Scooby-Doo! and the Reluctant Werewolf (1988) Review

Tagline: “The New Scooby-Doo Movie You'll Howl For!”

Scooby-Doo! and the Reluctant Werewolf (1988) Review

 

The Scooby-Doo franchise has featured pretty much every type of monster imaginable since it first started as a Saturday morning cartoon in 1969, but in the 1980s, Hanna-Barbera started producing televised feature-length films, and one of the earliest examples had the biggest cast of classic monsters ever seen in animated form. I saw Scooby-Doo! and the Reluctant Werewolf as a re-run on Teletoon when I was a kid, and as a Scooby fan who was somewhere between casual and consistent, it stuck with me as one of the best animated movies featuring the character, but how does it hold up today?

Unlike later TV movies of the Great Dane’s namesake, this one stars just Scooby and Shaggy as the main characters, without any of the other Mystery Inc. gang members. It starts with Shaggy as a pro race car driver, winning a race with a range of tricks in his decked-out dragster. Count Dracula just so happens to be hosting an upcoming “Monster Road Rally” for some of the most famous horror personalities, including the Frankenstein Monster and his bride, the Mummy, and even a swamp monster. The Wolf Man has retired, though, but it also just so happens that the next man prophesized to become a werewolf is none other than Shaggy—crazy coincide, right? Dracula forces Shaggy to compete and makes him a deal: if he can win the race, he can become human again, but if he loses, he has to remain a werewolf forever. Winning won’t be easy, though, because Dracula has totally rigged the race to be against him, and the other competitors have some monstrous surprises of their own!

Scooby-Doo! and the Reluctant Werewolf doesn’t do a whole lot with the concept of Shaggy as a werewolf, and is more focused on the racing aspect of the story, but that isn’t a bad thing. The first half hour is a bit slow and focuses way too much on two very annoying characters: the Hunch Bunch. Brunch and Crunch are Drac’s hunchbacked henchmen; one of them has a pompous British accent and a monocle and is the “smarter” one of the pair, and the other has his tongue constantly hanging out and can’t speak properly. Luckily, their roles are diminished as the movie goes on. Shaggy is at the drive-in hanging out with his girlfriend Googie, as well as Scooby and Scrappy-Doo, when Shaggy undergoes his transformation, and all of them are transported to Transylvania in the bat-copter (maybe Drac leased it from Batman?). Googie only ever appeared in this one movie, and there’s not much to say about her. Scrappy had plenty of representation in movies and shows in the 80's, but this would actually be his last role until the live-action Scooby-Doo movie in 2002, though he plays a pretty small part here.

Googie and Scrappy are basically a mobile pit crew for Shaggy and Scooby once the race starts, and the race is what I remembered best about this movie, because it makes up more than half the runtime. I’d completely forgotten about Brunch and Crunch, as well as the whole Shaggy-becoming-a-werewolf setup in that first half hour. Once it gets to the race, though, Reluctant Werewolf gets much more consistently funny and entertaining. There are Transylvanian peasants standing by watching the race and listening to the commentators, frequently providing apathetic “yays” or “boos” which never gets old. Dracula commentates along with his wife, Vanna Pira, who has a major crush on Shaggy for some reason and makes quite a few annoying jokes, such as when she says she’s going to provide “colour commentary” and then just starts listing all the colours she can see.

If you have a problem with puns made about monsters, I don’t think you’ll be able to handle this movie at its best. I mean, even a character named Shaggy becoming a werewolf, the hairiest of all monsters (next to Cousin Itt) is in itself a joke. What I appreciate is the rapidity and variety of jokes throughout the race. I couldn’t possibly list them all; a few of the visual gags I find particularly amusing include the mummy’s car using bandages like rope to ensnare a competitor’s car, Frankenstein’s Monster’s car using a lightning cannon shaped like a giant bolt, and swamp thing’s car shooting disgusting bog muck at the witch sisters. Many of the monsters’ names/identities are also joke versions. For example, I like that instead of a generic animated skeleton he’s called Mr. Bone Jangles and talks like he’s a cool old rack of bones. Every monster gets at least one moment to shine. 

