MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Howling III’--Mindless Marsupial Madness

As you watch “The Marsupials: The Howling III” (citywide) you keep wondering one thing: How’ll its film makers bite off a new chapter in werewolf mythology? The on-screen answer is that they largely ignore any reference to the earlier “Howling” installments, opting for a campy recycling of familiar fangoria that is fitfully entertaining.

The first howler, directed by Joe Dante, took us to the California backwoods, the second to a remote corner of Czechoslovakia. In this third excursion into lycanthropy, the story lands in the Australian outback.

Jerboa (Imogen Annesley), a female werewolf who has escaped from her sequestered colony, flees to Sydney to start a “normal” life. Immediately upon her arrival in the big city, Donny (Leigh Biolos), a movie assistant, spots her in the street and arranges for the young woman to appear in--you guessed it--a horror movie about werewolves. On seeing the makeup renderings and transformations, she tells him “it doesn’t happen like that.” He chooses to ignore the comment but the audience knows better.

About the same time, Olga (Dasha Blahova), a recently defected Russian ballerina, changes into a werewolf in mid-jete to the horror of the Oz corps members. Coincidence, you say. Dr. Beckmeyer (Barry Otto)--a poor tool of the scriptwriter--insists it’s synchronicity. Through some combination of smell and highly developed senses unknown to man, the dancer has left the Soviet Union not for artistic or political reasons but because she must mate with her distant cousins in the bush.

The horrifying aspect of this hair-raiser is that it proceeds to get worse. Writer-director Philippe Mora (who also directed “Howling II . . . Your Sister Is a Werewolf”) maintains interest in the film’s early sections by playing the nonsense straight and fast. Once he pulls back to explain what he’s wrought, the machinery seizes up.

Mora’s cardinal sin in “The Howling III” (MPAA-rated: PG-13) is in trying to make sense of the lunacy by digging himself a deeper ditch. His mad scientist (“Beckmeyer, this has gone too far”) is far too rational and the spawn of Jerboa and Donny looks like a wind-up toy with a rusted spring. When the film heads into the land of comic-book antics, no amount of huffing and puffing can make this flimsy script of straw work.