A young man whose sister was murdered by werewolves helps an investigator track down a gang of the monsters through the United States and Europe.
4 years after the surprising success of “The Howling” a sequel was finally released.
After enjoying I was seriously hyped for this sequel, I mean what Horror fan wouldn’t be?! You have the likes of Sir Christopher Lee and Sybil Danning, that’s enough to get anyone excited for a film. The film rolls out its intro credits and unfortunately that’s where all good things end, then the film starts and it’s all goes downhill.
It’s blatantly obvious that this film is going to disappoint, though you squirm and cringe in your seat it’s not because your frightened, it’s because the acting is absolutely atrocious. Director Philippe Mora has stated that Christopher Lee felt that fellow actors Reb Brown and Annie McEnroe were so bad that Lee was off-set very frequently in a way as if he were “wishing himself away” from being in the film.
I can tell you the exact moment I thought to myself “this is gonna be a hard film to sit all the way through”, there’s a scene where we see the great Christopher Lee put on a pair of punky style sunglasses to try and sneak into a punk rock club incognito style. I think everyone knew that this was going to be hard work to get through, well they weren’t wrong. Even Sybil Danning in the villainous role of ‘Stirba’, her outfit may have been amazing but the Director obviously didn’t want her for acting abilities.
Throughout the film we see Sybil in various scenes where she undresses or someway has her skin on show, I understand her role is supposed to be a sexual one but if you make it to the end credits you’ll see a loop of Sybil ripping her shirt off and exposing her breasts no less than seventeen times, I think that more than proves my point here.
“Howling II – Your Sister Is A Werewolf” is a dire sequel, a mess of a film that has no redeeming qualities. It’s not a so bad it’s good feature, it’s a it’s so bad don’t watch it feature.
Miscellaneous facts about the film:
This horror movie was inspired by New Wave Eroticism according to the film’s director Philippe Mora.
There were actually plans to have the character of Marsha from The Howling (1981) return in Howling II: … Your Sister Is a Werewolf (1985). However, the actress, Elizabeth Brooks, didn’t want to do it according to rumors that she had been just diagnosed with brain cancer. Or according to another account, she wasn’t too thrilled with her nude scene in the first film. According to one website, the director Joe Dante assured her she’d be pretty much concealed by the fires and the miracles of trick photography. However, she was quite a bit surprised to see herself in living color in that shot. Needless to say she was not happy. So Marsha was replaced with the character, Marianna, played by Marsha A. Hunt.
Christopher Lee stated in an interview at the time of the film’s US release, that his reason for accepting the part was because he had never before appeared in a werewolf movie.
When Christopher Lee was cast in Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990), one of the first things he did was apologize to director Joe Dante, who had directed the original movie The Howling (1981), for being in this film.
This is the only Howling sequel that directly follows the original film’s events, and is also the only Howling film to feature the input of the original novelist, Gary Brandner, despite the fact that this film is not actually based on his 1979 novel, ‘The Howling II’.
Philippe Mora didn’t know that Christopher Lee was a war hero in Czechoslovakia. It wasn’t something he was allowed to talk about but during World War II, he was part of an Intelligence Agency and so when they showed up to film the Howling II: … Your Sister Is a Werewolf (1985) in Czechoslovakia, he was greeted with a hero’s welcome at the airport when they arrived. That’s when Philippe first found out about his past- how he had been involved with killing one of the top Nazi officials, Reinhard Heydrich, and everything. Philippe couldn’t believe it. One day, he took Philippe to Prague to visit a church. He remembers Christopher Lee saying, “Dear boy, please come with me and let me tell you about what I’ve seen” and he then took Philippe inside to the basement and proceeded to tell him a story about how this was a place where people had been trapped by the Nazi’s and some very terrible things occurred there. It was such a profound moment for Philippe because he realized just where Christopher’s gravitas came from, he’d seen true horror first-hand in his lifetime and he used that in his performances. He was also a Nazi hunter for a couple of years after WWII. Christopher lived such an intriguing and complicated life, and most people don’t have any idea of who he was beyond being such an iconic actor.
When the werewolf suits finally arrived for the shoot, they were contained in a crate marked: “20th Century Fox: Planet of the Apes”, director Philippe Mora was horrified to find he had been sent monkey suits. He quickly contacted the producer who replied: “You’re talented, you’ll make it work.”, Mora tried to get his point across that the monkey suits were impossible to pass off as werewolves only to have the producer hang up on him. Stuck with monkey suits, Christopher Lee overheard the dilemma and came up with an idea to help make the ape looking werewolves work with the improvised line: “The process of evolution is reversed”. Philippe Mora loved the idea and said Howling II: … Your Sister Is a Werewolf (1985) became noted by one critic for being the only werewolf film to have the phase: man, monkey, wolf.
Gary Brandner, who is the author of The Howling novels, co-wrote the screenplay for this movie, the first sequel to The Howling (1981).
The novel “The Howling II” (1979) by Gary Brandner is also known as “Return Of The Howling” and “The Howling II: The Return”.
The name of the punk rock group was “Babel”. One of the songs they sing is entitled “The Howling”.
The picture was released during an early-mid 1980s cycle of werewolf movies. These included Wolfen (1981), The Howling (1981), Teen Wolf (1985), Full Moon High (1981), Teen Wolf Too (1987), The Company of Wolves (1984), The Marsupials: The Howling III (1987), and An American Werewolf in London (1981).
Christopher Lee handles silver bullets in this picture. In the James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), as Scaramanga, he had custom-made gold bullets manufactured.
The film was made and released about six years after its source novel by Gary Brandner upon which it is only very loosely based and suggested by, had been first published in 1979. The Wikipedia website states that “the Howling II film is largely unrelated to his Howling II novel from 1979, though it does introduce Eastern European customs and Romani into its werewolf mythology like the book.”
