Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf (1985) Revisited – Horror Movie Review

As my tastes change and I get a chance to watch more and more movies, largely due to wonderful companies like Severin, Vinegar Syndrome, and Synapse putting out forgotten or lost movies, this also changes what I’m willing to call a Black Sheep. The Howling series is kind of a Black Sheep series in horror. It has 8 films over a 30-year span from 1981 to 2011 and while the first one is typically held in high esteem because of its pedigree, and, well, because its good, there’s a lot to watch and unpack here. You can look at which movie is the black sheep of the series but let’s get even more granular with it. Let’s look at which of the two Howling movies directed by Phillipe Mora deserves the moniker. While the third one has that specific Ozploitation flair to it that admittedly I am an easy mark for, Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf has a pizazz to it that is unmatched in mid-1980s cinema that 40 years later, is a great Black Sheep candidate.

The rights for The Howling series were kind of up in the air and so Joe Dante was out. The writer of the Howling novels, Gary Brandner, wasn’t a huge fan of the first movie or the director after Dante said that the novels were just ok, and his movie improved upon the source material. The situation is a mess and that starts with production, as the first movie made a good amount of money, but Avco Embassy was accused by producer Steven Lane of adding costs that may or may not have been real and was upset that he wasn’t making the money he should have off of it. He bought out his co-producer and wanted to strike while the iron was hot but wasn’t able to make a direct sequel due to other rights issues. Lane then entered into a tenuous agreement with a production company called Hemdale Film Corporation. These guys grossly misrepresented how much money they had for the production as well as the script changed multiple times. While author Brandner is credited as a screenwriter on the film, his initial script was completely changed and has almost nothing to do with either the first film or the second book in the series. This might have been rectified even with all the changes, but the author had to leave due to pressures of turning in the third book in the Howling series… or he hated the production. Could be both.

Now it’s a hot mess but that doesn’t mean the movie is bad. Ok, the movie is kind of bad, but it got charm out the wazoo and is a fun kind of bad. Even with its faults, it has a few genuinely strong things going for it. The movie opens at the funeral of Karen who was played by Dee Wallace in the first movie. We get Reb Brown as Karen’s brother Ben, and he ends up meeting an associate of Karen’s named Jenny and Stefan who is not related to anyone or anything. Reb Brown is a damn legend and you could make a drinking game out of this or any other movie of his where you imbibe on something every time he screams when he does something. Here, it’s when he shoots werewolves or tackles someone. Reb is bad movie royalty with his appearances as Captain America in TWO movies in 1979, Yor: Hunter from the Future, Strike Commando, and Robowar but then throws a curveball by showing up in good stuff like Uncommon Valor and Hardcore. Dude’s a mystery.

Jenny is played by Annie McEnroe, who I don’t recognize from much but did realize she is the realtor lady in Beetlejuice and also shows up in The Survivors with Robin Williams. The strange man named Stefan is none other than genre legend Christopher Lee. Even in bad movies he is a consummate professional and a fun watch. To name the movies that Lee is in would be an exercise in futility and everyone has their favorites, so I’ll just tie some stories of Lee’s time here. He was so disappointed with the other actors acting in this movie that he would often disassociate between takes. Director Mora also had no idea that Lee was a secret SS killing badass and when Lee got off the plane in Czechoslovakia, he was treated to a hero’s welcome. At some point, he also took Mora on a mini tour explaining his exploits that caused the director to make a documentary about Lee and his military days. Lee also contributed to issues on the production when he was able to help, in character, explain away bad special effects. Finally, when Joe Dante, who was a huge fan, cast the imposing former vampire and Bond villain in Gremlins 2, Lee apologized for his involvement in the sequel.

Stefan explains that Ben’s sister, as the movie suggests, was a werewolf. Although that explanation also extends to Stefan and the main villain Stirba being siblings when she is the queen of the werewolves. He shows Ben and Jenny the tape of the broadcast where Karen changed into a lycan and was killed but he needs to put her into a final rest. One of the stupidly fun aspects of this movie is that the original script was geared towards vampires and while they moved it over to a different old school monster, they didn’t change a lot of the surrounding parts including Transylvania and how you are supposed to dispatch the threats. Stefan meets the other two at Karen’s grave and tries to kill her again but is interrupted by a group who follow Stirba. Stirba had the movie receive a couple different names they toyed around with too including Howling II: Striba- Werewolf Bitch which sounds like something they would make up for a fake preview in Grindhouse but would have also been amazing. The trio go off to hunt Stirba who is creating an army of super sexy werewolves and clearly must be stopped.

