The Howling (1981) is the movie for this Sunday's "monsterdon" watch party over on Mastodon, our fediverse sibling!
- Just start watching that movie this Sunday, Oct 26 at 9pm ET / 8pm CT / 6pm PT which is 1am Monday UTC
- and follow #monsterdon over on mastodon for live text commentary. For example, you can follow that hashtag here: https://mastodon.social/tags/monsterdon
- I usually open two web browser windows side-by-side on a computer. But you could follow the mastodon commentary on a phone app while watching the movie on TV or something.
How to watch the movie:
- tubi (availability varies by country): https://tubitv.com/movies/100044051/the-howling
- uBlock Origin adblocker on Firefox should work for that tubi link
- archive: https://archive.org/details/thehowling1981_202002
- someone usually streams it on https://miru.miyaku.media/ at that time.
- dailymotion (WARNING this movie is 3 minutes shorter?!?): https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9i7rle
- if you want to pay and/or watch ads, look here: https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/the-howling
the film follows a news anchor who, following a traumatic encounter with a serial killer, visits a resort secretly inhabited by werewolves.
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On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, The Howling holds a 76% approval rating based on 45 critic reviews, with an average rating of 6.4/10. The consensus reads: "The Howling packs enough laughs into its lycanthropic carnage to distinguish it from other werewolf entries, with impressive visual effects adding some bite".[12] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 68 out of 100, based on 11 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.[13]
In 1981, Roger Ebert's 2-out-of-4 star review described The Howling as the "silliest film seen in some time", but Ebert also said the special effects were good and the film was perhaps "worth your money, IF you get it two for one".[14] Gene Siskel liked the film and gave it three and a half stars out of four.[15] In his Movie Guide, Leonard Maltin wrote that The Howling is a "hip, well-made horror film" and noted the humorous references to classic werewolf cinema.[16] Variety praised both the film's sense of humor and its traditional approach to horror.[6] Kim Newman, in his 1988 book Nightmare Movies, called The Howling "a brisk chiller that effortlessly revives the prowling-through-misty-forests genre", and called Picardo's transformation sequence "the movies' most impressive werewolf monster".[17]