Though he’s not a participant in the race, Dracula gets the most screentime of any monster and is often unintentionally sabotaged by the Hunch Bunch. He pronounces Shaggy's name “Shaw-Gi” and is probably one of the funniest versions of Dracula I can think of despite still being an antagonist. It often cuts away to the Count’s attempts at thwarting Shaggy and Scooby, and I found these bits inconsistently funny. Some are in the spirit of good-old-fashioned cartoon hijinks, but others are kind of lame. These bits do prevent the race from feeling repetitive or monotonous, though, and while there are many overhead shots of the cars, the sequences throughout the race are never boring or tiresome. One thing that bugged me was how every monster had a unique vehicle design that complimented their most obvious attributes except for the Wolf Man. Shaggy’s car is just a decked-out VW bug, but nothing about it makes me think werewolf. A quick note on Shaggy’s outfit: he’s wearing his red t-shirt instead of the traditional green one, and from what I remember, every time Shaggy wore his red shirt, it was a good movie.

Scooby-Doo! and the Reluctant Werewolf is still fun to watch all these years later and stands out as a much more original werewolf movie than you might expect, even if not specifically because Shaggy himself is a werewolf. It’s like watching a cartoon version of Mario Kart with classic monsters instead of Nintendo characters (now that would be a game I'd love to play), mixed with some of the usual Scooby-Doo antics in a premise that’s different from the standard mystery solving. It’s one of the best old school Scooby-Doo movies, though perhaps not as great overall as some others that came later. Between reviewing Scooby-Doo! and the Loch Ness Monster a couple years ago, rewatching Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island last Halloween for the first time since I was a kid, and now revisiting this one, I’m thinking I may need to rewatch some more Scooby-Doo movies from my childhood, to see which others still remain entertaining all these years later. 

Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory (1961) Review

Tagline: “Beauties! The prey of a monster's desires!”

Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory (1961) Review

 

The title of this movie is perhaps questionable, but certainly not generic. You might expect Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory to be a schlocky, non-serious horror romp of a wolfman preying on hysterical, screaming young women, but it’s actually a surprisingly serious murder mystery, and a clear marker for the slowly evolving lycanthropy subgenre in that era. Unfortunately, the peak of its greatness begins and ends with that title.

The film began as Lycanthropus, and was produced in Italy, with other alternate titles including I Married a Werewolf, Monster Among the Girls, and The Ghoul in School. Speaking of that last title, the American version starts with an abrupt title card accompanied by a song called “The Ghoul in School” which is also included in brackets under the Dormitory title with an exclamation mark. It’s an upbeat song that doesn’t fit the tone of the film at all. A new teacher shows up to a girls’ reformatory just as mysterious murders begin to take place. Women are lured out into the woods and killed, so a more accurate title would have actually been Werewolf in the Woods Outside a Girls’ Reformatory, but I guess that just didn’t have the same ring to it. The reveal of the werewolf’s identity isn’t too shocking, but the mystery is sustained for most of the runtime. 

Apparently, there were actors and crewmembers speaking French, English, Italian, and German on set, which made the production very chaotic, but I’m actually surprised the movie didn’t turn out to be a complete mess. It’s mainly just a dull affair. The whole thing was dubbed into English, and the dubbing is horrendous. The line delivery sounds flat, and unfortunately, the majority of scenes are full of dialogue. The female cast members are attractive (they don’t exactly look like they need “reforming” though), but the characters are not noteworthy, so there’s little impact when any of them are murdered. The only kill that’s really upsetting is when the werewolf, in human form, beats a German shepherd to death off camera.

Most of the horror doesn’t extend beyond a lot of wolf howls and murky cinematography. The dramatic piano and strings on the soundtrack do a lot of the heavy lifting to make the horror scenes scarier, but it becomes a fruitless effort before long. The werewolf looks about right for the era—not the worst, but not the best, though lacks much hair and is shown very little in the first hour. I suppose he could’ve been passed off as simply a “ghoul” were it not for cutting several times to the full moon. This was still in an era when horror films were heavily censored, so we don’t see a lot of the kills, though we do see one girl early on with bloody slashes on her face and neck. It’s an interesting crossroads between gothic horror and the Italian giallo films to come, with the setting and suspicious teachers reminding me of something like Suspiria.

Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory is pretty dated and now more of a curiosity in the history of werewolf films, reserved for only the biggest lycanthrope fans to check out. Compared to the earlier 1956 film The Werewolf (which this movie outclasses solely on the grounds of its superior title), it’s even slower, and compared to Hammer's The Curse of the Werewolf released only one year earlier, it feels antiquated and tame, because Hammer's film was in colour with a period setting, though neither are as mystery-driven as Dormitory in their plots. Perhaps a remaster of the uncut Italian version would warrant a second viewing, but for me, the American version is only worth putting on in the background of a Halloween party. 

Werewolf by Night (2022) Review

Tagline: “There’s no escaping the night.”

Werewolf by Night (2022) Review

 

At a time when Marvel fatigue was starting to set in, a new corner of the superhero-centric universe had a spotlight shone on it for a brief moment, but in the four years since, that spotlight hasn’t returned, which is kind of a shame, since Werewolf by Night, Marvel Studios’ first “Special Presentation” on the Disney streaming service, might actually be one of my favourite post-Endgame productions.

A bunch of monster hunters show up at a creepy mansion after the death of Ulysses Bloodstone, a mysterious man who wielded the mystical stone from which his name is derived. They enter a maze to compete for ownership of the powerful relic, including Bloodstone’s estranged daughter, who seems to be an outsider compared to the others. The first hunter we meet is Jack, who has dark eye makeup and seems very suspicious. It’s a straightforward premise that doesn’t get dragged out; the total runtime is less than an hour, but a decent amount of suspense is built up in that time, and it threads in many of the spooky supernatural elements from the Marvel comics that had been absent from the MCU prior to this.

Right away, Werewolf by Night feels like a classic Universal monster movie, complete with a title card and black-and-white photography that even has little bits of projection dust and imperfections added to increase the authenticity. A colour version was released a year later, but why would you want to watch that version and lose the gothic, classic feel? The existence of a colourized edition is not overtly blasphemic, though, since the special was shot in colour and changed in post-production. It’s not quite the same as Spider-Noir, which actually was shot in black-and-white, but the production quality of Werewolf overall is still quite notable. It doesn’t look like everything was shot on a green screen, because it wasn’t, and many of the effects and costumes look tangible, because they were done practically in-camera. It’s a bit of a tease when you know Marvel can afford to make movies and shows this way, but they just choose not to most of the time, likely because it’s cheaper and easier to change on the fly.

To me, it’s a bit too obvious too early on who the titular werewolf is even if you don’t know the source material, and we don’t get to really know the other characters too well, but once that werewolf comes out, it is a satisfying transformation, done in an interesting way, which makes for the most memorable shot of the whole thing. It actually gets quite violent with a lot of blood splattering, which is very unlike Marvel, but it would have been difficult to do the special well without it. The werewolf itself is very versatile, fast, and acrobatic, which makes it feel more like a comic book werewolf, but I mean that in a good way, actually. The look reminds me of how David Kessler looks midway through his transformation in An American Werewolf in London. The werewolf isn’t even my favourite monster in this special, though. I was very surprised to see Man-Thing, AKA Ted, who is a classic character from the comics, and looks pretty cool despite mostly being CGI. What I would like to see next from the comics is Man-Wolf, who is actually the son of J. Jonah Jameson!

Werewolf by Night is definitely worth watching if you have Disney+ and are even remotely interested in the MCU, whether you remain a loyal fan or are catching up on the best of the best in the back catalogue. It isn’t without some questionable visual effects or moments of that annoying Marvel cringe humour, but the latter is minimized, especially in comparison to movies from around the same time. The music is great, too, helping cultivate that throwback vibe it goes for, but it would have been really embarrassing if the music hadn’t been good, since this was the directorial debut of composer Michael Giacchino. In terms of werewolf movies and shows, it’s not really anything too special, but in Marvel terms, it’s a tantalizing morsel of the untapped potential that I hope they have the balls to explore further, either with more of these “specials” or a theatrically-released film. *Cough* Blade! *Cough*.