WEREWOLF (1995)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *metaphysical*

(ADMISSION: I did watch the MST3K version of this item, but while sometimes their sendups interfere with my estimation of a movie, I don't think that happened here. In addition, I tend to doubt that anyone ever watches this garbage-heap any other way.)

I can't remember where I saw someone call Tony Zarindast "the Iranian Ed Wood," but whoever said it, it's wrong on two counts.

First, thanks to the nomination of Ed Wood as the world's worst director, the seven or eight movies on which his reputation rests are generally easy to seek out. Zarindast directed (and usually co-wrote) about twenty films, but of those twenty, only two are somewhat available in American markets. One is of course WEREWOLF, while the other, a 1978 sex/crime thriller called CAT IN THE CAGE, probably got a VHS release in the U.S. thanks to its casting of Sybil Danning.

Second, Wood was incredibly sloppy in laying out his preposterous concepts, but his plots were usually serviceable and reasonably linear. I've seen CAT IN THE CAGE and I found it semi-incoherent, though nowhere near as muddled as WEREWOLF. 

Though there are a lot of "WTF" moments in Zarindast's crappy drama, it's distinguished by a bizarre inability to tell a story. One knows from the opening that a group of archaeologists, including Joe Estevez, Jorge Rivero, and a hot young girl, unearth a human skeleton with a beast's head from the Southwestern desert. After two of the guys get into a fistfight about some damn thing, we eventually find out that local Indians think it's the bones of a "skinwalker," an Indian magician able to shift into various animal forms. So right away, it's not exactly a werewolf, but an entity that can turn into various creatures, including wolf-men.

But it's not some ancient Indian wonder-worker who's the menace, but the digger named Yuri (Rivero). Yuri sees another digger cut himself on the skeleton and transform instantly into a were-beast (who's then shot down like, well, a dog). After that, Yuri somehow conceives a mad-scientist passion to test the bones on other victims, just to see if they too will transform. Oh, and he has the hots for Hot Lady Archaeologist, so he uses the infection to try to get rid of her boyfriend. 

So there's no attempt to organize a legend of Indian shapechangers, or to focus on a particular victim of lycanthropy, as most werewolf films have advocated. Apparently Zarindast just wanted to have various actors in bad were-makeup run around an Arizona city causing random havoc, with occasional regular folks getting into more fistfights to punctuate the wolf-action. It's been observed that many performers have their hairstyles change in short periods of film-time, which probably means that Zarindast had to film different sections of the movie at different times when he had enough money to do so.

I've rarely seen a movie with well-known pro actors (including Richard Lynch, who mostly sits around reading his lines very seriously) that evokes so little interest in what happens to the characters. I'd have to look at it again to remember what happened to Yuri or any of his victims, About the only positive aspect of WEREWOLF is the nonsensical scene I reproduced above: that of one of the afflicted wolf-guys Driving While Lycanthropic. But even a nutty scene like this one lacks Wood's naive charm.

Now I may have to review CAT IN THE CAGE, just to see if it matches WEREWOLF for sheer inertia...