An American Werewolf In Paris (1997) – Review

If your movie is a true, undeniable classic, then no amount of cruddy sequels could possibly hope to tarnish their glory. Jaws is still resplendent despite the impressive quality dip of Jaws 3 and 4; Robocop still packs a punch even after viewing 3 and while it’s a little more difficult to separate The Matrix from what followed, Neo never flew higher than he did in his debut. With this in mind, it’s a fucking good job that An American Werewolf In London – aka. one of the greatest horror/comedies ever made – didn’t have its reputation savaged by a loose follow up that belatedly followed in its paw prints in 1997.
In fact, An American Werewolf In Paris not only failed to measure up to John Landis’ near-flawless classic on virtually every level, in my humble opinion it actually stands as one of the worst horror/comedies I’ve ever experienced. But maybe I’m being too harsh. If I were to remove the film out from under the shadow of the original and examined it under the light of the full moon, maybe this hairy trip to gay paris isn’t so bad when its allowed to stand on its own four legs…
Yeah, right, and maybe werewolves might turn vegetarian…

Hopeless American romantic Andy McDermott and his typically sex-obsessed buddies (it is the late 90s after all) are on holiday in Paris and looking for thrills, but during an attempt to bungee jump from the Eiffel Tower (again, the 90s) they stumble upon Serafine, a distraught woman who tries to kill herself by hurling herself off the national monument. After Andy sustains a head injury while saving her, he soon spots her again at the hospital where he’s being kept as she steals some hearts, but that doesn’t seem to stop him falling head over heels for the enigmatic Parisian.
Later, Andy and the gang decide to go to Club de la Lune, a nightclub ran by an aquaintance of Serafine, but soon all the weird details that keep springing up start to make us come to a bizarre conclusion. Why does Serafine lock herself away in a cell during the full moon? Why are the gang running the nightclub have an exterior door that locks on the outside? And why do – oh sod it, they’re all werewolves, OK? Serafine and the people at Club de la Lune are all werewolves and when they all transform, all party animals get to experience the real thing as they’re torn limb from limb.
During the carnage, one of Andy’s friends is killed while the other gets away, but Andy himself gets a rather serious bite on his ankle that, thanks to werewolf legend, means he’s going to be in some pretty hefty shit once the next full moon comes around. Thankfully, Serafine is on hand to explain such side effects as violent hallucinations, enhanced senses and the fact that the spirits of those mauled by a lycanthrope tend to hand around to torment those lumbered with the lupine curse, but when the promise of a cure rears its head, Andy has a shot of avoiding an existence of unsightly hair and fangs suddenly cropping up everytime the moon demands it…

While you could argue that Paris isn’t a true sequel to London as none of the original events or characters are mentioned (and I wish I could believe you), Anthony Waller’s follow up to the criminally unseen Mute Witness does actually use large sections of John Landis’ original lore, with werewolves being susceptible to normal bullets and experiencing wild hallucinations and visitations from their own victims after they’ve been mauled. It also uses a young, innocent American man on holiday who falls in love as its starting point for the story, but while Landis used such unforgettable imagery such as a nightmare about Nazi werewolves to metaphorically merge the subconscious horrors of both the real world and the fantasy notion of a lycanthrope, Waller instead throws in gags about someone using a condom as chewing gum.
However, even if Paris isn’t a true sequel (despite the vague hints that Serafine’s mother could be Jenny Agutter’s character from the original), the film still ends up being something of an excruciating mess to sit through regardless. The sound design is so overproduced and jarring it actually makes the film physically uncomfortable to watch in all the wrong ways and the movie is edited in a rather strange way too that not only refuses to gel with Waller’s sweeping camera work, but ends up being equally distracting as the bizarre wall of sound the movie whips up. It also doesn’t help that while Landis smartly peppered songs about the moon throughout the original as genuinely amusing in-jokes, Waller just chucks in some Smash Mouth because that’s what the kids like. However, all this pales into insignificance when the movie starts to exercise its funny bone only to find it has all the comic timing of a squashed slug. OK, so The condom joke does actually have a killer punchline, but the film’s attempt at fratboy humour falls embarrassingly flat as people immediately put on massively heightened “comic” performances that carry the same air of desperation as watching a sweaty stand-up comedian die on stage in front of a mercilessly hostile crowd.

Lead actor Tom Everett Scott seems to be trying to channel the frenetic every-man stylings of an 80s Tom Hanks but instead ends up as just annoying and Julie Delpy squanders her home field advantage by looking endlessly confused and deploying some truly confounding nudity. Even a young Julie Bowen from Modern Family manages to put in a performance so bad she somehow becomes even more annoying after she’s dead and this is a pattern that spreads to every other actor involved that leads to the whole experience being as fun as claws down a blackboard.
The movie can’t even take refuge in its monsters as anticipation was high to see how this French flavoured upstart could use then state of the art CG technology to try and top the greatest werewolf transformation of all time. However, while hair was still something of a holy grail for the medium, the state of the art just simply looks a state as the transformations look horribly awkward and the werewolves themselves look like they’re made of plasticine that’s been rolled in dog hair. To be fair, Waller gets good mileage of his digital lycanthropes, having them fight, stalk and even shake water out of its fur, but while you can appreciate that the movie was trying to do for werewolves what Jurassic Park did for dinosaurs, but when you realise that Aardman studios could probably knock up a scarier wolf man, it’s obvious that Rick Baker and Rob Bottin’s effects from American Werewolf and The Howling still remain thoroughly undefeated.

Not scary, not funny and hardly a great showcase for digital effects either, it’s films like An American Werewolf on Paris that are a good example why the Werewolf genre essentially hibernated it’s way through the entire 1990s. In fact the dumbing down of the whole concept and the whole, obnoxious, 90s comedy feel of the thing (just what is this movie’s obsession with bungee jumping) just makes you want to howl at the moon in enraged frustration.
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