An American Werewolf in Paris

An American Werewolf in Paris

Ever since “Scream” and “Scream 2” presented horror movie characters who know all the horror movie cliches, it’s been time for a werewolf movie about characters who know they’re in a werewolf movie. However, this insight would not help out the heroes of “An American Werewolf in Paris,” because they are very stupid. We are shown people we do not care about doing things they do not understand in a movie with no rules. Batter up.

I did not much like John Landis’ original 1981 film “An American Werewolf in London,” but looking over my old review I find such phrases as “spectacular set pieces,” “genuinely funny moments” and “sequences that are spellbinding.” My review of the Paris werewolves will require none of those phrases.

In the new film, three callow Americans take a “daredevil tour” of Europe. They are played by Tom Everett Scott (of That Thing You Do!), Vince Vieluf and Phil Buckman; they climb the Eiffel Tower at night, where they find a young woman (Julie Delpy) who is about to jump off. They talk and she jumps and Scott goes after her, fortunately while strapped to a bungee cord.

(Hint: Always make sure the other end of the bungee line is tied to something before you tie this end around yourself.) The girl survives, the lads track her to her home, she has blood on her hands, her friend invites them to a rave club, she isn’t there, Chris finds her locked in a cell in her basement, whereupon he learns that ravers are werewolves but so is she etc., etc., etc.

I don’t want you to accuse me of giving away plot points: In a movie named this waywardly can you imagine that the girl who jumps off the tower is not a werewolf, her friends are not exchange students and the club is not frequented by friendly tourists? One of the pleasures of a movie like this is the ceremonial explanation of the rules, in which we learn how werewolves are made, how they are killed and how they spread their wolfiness.

Here it doesn’t much matter because new twists keep getting added to the plot (such as a serum that makes moonlight unnecessary for a werewolf transformation). By the end of the film, any plot discipline (necessary so that we care about some characters and not others) has been consumed by an orgy of special effects and general mayhem.

But let me single out one line of dialogue. After three American college students have tried to figure out what happened at the tower, one says, “The kind of girl who jumps off the Eiffel Tower has issues, man.” Starting from that line, you could attempt a complete rewrite in which the characters are self-aware nesses who know the werewolf rules and know not to make all those same mistakes like in “An American Werewolf in London” (not to mention “The Howling,” “The Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf,” “Howling III,” “Howling IV: The Original Nightmare,” “Howling V: The Rebirth” and “Howling VI: The Freaks”). I even have a great title for them: “Howler.”

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