Yeah, he lost his appetite.
It’s a queer mix of the traditional and the American sensibility of making fun of darn near anything, but it’s a key constituent of An American Werewolf in London (1981). Two randy young American tourists are in the Moors of Yorkshire where they meet a group of standoffish villagers in a pub. Feeling unwelcome, they leave, only to be hunted down by an animal of marvelous ferocity. Jack dies, messily eviscerated, while an injured David survives; the werewolf is shot up by the local constabulary.
He awakens in a hospital weeks later, but despite being bothered by nightmares, he charms his nurse, Alex, into inviting him to her flat for a bit of feeling up, but while there a nightmare becomes sort of real: it’s his friend, Jack, now walking the streets of London as an invisible corpse because he was killed by a werewolf, rather than dying in some more natural way.
Yeah, figure out what that means and let me know.
Jack wants David dead, because he believes David is now a werewolf, carrying the curse of the one who killed him. But he cannot kill David himself, so David is out of danger – but the moon is coming full again, and between bouts of lustiness and a visit by the hospital doc to the little village, David wanders about until the change is upon him. I hope you like the graphic detail of the change. It reminded me of when I have acid reflux.
Then people die, quickly and slowly, slashed out of their everyday lives of lust and tippiness, and then David awakens.
And the lion doesn’t like him.
David displays the cleverness of the legendary American tourist and manages to return to the flat, where his nurse and partner in lust tries to take him to the hospital, but when he learns people have died, he disappears into, yes, a porno theater. His friend Jack, as well as his recent victims, once again suggest that everyone might best be served by his death. Unfortunately, either the movie becomes disjointed or this TV version cut too much out, as it all gets a bit ragged, and suddenly David once again does the Ovid thing, right there in the theatre. Perhaps it was just a long porno.
In any case, Londoners prove their kinship with cats (as in, curiosity…) and to Benny Hill, but eventually, despite Alex’s best efforts, David is shot by the police.
The charm in this movie comes, first, from the chemistry and charisma of the three leads (David, Jack, and Nurse Alex), who bring a sensibility that belongs to the period of the time the film was made (1970s) to a subject traditionally treated in a much more solemnly horrific manner.
Second, bringing the practical consequences of being a werewolf into a sardonic arena is akin to adding a dash of salt to an otherwise sweet dish: it serves to sharpen and refine the sweetness. The humor lets the audience relax, consider the sharp contrasts between Americans and the English, wonder at how such a movie dare make them laugh, but then show how a young man just entering into the prime of life is suddenly faced with that hardest of questions: when does one sacrifice one’s life for the safety of the group? It is a question which, unfortunately, David either fails to answer or refuses to answer properly. Or it ended up on the cutting room floor of the TV channel.
And perhaps that’s one of the failings of the movie, because David never does quite come to grips with the question. He’s faced with the almost certain knowledge that he’s a werewolf and cannot control himself. We see him try, once, to take his life, but he loses his nerve. Assuming I am not so ill-served by the television, consider what might have been possible if he had managed to nerve himself to commit suicide – and then discovered that he could recover from that?
The resultant madness might have constituted some true horror.
All speculation aside, I enjoyed what we did see. It kept me guessing, a little, and the humor was quite unexpected, if not quite as spiky as it might have been. But I think I’d recommend finding an uncut version. The TV version seems to have lost a lot, judging from searching for an appropriate image for this review.
