Howling III

Plot synopsis:
In this movie, Australian werewolves have evolved separate from the rest of the werewolf population. They are marsupials - the female werewolves give birth to partly developed young which then makes its way to a pouch for further development.
Harry Beckmeyer (Barry Otto), an Australian anthropologist, has somehow obtained footage filmed in 1905 which appears to depict Australian Aborigines ceremonially sacrificing a wolf-like creature. Meanwhile, reports of a werewolf killing a man in Russia reach Beckmeyer and he seeks an audience with the U.S. President to try and warn him that there is a widespread case of lycanthropy afoot in the world. The President (Michael Pate) is dismissive.
A young Australian werewolf named Jerboa (Imogen Annesley) runs away from the rest of her pack into the city to avoid her step-father Thylo (Max Fairchild) and his physical and sexual abuse, all of which her family condones. She ends up spending the night on a park bench in Sydney near the Opera House and in the morning is spotted by an American man named Donny Martin (Leigh Biolos). The young man is infatuated with her instantly and attempts to approach her. Jerboa runs away frightened and he chases her through the park before finally catching up and telling her that due to her beautiful and naturally wild looks, she would be perfect for the female lead in a horror film he is helping to make: Shape Shifters Part VIII. While filming in Sydney's Hyde Park, Jack Citron (Frank Thring), the director of the film, hires her immediately due to her natural talent. Jerboa and Donny quickly fall in love and Donny takes Jerboa to see a movie (a fake werewolf film entitled: "It came from Uranus") in which a "werewolf" transforms and Jerboa tells Donny that the transformation "doesn't happen like that" which leaves Donny puzzled. Later, after making love, Donny is curious as to why Jerboa refused to take off her top while they were together and notices that Jerboa's lower abdomen is covered in downy white fur and what appears to be a long scar, but he does not question her about it. It is shown that a full moon has risen outside.
Later, while at the wrap party for the movie, Jerboa is exposed to strobe lights and the flashing lights cause her to start changing into a werewolf. She flees the party with Donny in short pursuit. Due to the stress of the changing, she runs into traffic and is hit by a car. The doctors at the hospital realize that there is something very strange about Jerboa; she has striped fur on her back (like on the thylacine), and a pouch. They also deduce that due to her high amount of hormones, Jerboa is pregnant from Donny.
Meanwhile, Beckmeyer's father has disappeared in the Outback shortly after recording a film of tribal villagers apparently killing a werewolf. His investigation is short lived as three of Jerboa's sisters (disguised as nuns) show up in the city, track her down and murder anyone in the way to take her back to their pack's hidden werewolf town, Flow ( being wolf spelled backward). Deprived of a werewolf, Beckmeyer and his colleague Professor Sharp (Ralph Cotterill) spend the evening watching a visiting ballet troupe practice. However, they get to see the prima ballerina, Russian Olga Gorki (Dasha Blahova) transform into a werewolf to the horror of her troupe. She is captured and researched but quickly runs away, somehow making her way to Flow where the pack have been chanting to call her to be Thylo's mate (since Jerboa is pregnant). Jerboa soon gives birth to a baby werewolf.
Donny informs Beckmeyer that his girlfriend was from Flow and he goes along with him to find her. Instead, Jerboa smells Donny nearby and goes to him at night, presenting their baby boy and informs him of the impending danger and the family flee into the hills.
The next morning a government task force captures the werewolf pack, but not before having several soldiers killed. Beckmeyer enlists the help of Olga, who he is attracted to, to allow her and Thylo to be researched. After many surveys and investigations (including an incident where Thylo was tortured with strobe lights to make him transform) Beckmeyer starts to fret over the injustice done to the werewolves, including the U.S. Army hunting them in 1889, and so he frees Olga and Thylo. The trio escape into the Outback and eventually find Kendi (Burnham Burnham), Donny, Jerboa, and the baby. They are pursued by hunters but Kendi calls on to the spirit of their legendary phantom wolf and massacres them to ensure the safety of the family. He is cremated in a makeshift ceremony but the smoke alerts some soldiers who are still pursuing them. They are attacked by Kendi's skeleton who manages to hurt and scare them before being destroyed by one of the soldier's machine guns. At night, Thylo also calls unto the spirit and is transformed into a huge wolf who attacks the remaining soldiers before being killed by a bazooka blast that destroys the rest of the encampment.
