An American Werewolf in London (1981)

A "Lycanthrope Films Production", so I guess they made a production company just for this. It opens very much not in London, unless London has more rolling foggy mountains than I recall. It's more of a "Leshire", which is apparently the rolling, sheepy hills of Northern England, but doesn't really exist. A sheep farmer drops off two Americans in the middle of nowhere. They chitter-chatter realistically about relationships to establish that they are dear friends.

They enter the only local pub for miles and miles, and the entire town goes silent and stares awkwardly at them. The waitress refuses to serve them anything except tea. They ask why there's a pentagram on the wall, and the townsfolk get even more upset. The townsfolk are conflicted on whether they are allowed to leave the pub, but eventually they are kicked out.

It's a full moon and they hear dog barking, and then one of them is horrifically, brutally butchered by a fast-moving woolen puppet. The other is bitten once before an unseen townsperson shoots the wolf away. He awakens in a hospital in London where a rude American lawyer harasses him.

The next scene is basically a Monty Python skit. Is this a comedy?

The survivor, David, escapes from the hospital and goes for a naked jog in the woods, tackles a deer, and eats it raw. He returns to the hospital, where the nurse is upset that he isn't eating his fruits. They share a romantic gaze. The jog was probably just a bad dream.

So it is a comedy. He has a wild hallucination of a dream about mutant military people with fangs and uzis murdering his whole family while they watch The Muppets, and then slitting his throat. It's a nightmare-within-a-nightmare.

When he fully wakes up, he hallucinates his dead and mangled friend. His friend explains directly that they were attacked by werewolves, he's cursed to walk the earth in purgatory, and he somehow knows all of the supernatural history of werewolves. His friend tells him that he needs to kill himself before he kills others.

He is checked out of the hospital, and immediately checks in… to his nurse's apartment. Several scenes follow to convince us that they are now dating. Referencing The Wolf Man, which is coming later this WOLFtober, David tells his girlfriend that she's probably going to need to kill him if he's a werewolf. She thinks he's batshit insane, and finds that attractive. Dogs and cats don't like him anymore, though.

There is very little music in the soundtrack, other than Blue Moon or Bad Moon Rising playing every once in a while. It's awkwardly quiet, actually. Movies should have music, I think.

The period between finding out he's a werewolf and waiting for him to become a werewolf is a quite long series of entirely unimportant events. If there were doubt about whether he is going to be a werewolf, the delay might build suspense, but of course he will so it doesn't. Once we're good and bored, the full moon comes and he gets an insanely bad headache and rips off his clothing.

They put real effort into the wolf transformation. His appendages extend, his waist shrinks, bulges form in his back, his face extends, and hair grows out of everything. On screen, in focus, slowly, and quite well. Which is actually a bit odd, since the original werewolf looked like a muppet. And, yeah, he's a muppet when he rips the throats out of people in the London parks. The volume absolutely skyrockets when the muppet attacks. The neighbors are mildly inconvenienced when they encounter severed human body bits in the park.

When done hunting in parks, he hunts in the tube. It's a long, supposed-to-be-suspenseful hunt, and then he awakens in a zoo enclosure with the normal wolves. He has some slapstick escapades as he tries to escape the zoo without being spotted, while bare-ass naked. It can dedicate a lot of time to this shtick, because there really isn't any plot beyond "a guy is a werewolf, and that's unusual and inconvenient." The viewer can bring some external sense of conflict from our a priori knowledge of lycanthropy and its general difficulties, but the characters don't seem very conflicted at all.

He does get a little frantic when he realizes he's a serial killer. Briefly, then he's weirdly calm again, though perhaps a bit suicidal. Unfortunately, he can't manage to off himself with a swiss army knife, so he goes to a porno theater to hang out with his dead friend. The porn is its own little comedy skit. But nothing is actually funny in the movie, it's more just consistently unserious. His friend introduces him to his now-dead victims, who are quite cross.

He wolfs out in the theater, eats everyone, and then runs around in the streets decapitating people. It causes total chaos, with all of the drivers crashing into each other and pedestrians. Most deaths are not even direct wolf kills. The bobbies catch him eventually, and it ends quite abruptly.