The eponymous American werewolf in London certainly takes his time in arriving. A British werewolf in the North of England makes a brief appearance early on, but otherwise, you're going to wait for a while in John Landis's American Werewolf in London before things really get going. Fortunately, there's enough good-natured gore and viscera to make the first hour of the film appealing enough before the arrival of the titular villain kicks the film into overdrive for its final act.

The film begins with a series of kinda generic vistas suggesting that while the title of the film implies the urbane, the root of our story is elsewhere. East Proctor, in the North of England, to be precise. Our heroes, David (David Naughton) and Jack (Griffin Dunne) emerge from the back of a truck laden with sheep. The man who gave them a ride sends them on their way, telling them to stay on the road and avoid the moors. Our heroes are young American tourists. They sound like college students, but they look too old to be. But anyway, they have an easy friendship, full of jokes and banter. It's a cold night and they walk through East Proctor looking for a place to stop and have a bite to eat and a warm drink and they come upon The Slaughtered Lamb, a dark pub.

Now, they should have known something was up when all conversation halted when they entered the pub. And they should have known something was up with the craggy locals started giving them the evil eye. They should have figured that they weren't welcome when the bartender told them they didn't have soup or coffee. And they certainly should have been nervous about the candles and pentacle on the wall. But really, everything might have been OK, if they hadn't asked about the strangeness. Next thing you know, they're exiting the pub with only the warning to stay out of the moonlight, stay on the road, and avoid the moors.

The smart-aleck Americans are wise enough to know that moors imply Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights, but they're not smart enough to actually avoid the moors. And next thing you know they hear howling. Howling and feral breathing that seems to be following them and then, the creature attacks! Jack is mauled instantly, but David is only nibbled a bit before the locals show up with a gun. David regains consciousness long enough to notice a naked man lying next to him, shot, and then he passes out.

David comes to in a London hospital, where he's being taken care of by Nurse Alex Price (Jenny Agutter) is taking care of him. The doctor informs him that Jack is dead, but that David will be OK. He's assured that the locals in East Proctor had testified that David and Jack were attacked by an escaped lunatic. David knows that isn't right, but his ultimate confirmation that something strange is up comes when Jack shows up at his bedside, not-quite alive, not-quite dead, but totally torn to bits. Jack tells David that David is the last in a chain of werewolves, but, strangely, David is hesitant to believe him, even when Jack insists that his spirit will walk the Earth until David is killed.

And from there, the waiting game begins, for both the audience and David. Our expectations are that we'll get some wolfing out (to use Buffy terminology) ASAP, but instead Landis develops suspense, as well as a relationship between David and the pretty nurse. But at exactly the one hour point, David undergoes some very interesting changes and Rick Baker shows why he won an Oscar for the make-up effects on this film.

American Werewolf finds John Landis at the peak of his career. Between 1977 and 1983, he directed The Kentucky Fried Movie, Animal House, The Blues Brothers, Werewolf, and Trading Places. Regardless of your feelings towards one or two of those films (The Blues Brothers, for example, bores me to tears), that's a pretty amazing streak. Then, in 1983, Landis directed the prologue and one section of The Twilight Zone: The Movie. On that film, a tragic accident left three actors dead and while Landis wasn't found criminally responsible for their deaths, his career was never the same. His last two films have been The Blues Brothers 2000 and The Stupids and he really hasn't made a good film since Trading Places in 1982 and Werewolf in 1981.

And American Werewolf in London is actually an excellent showcase for Landis's directing strengths as well as his writing. Baker's landmark wolf make-up gets less than four minutes of screentime, actually. The wolf is barely mobile and the scenes with the greatest violence were constructed by Landis and editor Malcolm Campbell (whose otherwise undistinguished career has included the sequels in the Wayne's World, Hot Shots!, and Ace Ventura franchises). American Werewolf is masterful partly because of just how little you actually see of anything and yet how much you seem to remember seeing.

