Really Surprised!

n my opinion it was a great movie with some interesting elements, even though having some plot holes and the ending probably was just too messy and crammed together, but still fun to watch and not your casual movie that is similar to all other ones.

It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Finally someone has the cajones to put werewolves in a castle and initiate murder mystery slasher mode. My god, how did it take till 1989 to kick this into gear? And what fun we have here!At least in terms of a C-movie eclectic character cast and some cool castle cinematography. This is a murder mystery where you don't really care about the reveal, and you know it's a werewolf anyway so the why isn't important. It's also a slasher where there's not much bloodletting or fun. It lies somewhere flatly in-between these two genres that share so much in common and yet can't meet a happy middle ground.

Very slow moving and hard to make it through. It never explains the back story and important details. Instead, the viewer is led on the typical "seperate and get killed one by one" type deal. That's about all this movie offers, no real plot, no gore.The werewolf is barely shown at all, that is effective only if there is any REAL suspense. If the acting is bad, you don't care about the characters, and it's genuinely not scary then at least you should get some cool werewolf/gore/kill scenes. None of that is present in this movie.If you can find anything at all better to watch, I wouldn't recommend this one.

Howling 5 (1989) ** (out of 4) Budapest, 1489 is where our film starts off. In a dark castle everyone inside has committed suicide for some unknown reason. Two survivors are in terror and decide to kill themselves after a baby is thought to have also been killed. After their death we hear the baby cry out, which gets us onto to the mystery. Five hundred years later a group of people is brought back to the castle by a strange Count who could be hiding his own little secrets.The group has no idea why they are at the castle and things take a strange turn when the bus that brought them there drives off into the night. To make matters worse a snowstorm has hit, which means they'll have to spend the night in the castle. Soon members of the group begin to disappear so that Count orders a search of the place. Soon bodies are found with their throats bitten out and it appears that the legend of the werewolves is real. In a Ten Little Indians fashion, the group must discover who the werewolf is and destroy the thing before more die.Howling 5 suffers from a very small budget and I'm not sure to bash the film for this or praise it. The low budget is so low that we have to suffer through the fact that the werewolf is pretty much never seen. We get a few close-ups of its teeth and a couple quick shots of it attacking but we never get a good eye on the creature. This become pretty irritating, although I guess some could claim this was a homage to Universal's dreadfully bad She Wolf of London. Those expecting gore will also be disappointed to hear that all the death scenes are shown off screen.The good thing about the low budget is that the director tries to make up for it with some wonderful locations and a pretty nice script, which is full of some funny dialogue. Most of the laughs come from a dumb blonde actress who is too stupid to know what's going on around here. The director pretty much abuses the "dumbness" in the woman but it's pretty funny in the end. The castle is very well decked out and adds some nice atmosphere to the mix. Another good aspect is the snowstorm that rages outside. This here leads to some very nice shots, although I doubt this is what horror fans is wanting to hear.In the end Howling 5 is a decent little movie but the low budget and non-gory violence will probably turn more genre fans off. It's well made and well acted but that can only take a horror film like this so far. Another problem is that the film drags on and on with useless talk about the legend and mystery when the viewer knows exactly what's going on. The characters talk and talk about it not being a werewolf yet we know it is so these scenes come off as fake and really just pad the running time, which should have been cut to begin with. Many fans of the series talk about the shock ending but I pretty much caught it early on. If you want to see this same storyline better done then I highly recommend the Amicus film The Beast Must Die with Peter Cushing, which features that infamous "werewolf break".

I am a huge fan of The Howling series and Howling V: The Rebirth is one of best sequels I've seen. Clive Turner and Freddie Rowe who wrote Howling IV: The Original Nightmare return to write this one and it's great. The plot is basically about a castle that was closed down 500 years ago after a family killed themselves to stop the Werewolf although one survived.500 years later and group of people are sent to the castle for it's grand opening by the Count (Phillip Davis) once there they soon find themselves being killed off one by one by the Werewolf, it seems that this castle is it's lair and now they must figure out who is the Werewolf before it gets them. Although the guests don't believe that it is a Werewolf doing this they soon find out the hard way while figuring this out.I'm not going to tell who the Werewolf is otherwise that would ruin this movie.It's a shame they didn't show much of the Werewolf but the parts you do see of it are good enough. THe acting is quite good, Clive Turner who plays the guest Ray does a good performance and Phillip Davis has the Count is good.Howling V keeps you guessing who the Werewolf is and does it in a way to keep you interested. 10/10.