HOWling with Laughter

Today, I watched "Howl". Or, as the opening credits put it, "H O W L ", which I suppose was some kind of attempt to meet a legal requirement to warn viewers how painful it would be.

It was, of course, a werewolf film.  When the Werewolf expansion for the Sims 4 came out (I won't call it the "Werewolf pack" because that's confusingly ambiguous) it became my excuse to binge a thousand werewolf films I'd never seen.  So now when I come across an werewolf film unknown to me, I'll give it a try, for completist purposes.

I have seen things.
Things you don't want to know about.

Sometimes they are so bad I will bail on them (and I've watched all of The Werewolf of Washington, a film so bad it made me DEPRESSED, and which should be retroactively legislated out of existence) 

But "H O W L" was SO bad I watched the entire thing, because I was riveted by how such a thing could have occurred.  No sane person would have written this script. No sane director would have agreed to direct it. No sane actor would have agreed to be its lead.  H O W L, however, got around those problems by having one crazy person be the writer, director, AND the lead actor.

This person. I bet she used this poster as the cover for the novelization that I have no doubt she self-published.

I am convinced she's an Artificial Intelligence. This movie is exactly what you'd get if you asked an AI;

"Write a screenplay for a contemporary horror film, length 80 minutes, based on Little Red Riding Hood."

"UNDERSTOOD; LIST ANY ADDITIONAL PARAMETERS."

"Mmm, throw in a vaguely lesbian therapist, repeated shots of a hallway in the basement of a closed school, roughly 37 shots of the protagonist's thighs, some incest, a crazy-Christian mom, the Protagonist Is Actually The Monster trope, and one improbable bowl of fruit."

"ADDITIONAL PARAMETERS ACCEPTED. FILLER TOLERANCE?"

"70%."

"FINISHED."

Her acting also resembles an android mimicking human behaviors with no understanding of their emotional context. Her directing is just the sort of surreal nonsense you'd expect from an AI image-generator.

One of my pet theories is that for every film there is at least one single frame that tells you everything you need to know to determine whether you will enjoy that film or not.
For "H O W L", this is that frame.

Like some sort of alien man-trap, the film lulls you into inescapable stupor in its first and second acts so that when it goes bat-shit in the third you are too deep into torpor to reach for the remote and just sit there as it sucks out your soul and insults your intelligence with its faux gotcha ending.

Do not watch HOWL, and if you do, don't blame me.