Take, for example, the excellent scene in which the werewolf hunts a man down in a London subway station. Watch the scene a couple times. It's terrifying. But you don't see the wolf for a single second. Not even a glimpse. In fact, you only get a couple auditory nods to his presence. The sequence is instead made up of a variety of different point of view shots. We see the dingy empty corridors of the subway station and we begin to explore the corners. This is the point of view of the soon-to-be victim. Every time we reach the point at which we'd expect to see the Wolf, Landis cuts back to the victim's terrified response. The chases through halls and up an escalator alternate between tracking shots following the victim and Wolf point-of-view shots from a much lower position. As the wolf goes in for the kill, we get the monster's point of view again, but at the moment where the audience expects violence, there's another shock cut which leads into a humorous scene. You've been fully involved with the scene, but the director has denied you the creature that you long for.

Landis's craft helps cover up the fact that while Baker's transformation effects are amazing, the creature effects are somewhere between underwhelming and non-existent. The two minute scene in which David becomes the wolf is amazing and is still the best of its kind (though the transformation scenes in The Howling are cool too). It's an excruciatingly detailed change, made all the more painful for the viewer by the fact that Landis kept delaying the action. But once David has fully transformed, Landis has to use point-of-view and flashcuts of the monster's face to remind us that he's out there. What we see in great detail, though, is the carnage the creature leaves behind.

Landis relies heavily on Grand Guignol dark humor in this picture. Pompous film critics (like me) like to throw around the phrase grand guignol without ever bothering to explain the term. It refers to a theatre in turn of the 20th century Paris which performed largely one act plays relying heavily on the most gruesome and graphic violence imaginable. Theatre-goers would expect to be entertained and disgusted and would fully expect the blood and guts to fly. Literally. People in the front rows would frequently be drenched. The humor of the productions came from how far over the top they could go. The violence amused, titilated, and horrified. And American Werewolf comes out of this tradition.

There are things afoot that just aren't inherently funny that are played for laughs here. Jack, for example, returns from the grave several times, each time more decomposed. His dialogue is funny and his presence absurd, but the make-up in these scenes is shockingly graphic, with bits of flesh just hanging on. You watch and laugh, but you also get a little queasy if you look too closely. There are severed limbs everywhere, but generally as punchlines for jokes as well as terror. And the film's climax, in a Picadilly Circus porno theatre and then in the square itself, is just wild. Cars crash, buses spin, the wolf attacks while naked bodies writhe onscreen, and everything goes out of control and it's just impossible to know whether to laugh or cower.

And Landis balances all of the possible tones perfectly. The film is dizzingly self-aware throughout. David has learned the rules for werewolf behavior from Lon Chaney and he's shocked to discover that the movies aren't gospel. Various other movies make appearance either on television or as visual footnotes. And the soundtrack features only songs with the word "Moon" in the title, which is either cute, or a little silly depending on your tolerance for covers of "Blue Moon" and "Moondance." Sometimes you're totally convinced that American Werewolf is taking itself seriously, but most of the time, you suspect it's not.

In the two lead roles, David Naughton and Jenny Agutter are mostly just amiable. Naughton has a silly charm and he plays his character's comic scenes far better than the dramatic moments. Agutter is very fine to look at, but after some fine work up to this point (including Logan's Run and Nicholas Roeg's Walkabout), this was pretty much the end of her career, at least until Quentin Tarantino decides to resurrect it. As the wry and then rotting Jack, Griffin Dunne's sardonic edge typifies the tone of the entire film. The gruff and cursed residents of East Proctor are largely stereotypes, but they're funny stereotypes, led by Brian Glover and David Schofield. And watch for Frank Oz as an American consulate representative.

Some werewolf movies have reveled in a Freudian subtext of the revealed and no longer sublimated beast within. In these movies (like I Was A Teenage Werewolf and Teen Wolf and Wolf), the experience of a man becoming a wolf is linked to the rise of puberty, the need to be more outgoing, or the need to compete in the corporate jungle. An American Werewolf in London does away with any of that. For David, becoming a monster is pretty much only tied to, well, becoming a monster. What Werewolf lacks in depth, though, it makes up for in charm, effects, scares, and skill.

[DVD Note: It's not a great transfer of the film, really, but the DVD has all sorts of fun things including commentary by Dunne and Naughton and a featurette on the make-up effects. Good stuff.]

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age