There isn’t much information about Howling: New Moon Rising’s director Clive Turner on the internet, neither his personal life nor why he hates humanity. Clive Turner is the one who got the blame for making Howling IV: The Original Nightmare (1988) and Howling V: The Rebirth (1989) the crap films they were. He wrote and produced them, then took over and reshoot them and edited them to feature as few werewolf moments as possible. His first IMDb credit is a location manager for Howling III (1987), his only non-Howling credit is as an executive producer for the not-Stephen King film Lawnmower Man (1992). He wasn’t involved in Howling VI: The Freaks (1991), and that film was watchable.
Well, that just made Clive even more adamant about making the perfect non-werewolf Howling film. Thus, the world got Howling: New Moon Rising. Written by Clive Turner. Directed by Clive Turner. Produced by Clive Turner. Starring … Clive Turner.
Clive plays a long-haired hillbilly that gets a job at a hillbilly bar. There are a lot of montages showing him working at the bar, line dancing at the bar, listening to bad country music at the bar. Between those montages are scenes of two bad actors, a police inspector and a priest, the inspector is telling the priest about the plots of the past three films, featuring footage from those films.
Those scenes are supposed to give some continuity to a series that famously has no continuity. I also think a couple of actors from the past three films are in this, but the characters in those films were so forgettable that I am not sure, and this film includes so much of people singing country songs that I had to turn off my brain.
So, werewolves. There is a lot of jabbering about them and four scenes where we see from a werewolf’s point of view (they see red), there is some footage of the creatures from the previous three films but then we get to the money shot here, a three second literal animorph scene of a person changing into a werewolf. Before anything happens the film cuts to a scene where Clive is singing a country song at a bar.
That’s it.
It’s a mystery why someone who hates werewolf films and doesn’t want them to be in his films ended up producing and writing three films in the Howling series. This film is like a big “fuck you” to the werewolf genre, if not the whole horror genre. It’s unbelievably bad in such an incompetent way that you can’t even get enjoyment from its badness. It’s a film about bad actors delivering bad lines while singing bad country songs. It ended the series until The Howling: Reborn was released sixteen years later.
Clive Turner had nothing to do with that film.