At last, no longer being pursued by soldiers, Olga and Beckmeyer fall in love and together with Jerboa and Donny, hide and make a homestead at an idyllic riverside camp, avoiding human contact and raising their children in peace. After some time, Jerboa and Donny eventually move out, with the intentions of assuming different identities and the Beckmeyers remain behind raising their daughter and newborn son. Eventually, Harry is tracked down by Sharp and informed that all lycanthropes have been given papal amnesty due to the crimes committed against their kind and the Beckmeyers move back to the city. While teaching a class in Los Angeles and showing the reel seen at the beginning of the movie, Beckmeyer pauses to tell his class about Jerboa and how though he and Olga searched for her and Donny but never found them. At the end of the class he is approached by a young man who Beckmeyer notes looks familiar but cannot recognize. The young man introduces himself as Zack. He is Jerboa and Donny's son. He informs Beckmeyer that him and his parents are now living in Los Angeles and his mother is now the famous actress "Loretta Carson" and his father is now the famous director "Sully Spellingberg".
That night, Olga and Beckmeyer are watching a television award show in which Jerboa has won the best actress award. Her sisters are seen living in a cave in their half transformed states celebrating her win. As Jerboa accepts her award and tries to give her speech, the flashing cameras and stage lights cause her to start changing into a werewolf. This also prompts Olga to start her change much to her husband's dismay. Jerboa goes on the attack as her sisters howl in glee and Sharp is seen in his living room smiling deviously.
The final shot shows a picture of a thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, a marsupial carnivore which was hunted to extinction by Australian farmers to protect their sheep as it was the inspiration for the film.

Tags: paranormal, cult

Review:
Absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the original film, being simply an antipodean tale of lycanthropic maladjustment!Way better now than upon its release, the full low-budgetry inanity of Mora's little pet works quite well if you can get on its wavelength, that is, down to a primordial level.
Biologically er, different, she has the cutest little pouch just above her more "R" rated parts, which following a night of passion, soon gains the tiniest of new inhabitants in a scene one can only describe as "different!"A subject of extreme interest to the medical profession, trivia buffs may notice none other than film historian and TV presenter Bill Collins making his rather pedestrian debut here as a hospital doctor, somewhat enamoured with Jerboa's never-seen-before physiology.Played strictly for laughs and non-conformist fun, the budget constraints were such that at the point of anyone actually being attacked by a werewolf, all the viewer ever gets to see is a back-pedalling actor with varying expressions of laugh-out-loud fright.
Michael Pate and son Christopher make a suitably stilted (as in  "What the hell am I doing in a film like this?) contribution and Australia's grandest thespian Frank Thring, camps it up shamefully as a Z-Grade horror-movie director.
It's also one of the few werewolf movies based on the idea that werewolves are people too and at times it seems that the people hunting the werewolves are the real bad guys.
After the complete failure of a sequel that "Howling II" was, Philippe Mora returned for yet another installment, trying a different (more spoofy) approach this time....but it didn't work out much better.
Perhaps the only two good things about "Howling III" are two of its actors: Annesley (definitely the cutest werewolf I've ever seen) and Barry Otto, who gives an honest performance as the compassionate scientist.
The series is up to its seventh entry thus far and if the diminishing laws of sequels is anything to go on, they must be unspeakably terrible because Howling 3 (the only one I've been bored/curious/stupid enough to sit through) is so bad I'd have to say it's one of the worst films I've ever seen.The principle reason for this is the premise, as director Philippe Mora decides to do away with the original's everyday people versus rampaging monsters approach and instead, provides us with what must be the only Marsupial Werewolf Romance Epic in movie history.
You might get a few laughs out of it, but ultimately it's just a very poor film.The overambitious storyline considers an anthropologist, Dr Beckmeyer (Inspector Clouseau lookalike Barry Otto) and his studies of a race of marsupial werewolf people discovered in Australia.
