The Howling (1981)

Joe Dante, the director of Gremlins, directs Belinda Balaski, of Gremlins, and the crazy murder girl from The Frighteners, David Carradine's dad, Slim Pickins, and the hologram doctor from Star Trek: Voyager.

A long intro setup: a local anchorwoman, Karen (The Frigheners), has been regularly contacted by a local Los Angeles murderer, accepts an invitation to meet him in a peep booth in a porn shop, freaks out when he gets hairy, and then some cops shoot him to death through the wall. He looks normal when they pull his body out, but she's fully traumatized.

She is so traumatized that she gets selective amnesia, so her psychologist sends her to an institute in the countryside, where Slim Pickins is hootin' and hollerin' with a bunch of cult weirdos and hillbillies at a beach lūʻau. Her husband Bill accompanies her, and John Carradine tries to throw himself into the bonfire. It's not clear who anybody is, or why she or any of them are here.

A creep is watching her bungalow; the escaped dead one? She wanders around outside for some reason and finds a decapitated cow. There's a smoke machine running, and it basically won't turn off for the rest of the film. In the morning, the entire weird beach cult grab some rifles and go on a wolf hunt.

Back in the big city, the coroner goes to check on the dead creep's corpse, but finds the fridge drawer mysteriously empty. One of the other journalists, Terri, starts reading about werewolves, because the dead guy had werewolf drawings all over his walls. The occult shop that sells werewolf books also sells a big box of silver bullets as gimmicks for rich idiots, which is a pretty clever way to explain how those come into existence.

Bill goes out at night for some reason, and gets bitten by an unseen thing. The next day, Terri (Gremlins) comes out to the cult jungle to see how he's doing, and finds he is no longer vegetarian. He sneaks out again that very same night to cheat on his wife with a leather-clad cult member on the beach, and both of them go full werewolf mid-coitus. There's a whole lot of howling, because this is definitely a werewolf cult, and the end of their sex scene is literally drawn as low-quality cartoons.

Terri notices that some of the landscapes around the cult beach match perfectly with drawings from the dead kid's walls. She sneaks around and finds a cabin in the woods. Nobody appears to be home, so she goes in and finds animal pelts and crazy drawings and newspaper clippings all over the walls. A werewolf suddenly smashes through the door and grabs her. They can apparently change at will, including during the daytime. She chops its arm right off, and the fuzzy arm pulsates, inflates, melts, and transforms into a human hand.

Terri runs to the doctor's office to call her husband, but is interrupted by another Gremlins-meets-Donnie-Darko werewolf. It strangles her to death, in classic werewolf tradition.

Karen finds her mangled corpse and is surprisingly calm about it. Eddie, the dead guy from the intro (and Voyager's The Doctor), his head riddled with bullets, pops up and starts chattering at her. She sticks around and listens intently while his face bubbles and inflates. Although highly balloon-based, it's one of the better on-screen transitions, but the final form is just ludicrous. You can hear all of the balloons creaking. The transition takes absolutely ages; this is definitely where they spent their budget. Karen just silently watches the whole two-minute change-over, then tosses acid on him and runs.

She's immediately grabbed by Sheriff Slim Pickins, and taken to the cult cabin where the entire cult is gathered in human form. They call it 'the gift,' and offer it to her. Carradine isn't down with their hippy werewolf ways, and just wants to eat humans.

Terri's husband comes flying in to town in his cool Mazda sports car, wheels somehow screeching despite driving on soft grass. He conveniently finds a cassette tape about lycanthropy playing in the psychologist's office. A mutilated, melty-faced, human-form Eddie greets him, and then starts the balloon thing again, but this guy doesn't wait and shoots him right square in the balloons.

The husband teleports to the cabin with the other wolves, and takes his time before shooting these transitioning wolves for some reason. They're shocked to see their brethren actually die. "Silver bullets!" he yells, and starts slowly offing wolves one-by-one. None of them flee or do anything, they just stand in a semicircle growling and waiting to get shot. Instead of shooting them all, he locks the remaining ones in the barn and burns it down.

Slim Pickins shoots their tire out, so their car explodes in a fireball. They get locked in his cop car, and the swarm of very unburned werewolves hop all over it. Karen, who has done nothing except scream the whole movie, gets bitten. She takes advantage of her position as a TV newscaster to show the world definitive proof that werewolves are real.

She turns into a Gremlin live on air.