HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: HOWLING 6: THE FREAKS (1991) * ½

Ian (Brendan Hughes) is a British werewolf drifter stuck in a small American town.  He gets a job helping a local pastor restore his church and begins to develop a crush on the pastor’s daughter.  A traveling freakshow ran by the evil Harker (Bruce Payne) rolls into town, and he almost immediately decides he wants Ian to be his star attraction.  

The Greatest Showman it is not.  

This is the only Howling sequel I haven’t seen, which is why I wanted to review it to close out the Halloween Hangover column.  I’ve long heard it was one of the best Howling sequels.  Now that I’ve finally seen it, I’m not sure agree with that assessment.  Sure, 2 is bad, but it’s also spectacularly entertaining.  Although the freakshow plotline makes it stand out from the other sequels, there’s not much here that makes it “better” than them either.

Speaking of the freaks, they include a three-armed card player, a half man/half woman (who shows off one boob), and an alligator boy.  The best one though is played by none other than Huggy Bear himself, Antonio Fargas.  He’s the geek who bites the heads off chickens.  So, no matter how bad Howling 6 is, at least it has that going for it.

At 100 minutes, it’s about 20 minutes longer than any Howling sequel should be.  The subplot about a local election is totally unnecessary and should’ve been scrapped entirely.  There’s also a terrible montage where Hughes fixes up the church that’s accompanied by some awful country gospel music that deserved to be left on the cutting room floor.

Howling 6 moves at a slow pace and it takes a good 45 minutes before anyone turns into a werewolf.  As far as the effects are concerned, they are decent, compared to what we’ve seen in the other sequels, but the final creature (which isn’t all that hairy) is kind of lame.  The melting sequence in the end is pretty cheap looking too, although the final skeleton looks cool enough.  Much of the film is too dark, which might’ve been on purpose to hide the weak werewolf effects.  In fact, the blue-skinned vampire make-up (yes, there’s a vampire in this movie… don’t ask) is a lot more inventive than the shitty werewolf, who looks like he’s in dire need of Rogaine.

Hughes makes for a bland lead.  The good news is that Payne is quite good as the conniving ringleader.  His performance is easily the best thing about the movie, but it’s not nearly enough to qualify it as anything other than another shitty Howling sequel.