Dr Beckmeyer is determined to prove that the werewolves are not to be frightened of and that studying them is the best approach, the Government is not so certain and wants to destroy them and eventually, after a painfully long set up, he joins up with the lycanthropes in an attempt to lead them to safety in the outback.You might think a film with 'Marsupial Werewolves' in might be entertaining.
Yeah so i made two no three mistakes with this one, the first being that i bought it, i actually spent 5 dollars on it, new, two i watched it all i got out of that was a good nap and three i did not burn it after wards please just save yourself the trouble and bypass this movie completely you will save a lot of time this way.
The Howling III: The Marsupials has very little if anything to do with the original Joe Dante film of the Howling, except that, in a sense, these are werewolves, and at the end of this film like in the original there is a scene where a character transforms into the horrifying creature on live TV.
It's a splatter movie that takes little into account in the way of logic, whether it's with how a character actually turns into the werewolf-marsupial, or even where the camera is in a certain scene (at one point two characters make note of a camera looking at them, breaking the fourth wall, and it doesn't seem to be mentioned much again).The story concerns a woman who is, in fact, such a werewolf-marsupial type, distinguished by having an actual pouch, and when a young man, an assistant director on a splatter movie, comes up to her and after a date has some hot sex with her, she's pregnant with her little baby marsupial.
You see that the director is going for some serious terror here, but at the same time some crazy laughs are meant to be had, just by the cut-away shots put in to the scientists in close-ups from a TV monitor.And even crazier still is how Mora, after having what would appear to be so much carnage and a climax and a half with a big torpedo blasting away a wolf, there's a sappy interlude showing the passing of time and years and little marsupi-man kids growing up!
It gets a bit tiresome, but it was kind of subversive for a horror movie of this sort, which, per the course for Mora, has some bizarre camera-work and very obvious references (the Hitchcock director anyone?) Howling III doesn't pretend to be anything like great art, but it comes in and impresses with its bizarre qualities and self-mocking sense of the genre and movies in general.
Released in 1987 and written/directed by Philippe Mora, "Howling III: The Marsupials" chronicles events in Sydney, Australia, when a tribe of werewolves is discovered in the Outback with links to the thylacine (THAHY-la-sahyn), the so-called Tasmanian tiger.
A young female (Imogen Annesley) escapes the abuse of the pack and flees to Sidney where she meets a guy (Leigh Biolos) who assists in getting her a part in a horror film that's being shot in the city and directed by a Hitchcock wannabe (Frank Thring).
Both movies mix goofy camp with seriousness for an odd mix, with "Howling III" in particular trying for more gravity.While I'm giving this a relatively low rating, there are some endearing elements in addition to its already noted eccentricities: Blahova is formidable as the ballerina with an impressive set of teeth (you'll see what I mean); there's a brief horror movie parody sequence; the footage of the supposedly extinct thylacine is very interesting; there's a love story that's actually kind of touching (and I'm not tawkin' bout Jerboa & Donny); you can't help but start to sympathize with the werewolves by the second half; and the climax nicely ties into the first film.
It's got a horrible story (Some Alfred Hitchcock-looking guy is making a horror movie and they hire a real werewolf to star in it.
"Howling III - The Marsupials" is a surprisingly good werewolf spoof with a twist; set in Australia (and let's face it, an Aussie horror movie is a rarity - only "Body Melt" and "Razorback" spring to mind), it deals with the plight of a dwindling pack of marsupial werewolves who are in danger of becoming extinct.The movie focuses its attention more on character development and emotion rather than the usual random slashings that prevail in such similar movies.
And let's not forget the exquisite Imogen Annesley as Jerboa, who shines as a beautiful young human marsupial, escaping from her abusive stepfather and running off to the big city (Sydney) where she finds fame and romance (no, she's not Joan Collins).The movie comes off quite well on the whole, and has a very moralistic and humane message, dealing with the preservation of dying species..
Like 'The Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf', the sly wit and well-timed eeriness of the first film are completely gone in 'Howling III' and replaced by over-the-top camp and bizarreness, neither of which really done well and there's little charm with either too.
