Part of Shocktober
Aw-ooo!!! There’s a bad moon on the rise when vacationing yanks David Naughton and Griffin Dunne meet up with savage jaws and slashing claws on the moors. Dunne is done for, but Naughton suddenly gets the cinema’s worst case of itchy palms — courtesy of makeup master Rick Baker’s still-astonishing transformation scenes. Hot off his smashes ANIMAL HOUSE and THE BLUES BROTHERS, writer-director John Landis used his clout to make this big-budget homage to the Universal horror classics he loved as a kid — only with all the sex, nudity, black humor and bloodshed an R rating will allow!
“Forty years on from its release, AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON is not a film best remembered for its subtlety…. Revisited today, [it] is indeed a strange, brisk, moody beast, its plotting lean and sudden, its tone turning on a dime from jokey genre shenanigans to genuine, violent terror. Audiences weren’t so much baited and switched as they were baited, assaulted and nudged in the ribs, repeatedly, and in varying order.” —Guy Lodge, The Guardian “A marvellous, pop tragic, serio-comic monster movie…. Carnivorous lunar activities rarely come any more entertaining than this.” —Kim Newman, Empire Magazine "Blending horror and comedy is tantamount to walking a tightrope…. no one would have doubted that writer-director John Landis could bring the funny. But that he could also terrify audiences with a canny updating of Universal’s 1940s monster movies would be demonstrated definitively by AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON.” —Budd Wilkins, Slant Magazine
