much better than anticipated as an exploitation picture (or "Ozsploitation")

Quinoa1984

The Howling III: The Marsupials has very little if anything to do with the original Joe Dante film of the Howling, except that, in a sense, these are werewolves, and at the end of this film like in the original there is a scene where a character transforms into the horrifying creature on live TV. So, with that in mind, the director Philippe Mora does his own thing. It might not always gel completely, and some of the acting is just downright bad... but it works on its own terms somehow. It's a splatter movie that takes little into account in the way of logic, whether it's with how a character actually turns into the werewolf-marsupial, or even where the camera is in a certain scene (at one point two characters make note of a camera looking at them, breaking the fourth wall, and it doesn't seem to be mentioned much again).

The story concerns a woman who is, in fact, such a werewolf-marsupial type, distinguished by having an actual pouch, and when a young man, an assistant director on a splatter movie, comes up to her and after a date has some hot sex with her, she's pregnant with her little baby marsupial. We see in some excruciating detail this inter-breeding taking place, and the cute little marsupial baby in the pouch (think of the cute little velociraptor in Jurassic Park perhaps, albeit this one, sadly, never attacks in the course of the film). But really this is just a backdrop as our heroes try to evade capture or killing by some who are fascinated by it like a very mustached man who may be in love with a Russian werewolf, and some poachers on their trail in the outback.

Oh, and of course as it's an Aussie exploitation flick there are some various things to keep audiences on their toes. Such as, of course, didgeridoos, and a brown, white-bearded shaman figure who at one point goes all in white with red war paint and attacks a bunch of people (perhaps the most bad-ass moment in the film, as we get to see some real brutal carnage). But what is kind of odd is how funny scenes and dialog end up being, sometimes unintentionally and sometimes not (a key at looking at this split is when the two scientists are, once again, trying out their "lets see what happens when we do a lot of strobe light things and aggressive manipulation" in front of a big baldie who turns into another were-supial. You see that the director is going for some serious terror here, but at the same time some crazy laughs are meant to be had, just by the cut-away shots put in to the scientists in close-ups from a TV monitor.

And even crazier still is how Mora, after having what would appear to be so much carnage and a climax and a half with a big torpedo blasting away a wolf, there's a sappy interlude showing the passing of time and years and little marsupi-man kids growing up! It gets a bit tiresome, but it was kind of subversive for a horror movie of this sort, which, per the course for Mora, has some bizarre camera-work and very obvious references (the Hitchcock director anyone?) Howling III doesn't pretend to be anything like great art, but it comes in and impresses with its bizarre qualities and self-mocking sense of the genre and movies in general. Not all of it clicks, but enough of it did to make it worth watching.

score 7/10

Quinoa1984 1 May 2010

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2243796/