Horror Movie Review: Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf (1985)

The 1981 Joe Dante directed werewolf flick, The Howling, was a unique horror film. Sexy, sleazy, and satirical, it took the werewolf genre in a different direction, but it still made sense. Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf is the opposite, in almost every way.

Wacky, but not exactly wonderful, it comes from a screenplay written by Robert Sarno and Gary Brandner, is loosely based on former’s 1979 novel, The Howling II, and is directed by Philippe Mora. It stars Christopher Lee, Sybil Danning, Annie McEnroe, and Reb Brown. The latter plays Ben White, the brother of journalist Karen White from the first film (played by Dee Wallace originally). She is being buried, and Ben is grief-stricken, so probably not the best time for Stefan Crosscoe (Christopher Lee) to tell him that she was a werewolf.

Of course, Ben doesn’t believe him, but something about the man and what he says is enough to make Karen’s colleague and Ben’s girlfriend, Jenny (Annie McEnroe) go after him. Providing the video evidence of her transformation, Crosscoe reveals that Karen is now ‘undead’ and she must be destroyed with a silver spike before she rises from the grave. It’s all very vampiric, even if it’s rare to see Lee ‘staking’ the undead instead of being staked.

Anyway, following all this nonsense, the film then goes off the rails as he reveals to them that there is a werewolf queen in Transylvania, and they need to go and destroy her. Her name is Stirba (Sybil Danning), and along with her ‘mate’ Vlad (Judd Omen), new concubine Mariana (Marsha Hunt), and minion, Erle (Ferdy Mayne), she plans to take over the world with an army of werewolves.

Can they successfully infiltrate her sexy party and put a stop to the furry beasts before it’s to late? Will anyone look comfortable in their outfits? Will that new-wave punk band ever stop playing the same song?

Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf is almost a ‘so bad it’s good’ film. It certainly manages to be entertaining, but for all the wrong reasons. It’s an absolute mess of a film that embodies its release period but equally feels like nothing else released at that time. Yet, the nonsense of the story and its poor characters, the awkward acting and overt-sexualisation of many moments, the failure of horror and comedy, it all comes together in such disastrous style, it’s hard to not get invested.

It’s a bad film, and it feels like a fever dream, but scene after scene grabs the attention, especially once it moves to Transylvania. There, the madness ramps up and we get classic scenes such as the werewolf orgy, which looks like it was so embarrassing for everyone involved, and the sight of Christopher Lee donning hip sunglasses, at a club while a new wave punk band called Babel plays their song, ‘The Howling’. Should you also make it to the end credits, you’ll get to see a repeated shot of Sybil Danning’s bare breasts. Repeated over and over again. It’s that kind of film.

Ultimately, as entertaining as all of this ‘crapness’ is, it fails as a horror film by being about as scary as a sleepy poodle that has no teeth. As strange as the first film was, at least it made the werewolves frightening.