|
an
american werewolf in paris |
director
Anthony
Waller
screenwriters
Tim Burns
Tom Stern
Anthony Waller
producer
Richard Claus
cinematographer
Egon Werdin
music
Wilbert Hirsch
editor
Peter R. Adam
cast
Tom Everett Scott (Andy McDermott)
Julie Delpy (Serafine Price-Kessler)
Vince Vieluf (Brad)
Phil Buckman (Chris)
Julie Bowen (Amy)
Pierre Cosso (Claude)
Thierry Lhermitte (Dr. Thierry Pigot)
Tom Novembre (Inspector LeDuc)
Maria Machado (Chief Bonnet)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 105m
u.s.
release: December 25,
1997
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
|
Hollywood
has been mixing horror and comedy at least since James Whale's
The Old Dark House in 1932, but John Landis' An American
Werewolf in London (1981) was probably the first horror-comedy
that managed to comment on the genre without being openly parodic.
That film's smirking college-student hero -- David Kessler, who
found himself turning into (you gotta be kidding me, right?)
a werewolf -- can now be considered the precursor of the wised-up
horror fans in the Scream
movies. Landis' hero didn't believe his predicament any more
than we did -- until the movie got scary and David (and we) got
a reality slap.
The original American Werewolf blended big laughs and
bigger scares so seamlessly that one wonders exactly how Landis
pulled it off. He wrote it when he was 19 and held onto it until
he had the clout to get it made his way; it's his best film and
his last good one. The belated sequel, An American Werewolf
in Paris, doesn't feel like a movie that sprang full-blown
from the fevered brow of an aspiring filmmaker. It feels like
a movie passed from writer to writer and director to director
over a period of five years -- as, indeed, it was. It's a needless
sequel -- it has some scattered good moments, but it's fundamentally
lame. (To be fair, Landis' own sequel concept, which he described
in a Fangoria interview some years ago, was even lamer.)
The American werewolf this time is Andy McDermott (Tom Everett
Scott, the Tom Hanks lookalike from That
Thing You Do!), a college student vacationing in Paris
with two buddies. Preparing to bungee-jump off the Eiffel Tower,
Andy spots a suicidal French beauty, Serafine (Julie Delpy),
who's also preparing to jump -- sans bungee cord. Why?
Because she's a werewolf -- the product, it turns out, of a night
between David Kessler and his English nurse girlfriend (Alex
Price, who appears here as a ghost laden with make-up intended
to hide the fact that the moviemakers couldn't get Jenny Agutter
to reprise the role).
Andy, like David, gets scratched by another werewolf and soon
begins acting lycanthropic: a ravenous appetite for raw meat
and sex; strange dreams and visitations from gross-looking undead
people. Landis handled all this with a straight face that made
it funnier (and creepier); the director here, Anthony Waller,
goes for broad effects most of the time. Since Waller did such
subtle, witty work in his debut, the 1995 thriller Mute Witness,
I'll chalk this up as the sophomore slump of a gifted director
swamped by a bigger budget and too many special effects.
Speaking of which: don't get me started. The werewolves of Paris,
a combo of latex and CGI, are uniformly cheesy-looking. Motionless
in the dim light of the full moon, they're all right; photographed
full-on, charging at the camera in jerky movements that scream
"CGI," they're embarrassing. In a way, though, I'm
grateful: This review provides the perfect opportunity to point
out that Rick Baker's effects for the original American Werewolf
sixteen years ago -- done entirely with latex -- still
wipe the floor with almost any computer-generated monster I've
yet seen.
Waller's sly use of the frame (as seen in Mute Witness,
which you are required to go rent right now) occasionally brightens
Paris. A few gags get their laughs by having odd things
happen in the background, and Waller's best, scariest moment
here comes when two people are trying to fire up a lighter, illuminating
and concealing the werewolf slowly approaching in the background.
But the script, written by Tom Stern and Tim Burns (Freaked)
and revised by Waller, is overplotted and doesn't get much mileage
out of several promising ideas -- such as the ghost of Andy's
one-night stand (Julie Bowen, who's funny) coming back to haunt
him, or the development of a serum that speeds up the process
of lycanthopy, or the idea of a subculture of werewolves hanging
out in rave clubs that keep changing addresses.
I won't give away the non-ending, but I think it should have
ended the way Landis had the courage to end his film: tragically.
It should have ended with Andy kneeling over Serafine with a
knife and getting popped by the cops, like Gregory Peck in The
Omen. Then they could have used the idiotic final scene (it
involves the Statue of Liberty) as a bit of hallucinatory wishful
thinking on the parts of the dying lovers. As it is, it seems
that Hollywood Pictures is hoping for a second sequel (Two
Ex-Werewolves in America?) -- which may be wishful thinking
on the studio's part, but certainly not on mine. |