It was like watching a completely different franchise.The scenery is quite nice and there are some atmospheric shots.Dasha Blahova is suitably formidable and the occasional sly dig at the horror genre was reasonably fun.Other than Blahova however the acting is dire, with a mix of the actors not looking comfortable in their roles, having little personality or over-compensating.
The good points: plenty of quirky Aussie humour, Imogen Annesley looks great as the main werewolf character, nice use of Sydney Harbour & outback locations, decent effects for the baby marsupial & no shortage of werewolf action.
French director Philippe Mora once again calls the shots, this time transplanting the action to the outback of Australia, where a small group of half-human/half-marsupial shape-shifters live in isolation, away from the persecution of man.
However, when the beautiful Jerboa (Imogen Annesley) leaves for the big city, and falls in love with Donny, a member of a film crew, she unwittingly exposes her clan to danger...The plot to this second sequel to the original 80s horror hit is so stupid, and so far removed from the first film, that it is bound to find a small audience amongst werewolf fans keen to see just how truly bizarre and totally crap it actually is.
Those that do seek the film out and watch it in its entirety will be treated to a mind-bogglingly awful (but definitely one-of-a-kind) experience, that features such dubious delights as a trio of werewolf nuns, a top horror film director who looks and acts uncannily like Hitchcock, a birth scene with a difference (the newborn crawls from between Jerboa's legs and into the furry pouch on her stomach), and a Russian ballerina transforming into a hairy monster mid-performance.Whilst all of this sounds like terrific fun for fans of cheap, trashy horror, it isn't: although the whole film tries desperately to be 'so bad, it's funny', the slow delivery, dreadful acting, awful effects and cheap production values ensure that it just ends up being embarrassing to watch.
The Howling III takes place in Australia, where a team of scientists have discovered a tribe of half-human-half-werewolves living in a rural plot called 'Flow' (you get it?).
If you enjoy all the pulsating action and incredible scenery and special effects of the first Howling, or of any other fantastic werewolf film, then you might find yourself rather bored at times (if not bored entirely with the whole thing), and possibly amused here and there by getting something different (in this story, the werewolf tribe descended from dingos and they are marsupials), though not very 'scary.'However, before recommending this movie, I must warn prospective viewers that, about three quarters of the way into the movie, the picture dramatically shifts gears and turns into an absolute cheese fest, complete with dreamy unfocused shots and orchestral score.
Still, many things are downright bad: The acting is abysmal at times, the special effects are sloppy and the story is full of plot holes.Philippe Mora's "Howling III" is a spectacular mess.
Howling 3 1987This was more of stand alone as it's as it own story and back plot and it not connected to last two moviesand I really don't know what to make of this movie as this is even worse then second one,I actually found the movie very boring from start to end Even the werewolf were not interesting at all and those scenes were so god dame awful , it was so bad , it wasn't so bad that it funny , it just worst effects I have seen for a werewolf movie.saying that I did laugh out , when the nuns turned up at the party , the make up effect for nuns were unbeliever bad .
The way this film manages to crudely handle these ideas though, whilst also attempting camp humor and schlock horror, result in a truly awful mess that will have a room full of B-Movie fans rolling around in fits of laughter.
Part III is a change of direction for this franchise, set in Australia(no overt links to the first two) where a young woman finds herself involved with an oddball film director and some very strange werewolves related to a secluded aboriginal tribe, where expedition members are being killed.Though different from Part II, this is no less bizarre and ridiculous, with a plot that doesn't hang together at all, truly bizarre characters and music, and an ending sequence so self-defeating and crass that you would think returning director Phillippe Mora was intending to kill this budding franchise(not a bad idea really...shame it didn't happen!).
HOWLING III has a pretty poor reputation and a lot of this seems to be from fans who simply don't like the fact that this film has no real connection to the first two movies.
I think the highlights of the film has to be the pregnant woman giving birth to a werewolf baby and of course since we're talking Australia you have to have her carry the baby around in her pouch just like a kangaroo.
