AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON (1981)

How best to follow The Omen? Well an episode of Modern Family if it's up to the girlfriend. She couldn't possibly do back-to-back horror films. Once that was out of the way we were straight on to the John Landis classic An American Werewolf in London.



I've got very fond memories of this film as I recall it being one of the first films my parents let me watch that wasn't a PG. It used to scare the life out of me. I remember seeing the transformation scene and the murderous rampage. I was disgusted but I wouldn't dare look away. What were Mum and Dad thinking?

This was the first time I'd seen this film in a few years, probably since my early twenties, and what struck me on this viewing was the humour. Not just the well known black humour of Jack the decaying walking dead haunting his best friend. There is also the banter between the David and Jack in the opening scene which brilliant, two lads just enjoying themselves on holiday. Likewise between David and Nurse Price (the other scene I remember from my youth, Jenny Agutter and the shower) flirting over bad hospital food. David waking up in the wolf enclosure at London Zoo. As the title suggests, the home of this film is England and it has an underlying Englishness to it's sensibility and, particularly, it's humour.

This playful side really helps to give the characters a heart which makes the horror all the more shocking and frightening. The transformation scene is now part of cinematic history, and it still packs a punch with this film as old as me (ALMOST thirty). It looks fantastic and the physicality of the effects surpass any CGI. You really feel David's pain. Speaking of pain, his rampage where he slaughters 6 also lingers in the memory, most notably the murder at Tottenham Court Road tube. Late at night, when on the tube, I can't help but think of this scene and constantly look over my shoulder. The scene that I found impressive and the one that really struck a chord with me was the Piccadilly Circus carnage. I don't remember it being so graphic, people being crushed under cars, flying through windscreens, how they managed that all those years ago - a real achievement. Special mention should also go to the mischievously hideous dream sequences, they work their way up from a nude David running through the forest slaughtering and eating deer to a fantasticly sureal and striking scene involving nazi demons slaughtering a family. Brilliant stuff.

The film has humour, dark, dark humour, real horror, bloody horror but it also has a heart. There are some genuinely touching moments in this film. David looks across at the original werewolf as it is slain and all that remains is a middle aged man. David confronting the people he murders, the guilt being hammered home. However, the real moment that tugs at the heart strings is when Alex Price confronts the wolf in an alley and there is a split second or recognition in the eyes of the beast, before the animal instincts take hold again and he lurches forward. Then if the final frame doesn't get you, then you might as well be a lycanthrope.

Plus it has Alan Ford as a cabbie.

Timeless.