A writer, Marie Adams, suffers a nervous breakdown due to her visions. To rest, she rents a cabin with her husband in the secluded town of Drago. But the town isn’t as peaceful as she’d hoped when she starts to hear howling in the night, and an ex-nun shows up looking for a woman from Marie’s visions.
Hey, here’s an idea for anyone making a werewolf film: put a werewolf in it, and not just in the last five minutes. Howling IV: The Original Nightmare is a low budget bore-fest that saved money on werewolf makeup, actors, the script, and production values. Having endless dialog instead of actual monsters must have saved them a bundle. And why hire expensive, talented actors when the ones that can’t act are much cheaper?
Now I have to give them credit for the script. New scripts can cost (those pesky writers want to eat), but here, Clive Turner, pseudo-writer and on-screen tow truck driver, simply took the story from The Howling and switched a few details around. Clever, eh?
It isn’t often I see a film with such washed-out colors, but the poor picture quality is insignificant when compared to the abysmal sound. Muffled at some points, lacking in background noises in others, and with noticeable dialog looping, it’s hard to imagine that professionals worked on this project.
I can understand how the music ended up as it did. With the rest of the film so bad, some kind of game was invented to find the most inappropriate tunes. What is worse, the “scary” score that pops in at such terrifying moments as a traffic stop, or the achingly bad ’80s pop rock that doesn’t fit the story or tone? I say they both win.