A Trip to the Bakery

I've seen most of the classic horror films of the 70s and 80s -- at least, the first film in various franchises. But one that had slipped through the cracks was An American Werewolf in London, the 1981 movie about a pair of American backpackers in the English countryside who are attacked by a werewolf (each meeting a wildly different fate).

I had heard two things about this movie. One of them proved to be absolutely true; the other, I felt, was absolutely false.

The true thing: the makeup is exceptional. This movie made Rick Baker as famous as a film makeup artist can be. It won him the very first Academy Award ever given for the category of Best Makeup. And almost all of it frankly still holds up. We get various degrees of human-wolf hybrid. We get transformations achieved with makeup that today would be a simple CG morph. All that, and the rapid corpse decay of the film's secondary character. (40 year old spoiler, I guess?) It is beyond fitting that they essentially created an award for this movie.

My asterisk on that praise: I compliment the makeup. There's also some puppetry in the movie, and what looks like some stop-motion animated creature work. These elements are hit-and-miss, and even when they "hit," they're far inferior to the makeup effects.

The second thing I'd heard about this movie was that is was a horror-comedy. Well... comedy is, of course, a matter of taste. But I'd say it strains the term to apply it here. There are perhaps one or two jokes in the movie -- less even than most actual straight-up horror films sprinkle in just to cut tension. The rest of the movie is simply not funny, and doesn't even suggest that it's trying to be.

My asterisk on that critique: maybe it depends on whether you think melodrama is funny? Playing a wild situation with utter sincerity can start you in the direction of comedy, I'd say. But you have to be pretty unflappable as you sail pretty far over the top to get a laugh from me. Melodrama often just strikes me as weak acting, and doesn't reflexively tickle my funny bone. But if your take differs here, then perhaps you would find An American Werewolf in London quite funny.

John Landis both writes and directs here. As a director, he really charts the course for the future: this is a violent and gory movie, and struck me as considerably more so than its contemporaries. As a writer, though, he's shoehorning in a lot of extra stuff, like a romantic subplot that makes no sense whatsoever, at any stage of the film.

All told, I'd give An American Werewolf in London a C-. I wouldn't recommend it to most, but it does feel like a movie that real horror enthusiasts who want to do their film "genealogy" should check out at some point.