The music is shockingly fun here. The score itself by Stephen Parsons works in nearly every scene and then you have the punk club. That scene works on so many levels but just seeing cool 1980s Christopher Lee in his shades is worth the price of admission and yes, he pulls it off. The club and music from the band Babel comes back in a very hilarious but problematic end credits sequence. You see, Stirba is played by Sybil Danning who was a B movie queen and quite often naked, both in the pages of Playboy and on screen. For this movie, she had grown tired of being naked so often and got the producers to agree to only one nude scene where you can see anything. She is in strange leather or covered in wolf fur for the rest of it. The scene is clear as day and has the nudity that she agreed to but then the producers called Mora when they were working on the end credits and asked if he thought it was ok to run the scene of her topless again and he said it was probably fine. What he and certainly Sybil didn’t know was that they were going to run the clip 17 times during the course of the credits. Yeesh.

Sybil is known for more than just this though as she can be seen in other fun genre works like Malibu Express, The Tomb, and V. She was also in the first two Oliver Reed Musketeer films that also featured Christopher Lee and newer horror directors like Rob Zombie would put her in projects like the 2007 remake of Halloween. While I would agree with Lee that the acting isn’t great here, its part of the charm with Danning and Brown particularly looking like they are having a damn blast. The trio meet a bunch of local villagers who are part of a group that have sworn to oppose Stirba because she has killed parts of their families for generations. Ben finds the castle that Stirba is at but loses a partner named Vasile while also allowing Jenny to be captured. Stirba is able to reanimate Vasile and use him to attempt to kill Stefan before Reb absolutely destroys him by tackling him out a window and onto a spiked gate.

Another thing to discuss that actually works really well besides the score are the effects and those shouldn’t have been as good as they are. Ok, good is a strong word, but they are fun as heck and some of the more entertaining looking kills of the 80s. The special effects were severely hampered by budget and many of these cool kills were added after the principal filming had ended. The gore is more than sufficient and it’s really funny in a good way to watch the hastily put together dummies get absolutely wrecked by bat creatures or magic that makes their eyes pop out of their sockets. The wolves were a big part of what made the first movie so cool from their transformations to the way they walked and even stood. Here though, oh boy, they did what they could. They were sent a box from 20th Century Fox that was labeled Planet of the Apes and that’s exactly what they received. You’ll see a lot of the wolves clothed or only partially visible or just naked with focus on the human nudity. They did what they could with what they had, and Lee added a line about werewolves devolving from humans which adds a little credence to the apes thing.

The heroes end up at the castle and grounds with a handful of them dying and ultimately killing Stirba. How it happens is irrelevant as there is a section with Reb Brown screaming as he kills more werewolves than Rambo kills soldiers and teams up with Christopher Lee in a tag team that I did not have on my bingo card. Stefan is able to kill Sybil but also sacrifices himself in her very unconvincing fire but that’s what happens I guess when it’s Howling II and your sister is a werewolf. Jenny and Ben go back home, now a couple and we get a bizarre ending that happens when you don’t know how to end a movie. I say that but its also the only part of the original script from screenwriter Robert Sarno who originally wanted this movie to be a comedy. He only has one other movie to his name.

The entire Howling series deserves a once over even if the first one is the only one people are willing to talk about. There just aren’t enough werewolf movies out there and we still aren’t getting great ones as evidenced by the recently released Wolf Man from Leigh Whannell and Blumhouse. While the rest of the series doesn’t deserve its day in the sun like this one, I’d highly recommend buying the new 4K from Vinegar Syndrome that shows this hot mess in the best quality possible. Howling II is enjoyable trash of the highest quality.

A couple of the previous episodes of The Black Sheep can be seen at the bottom of this article. To see more, head over to the JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channel – and subscribe while you’re there!

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