According to website Wikipedia: “Shooting in [the] then-Soviet-controlled Prague [in Czechoslovakia] offered difficulties: [Director Phillipe] Mora’s government-assigned assistant director knew nothing of filmmaking. Mora had to ‘literally import trash from America to clutter the clean communist streets’. When a local casting call went out looking for ‘punks’, a thousand individuals arrived, resulting in the local authorities calling in the both the police and military. Mora was advised by an army colonel, ‘you can finish shooting the scene, but they’ll have to leave in groups of no more than three’.
With the Karen White character from The Howling (1981) being revived in her tomb in this movie, it served as a direct sequel to The Howling (1981).
The names of the various subtitles of the movie titles for English language versions of this “Howling II” sequel include: “She-Wolf”, “Bark at the Moon”, “It’s Not Over Yet”, “Your Sister Is a Werewolf”, and “Stirba – Werewolf Bitch”.
This is the first of two sequels to The Howling (1981) to be directed by Australian director Philippe Mora. The second was The Marsupials: The Howling III (1987).
This sequel to the major motion horror picture The Howling (1981) “barely got released” in cinemas according to Halliwells.
According to Halliwells, “the film which was shot in Czechoslovakia [now Slovakia and the Czech Republic], has no relation whatsoever to The Howling (1981)”.
There is an alternate opening of Howling II: … Your Sister Is a Werewolf (1985) that omits the screenwriter credit for author Gary Brandner and only credits screenwriter Robert Sarno for the screenplay. This was likely due to the fact that the script that Brandner wrote bore no resemblance to the script that Sarno wrote when he replaced Brandner as writer on the film.
The first draft by author Gary Brandner was closer to his book “The Howling II”. According to director Joe Dante, the original script by Brandner also featured on the first page a woman walking her dog named ‘Dante’, showcasing the author’s dislike towards the director after he publicly criticized the 1977 novel “The Howling”, claiming that the movie The Howling (1981) was an improvement over the book.
The constant changes that the producer wanted on the script was the reason why Gary Brandner had to quit being the writer for the film. It was taking up so much time to change the locations from the original setting in the book to Spain and then to Yugoslavia that the deadline on his book contract was approaching. After he left to finish his book, Robert Sarno was hired and changed the script into what is seen on the screen.
Joe Dante, director of The Howling (1981), was never offered the chance to direct this film. The rights to the book “The Howling II” was owned by one of the producers and by Gary Brandner, the author of the book. Brandner, who was not a fan of Dante at the time, was not likely going to consider him to make the sequel after his displeasure with the director loosely adapting the first Howling novel.
Philippe Mora stated that the image of Sybil Danning wearing the sunglasses as Stirba was so iconic in the film that it started the trend in 80s horror films where sunglasses became common, most notably in The Lost Boys (1987).
Sybil Danning went to the director, Philippe Mora, right after the enormous success of the release on DVD for SONY/MGM and told him they should do a direct sequel to Howling II: … Your Sister Is a Werewolf (1985), she had a treatment already written and passed it on to Philippe who loved the idea. He came back, after talking to Gary Brandner, author of The Howling trilogy of books and who said that after six Howling movies, they should move on to doing their own new franchise. Gary, Philippe and Sybil were partnered to make a new franchise with the working title of: Wolf Project.
The reason behind Sybil Danning wearing sunglasses was because she arrived on set one day and said she wasn’t sure what to do because she had conjunctivitis, so director Philippe Mora said, “Here, wear these sunglasses.” She protested, because the scene was indoors, and Philippe told her, “Sybil, you’re the Queen of the Werewolves- you can wear whatever you damned well like”.
The only other film written by Robert Sarno is Decoy (1995), made 10 years later.
After Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972), this was the second and final film that Marsha A. Hunt and Christopher Lee made together.
The Karen White character appears in both The Howling (1981) and this first sequel, being portrayed in each film by actresses Dee Wallace and Hana Ludvikova respectively and with the character being called Karen Marie White in this movie.
After The Return of Captain Invincible (1983), this was Christopher Lee and director Philippe Mora’s second and final film together.
The informal name that Stefan Crosscoe (Christopher Lee) gave for the fictional nation of Transylvania was “The Dark Country”.
According to the Wikipedia website: “Despite the ongoing film series that began in the 1980s, The Howling II [novel] was not adapted as a film and bears no similarities to the 1985 film Howling II or any of the other Howling films. The 2011 film The Howling: Reborn (2011) credits the book as the source of its story but bears no resemblance to it other than being a story about werewolves.”
The original director’s cut by Philippe Mora was more tongue-in-cheek, it was a comedy with some horror elements rather than an actual horror film. While Mora was in Australia, making Death of a Soldier (1986), the producers re-cut Howling II: … Your Sister Is a Werewolf (1985) to try and make it a horror movie with some comedy elements.
Director Philippe Mora has said that the movie was set to celebrate the ten-thousandth birthday of the bi-curious werewolf queen character “Stirba” who is portrayed in the film by actress Sybil Danning.
In the original cut by Philippe Mora, the end credits had Sybil Danning stripping 5 times. While Mora was making Death of a Soldier (1986), he got a call from the producer who was in awe with the shot of Sybil stripping and requested if they could change it from 5 times to 17 during the end credits. Mora replied “If you’re crazy enough to do that. Go ahead.”
The name of the Wiccan Pagan Witchcraft chant was “Eko Eko Azarak” which is also known as the “Witch’s Chant” and the “Eko Eko” chant.
The movie was made and released about four years after the original The Howling (1981) movie.
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