The serious tone only serves to make you laugh all the more, as it looks like the film makers actually thought they were making a real movie!
A professor and a casting director for a horror film come across the species in two very different ways -- one as a field of study and the other as a love interest.
If you like bad horror sequels and cheap booze, "The Howling III" is your film.
On amusement value alone this sits head and shoulders above most of the other Howling films.As long as you're not looking for a well scripted film, then it's your classically amusing "Bad" film.I'm shocked it's in the worst 100, as it IS entertaining.The baby scenes can be pretty gross too.Even if the other effects are a bit lacking.For fans of the series it's a must, unless you're of the opinion the series can actually by ruined, in which case you might be offended!There's some semi intentional humour within the scripting too, as one would expect with a spoofing of this type.
Surprisingly, the film isn't all that gory but the make-up effects are pretty cheap-looking...though the baby werewolf (which the leading lady holds in the pouch in her belly, like a kangaroo - the film was shot in Australia, after all) is rather cute.
The cast is largely unknown (apart from Frank Thring as an eccentric film director, Michael Pate as the President and Barry Humphreys - in his Dame Edna Everage persona - as, of all things, an Academy Awards presenter) but, at least, Imogen Annesley makes for a lovely lead and her performance isn't too bad either.I will be following this with my second viewing of two other werewolf films from the era: THE COMPANY OF WOLVES (1984; via the R2 SE I purchased recently) and SILVER BULLET (1985; a DVD rental)....
After a bus ride, she ends up in Sydney and is immediately discovered by Donny Martin (Lee Biolos), assistant director on a horror movie called "Shape Shifters Part 8." He takes her to meet director Jack Citron (Frank Thring, doing his best Hitchcock impersonation), who immediately casts her in his film.
Where else can you get werewolf nuns, a Soviet werewolf ballerina, aboriginals that don't look like aboriginals, a determined but love struck Barry Otto (a sincerely good turn), an eye-opening birth scene that sees a baby marsupial werewolf in a pouch (while the father doesn't seemed to be too fazed by making love with a she-wolf and having a werewolf baby "It's beautiful") and for the locals the never ageing Bill Collins, Frank Thring portraying b-grade horror director and Barry Humphries' Dame Edna getting close and personal to a snarling werewolf (which could be seen as a homage to Dante's original's ending).
I can think of many different ways to tell a story about werewolves, but anything I could direct wouldn't be half as creative as The Howling 3: The Marsupials.
Howling III is the first sequel that brings us a new plot and new characters, the plot is basically about a group of Marsupial Werewolves living in the outback but one of them named Jaboa hates her tribe and leaves only to be followed by three of them dressed as nuns.She meets up with Donny Martin who is working on a film meanwhile Prof.
The amusing scene of the werewolf ballerina, the shaman, the hunters debating like kids, the nuns, the nod to the first movie and the silliness of the whole film.
All in all, I liked Howling III: The Marsupials its definitely one of the better Howling sequels, tho not my favorite that one will be coming up soon, but, Mora manages to make a way better film then his second installment, and that's what makes Howling III enjoyable, its camp entertainment at its best..
It must be hunted down and eliminated.This film starred: Barry Otto, Imogen Annesley & Max Fairchild.Howling 3 is not is good as the first but better than the second, however when I say that they are all bad films.
There are so many things about Howling III that I could talk about but I doubt I could do it justice like how the Werewolves in Howling III are treated as a persecuted species & it's us humans who are the bad guys, when all said & done it's far from boring, at least it entertains & doesn't take itself seriously (or I certainly hope it doesn't because I couldn't).Director Mora makes a pretty incompetent film, some of the special effects are among the worst ever put on film, the Werewolves look absolutely awful & they add a certain amount of comedy value to the film themselves.
The least said about the acting the better I'm afraid as it's not very good & Dame Edna Everage's cameo is truly embarrassing to watch.I liked Howling III, it's bizarre & strange & doesn't feel like a film as it's all over the place at times.
In a word: yes.Having nothing to do with the prior movies, "Howling III" revolves around a strange Australian race of werewolves that are part man, part wolf and part marsupial.