LYCANTHROPE

LYCANTHROPE (1999)

Directed by Bob Cook 

Written by Bob Cook

Starring Robert Carradine, Christopher Mitchum, Michael Winslow, Jeffrey Alan Chase, Rebecca Holden, and Dalia Garcia

Oh, I didn't want to do this. I mean, I really didn't. But even tho I had a regular two-day weekend this time around, I've been distracted by "real life" things - Dad's fine, by the way - and haven't read or watched anything decent to natter on about. 

I did, however, watch this a few weeks back. So, in the tradition of "I watch bad movies so you don't have to," let's get this week's entry out of the way....

I'm a werewolf fan. If it's a book or a movie or whatever that looks like it might even tangentially be about werewolves, I want to check it out. Even if I know there's really going to be no werewolves to be found, like in The Hardy Boys adventure The Night of the Werewolf, I'll still give it a whirl. And I've accepted the fact that if I'm going to watch werewolf movies, I'm going to see a lot of bad movies. For every masterpiece like THE HOWLING, there's a dozen or more THE HOWLING 7s and the like.

LYCANTHROPE starred Robert Carradine and Chris Mitchum. Not A-listers, but they've been around. I've seen them. They're pros so I figured this movie would be at least competent. 

I was wrong. So very, very wrong.

It's starts out promisingly enough, if you're the sort who's keen on ridiculously gratuitous nudity in your low-budget movies. I certainly don't mind it most of the time. After montage of scenes of a forest, overlaid with a warning about about a "serious ozone problem" and "more than just plants are dying" (environmentally conscious werewolf movie - okay, I can deal) we cut to a young topless lady rinsing herself off with a gallon jug of water and a washcloth in what seems to be an abandoned warehouse. 

Oops...not totally abandoned, as we get shots of her intercut with some big dude in a football jersey roaming the halls. This, it turns out, is our werewolf.

She finds another dude, dead, just before our were-jock finds her and that's a wrap for her. 

Then we cut to Robert Carradine as our hero, Bill Parker. He's some sort of government agent being recruited to go down to the Amazon and find out what happened to some scientists that are overdue in reporting in.

His partner is a guy who randomly makes weird noises while Parker is getting the details of the job. Now, this partner guy...at first I wasn't even sure what he was supposed to be doing with these noises, other than annoying the other characters. I got to thinking that the film must've blown any budget they had on Carradine and Mitchum and so had to go with a cut-rate Michael (the guy from the POLICE ACADEMY movies that made all the sound effects with his mouth) Winslow impersonator. Later in the film, I realized that it actually was Winslow. Yikes. 

Anyway, it just goes downhill from there. Those nice shots of the peaceful forest at the beginning? Yeah, that was "the Amazon." I understand a movie production, especially a low-budget film, not actually going down to South America for location shots, but I swear...there's even dialog in the film about how they're going to have to walk in because the jungle is too dense to fly or even drive but I've got a stand of trees out by my apartment that would be harder to navigate thru than wherever it was that they filmed. IMDb lists one of the filming locations as Hanford, California, which ten years earlier had been used for another awful, low-budget werewolf movie called NIGHT SHADOW, by the way.

The line about the ozone layer from the start? Apparently it's giving people Lupus which in this movie is maybe some sort of skin cancer that makes people think they're werewolves? 'Cause, ya know, Lupus and Canis Lupus must be related, I guess? I admit, I was zoning out during some of the exposition stuff.

If there's a bright spot to this movie (other than the nude scene at the start) it's that it makes the other really bad werewolf movies look better by comparison. I'd put this one somewhere down below THE HOWLING 7: NEW MOON RISING.