in Brandner's series. The basic plots of the two films are nearly identical, but the approach to the material is not. Gone from this one are the production values, the sense of humor, the scares, the trend-setting special effects and the great cast. This lower-budgeted film simply comes off by-the-numbers, humorless, dull and actually surprisingly amateurish considering the fact the director is very experienced in the horror genre.Bestselling author Marie Adams (Romy Windsor) is haunted by visions of a nun and wolf faces and ends up spending time in an asylum as a result. After she's released, her husband Richard (Michael T. Weiss) takes her to a remote cabin located deep in the woods so she can have some quiet, peaceful time to recuperate. It isn't long before our troubled heroine begins doubting her sanity once again. Every night she hears wolves howling in the woods, despite the fact the sheriff (Norman Anstey) keeps insisting there are no large animals in the area. She's haunted by more visions of the nun as well as the home's former occupants, her poodle Pierre disappears and is later found with its head cut off and a pair of hikers vanish without a trace. To make matters even more stressful and sinister, all of the people living in the small neighboring town of Drago behave strangely and secretively.Loose ends start to finally come together once Marie meets Janice Hatch (Susanne Severeid). A former nun herself, Janice is there looking for answers as to why another nun from her convent, Sister Ruth (Megan Kruskal), spent some time in the area and later went crazy and died. It's rather personal for Janice because Ruth was her lover and it also becomes personal for Marie seeing how her hubby has been spending a little too much time making special trips into town to visit an exotic, seductive shop owner named Eleanor (Lamya Derval). It should come as no surprise to anyone reading that the entire town is actually a haven for werewolves.There are three major problems that completely sink this film early on. The first is atrocious monotone acting from nearly everyone in the cast. It seems like many have been dubbed over and the audio recording is terrible to start with, so that may play some part is the thoroughly inept performances seen from nearly everyone in this film. The second major issue is the location. This is supposed to be taking place in Northern California but it was filmed in dusty, dry South Africa, which looks absolutely nothing like Northern California. The final major problem with this one is the pacing. It plays out like a boring made-for-TV "thriller" with endlessly talky scenes that don't contribute a thing of interest to an already utterly predictable plot. Even worse, this film wastes so much time on nothing for the first hour that it must then quickly rush through a choppily-edited finale in just a few minutes.The only positives in this one happen during the final few minutes and those are some Steve Johnson special effects, including a gory human meltdown and a guy ripping his face apart. Still, this is far from Johnson's best work. Aside from one brief flash of an actual werewolf (which seems to have been taken from another film altogether), the beasts are shown only as hairy-faced people and then as dogs in their full "transformation" stage later on. Very lame. The only other point of interest is that the opening 80s cheese-rock song ("Something Evil, Something Dangerous") was sung by Justin Hayward of The Moody Blues.