An American Werewolf in Paris (1997)

In 1981, An American Werewolf in London and The Howling both took advantage of advances in special effects technology, augmented by a canny mixture of horror, sly comedy and genuine emotional content, to revive the apparently played-out werewolf movie sub-genre. In the sixteen years it has taken to get together a sequel to John Landis's hit, Joe Dante's The Howling has spawned six straight-to-video follow-ups. Anthony Waller, whose debut Mute Witness was also about horrors afflicting Americans abroad, reuses some of the new 'rules' of lycanthropy Landis laid down - altering them slightly, since under the system on display here the ghost of Griffin Dunne would not have been able to explain things to David Naughton since the death of the werewolf who killed him would here liberate his spirit to disintegrate into a benign Ghost afterlife. But plot points like the gang of racist French skinhead lycanthropes, the serum that duplicates the effects of the full moon and the legless werewolf invalid penned in the cellar would fit more comfortably into the anything goes tone of the cheapskate likes of The Marsupials: Howling III or Howling VI: The Freaks.

The usual quandary of sequelmakers is the need to deliver the same material with enough differences to keep up the surprise factor. Here, with the original film barely a childhood memory for its target audience, the problem is exacerbated by Waller's indecision over how much of Landis's plot and approach to reuse and how much to abandon completely. It's never clearly stated by the script, but the implication is that Serafine is supposed to be the daughter of the hero of the first film and the nurse played by Jenny Agutter - the character appears briefly, played by Isabella Constantini, as a ghost - but the unrelated Andy is the one who goes through most of the plot sufferings Naughton went through first time around. Waller, going his own way, makes a movie which seems more rip-off than sequel, for instance ditching the first film's distinctive use of evocative pop songs (all with 'moon' in the title) in favour of an album's worth of eminently forgettable, affectless Euro-rock.

The early stages of the film manage Landis's lightness of tone, though the amiably lightweight leads have slightly less sharp material to work with (one sustained gag about condoms excluded). Landis's subtle observations about British hospitality have an interesting equivalent in the parade of French stereotypes (pipe-smoking policemen, snooty waiters, abusive club bouncers, unattainable blondes) who pass through. The plot tours such archetypal locations as the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, Jim Morrison's grave, a café and the sewers made famous by Les Miserables, but the fact that most of the movie was made in Luxembourg prevents it from making its city as much a character as was the London of the first film. As in Mute Witness, Waller relishes gothic locales: opening with close-ups of storm-washed gargoyles and a werewolf attack intercut with a choral concert, though the running-around-tunnels of the rest of the film wears thin.

The concentration on the relationship between Serafine and Andy, which never quite fires in the way it ought to, eclipses the film's most interesting character, Pierre Cosso's villainous Claude. A potential highlight, as Claude delivers an ironic speech about how much he loves Americans for all they have given the world as a preparation for slaughtering a batch of clubbers on July the 4th, is fumbled completely by cutaways to other business that curb a rare moment where hilarity and horror genuinely mingle. The second half of the film is so busy that one suspects some tampering to beef it up, because several plot threads get dropped - the ending leaves the ghosts of Amy and Serafine's mother literally hanging around in limbo - and the key emotional scene, in which Serafine begs Andy to kill her and eat her heart, is rushed through too swiftly to have the impact it needs.

The miracle of the first film, in retrospect, was that it managed to work in sweetness and shivers between the then-amazing special effects. Both qualities are attempted here, with variable results, but the real arena of competition between the two movies is, of course, in the monsters. Since 1981, there has been a drift away from physical effects towards computer-generated opticals, and this is the first proper werewolf movie to make extensive use of CGI. The beasts themselves are impressively fearsome, though slightly more ape-like than lupine, and Waller stages one masterly coup as Andy transforms while submerged in a pool and explodes out of the water to shake himself dry. However, like a lot of CGI creatures, these werewolves have little individuality, which becomes a plot point in the confusion over who exactly has bitten Andy, but means bluntly that in battles between good guy and bad guy werewolves it's impossible to know whether our side is winning or not.
KIM NEWMAN

First Published In: Sight and Sound December 1997) pp.37-38 (UK)

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