Let's be realistic.

Good start, but then it gets ruined

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

A teenage outcast discovers he is a werewolf, and must battle a pack of the brutal creatures when they threaten him and his new girlfriend.This reboot sixteen years after the last entry tries to cash in on the popular "Twilight" movie franchise of the time, but fails flat with mediocre CW style acting and a plot full of holes. It gets credit for its use of practical werewolf costumes, which at times look good and other times not so much. There is a terrible CGI transformation as well. The final werewolf battle has its moments (a werewolf gets thrown through not one but THREE walls) but it's undone by some crappy shaky-cam camerawork. I will say this for the movie. Despite its flaws and a so-so finale, it still remains fairly watchable.

In the Shermer High School, the teenager Will Kidman (Landon Liboiron) is bullied by his school mate Roland (Niels Schneider). Will lost his mother when he was born and he lives alone with his father Jack Kidman (Frank Schorpion). Will's best friend is the aspirant horror film director Sachin (Jesse Rath) and he dreams on his mysterious school mate Eliana Wynter (Lindsey Marie Shaw), for whom he has yearned for a long time. On his eighteenth birthday and eve of his graduation day, Will is invited to go to an underground party and he stays with Eliana. Will is drugged by a colleague and he has the sensation that a werewolf attacked people in the party. Out of the blue, Will gets stronger and stronger and he suspects that he might be a werewolf. When the evil Kay (Ivana Milicevic) meets Will at school, he learns dark secrets about his past and finds that Eliana might be in danger."The Howling: Reborn" is a lame movie, with a terrible story with many holes, poor special effects and acting and awful music score. Eliana is a strange character that seems to be strong in the beginning but totally changes her behavior. Will is unstable, and does not seem to know what he wants. Further, he never misses or grieves the deaths of his father and his best friend. A question: why he turns into a werewolf only when he is eighteen? Last but not the least, people are murdered, the school is burnt down but there is no consequence. My vote is three.Title (Brazil): "Gritos de Horror – O Renascimento" ("Screams of Horror – The Rebirth")

There is a theory of film study which asserts that an important factor in how a film is experienced is the time and setting in which one sees it. It's especially true for horror films. Teens who see films like the original Texas Chainsaw and The Howling for the first time decades after they were made will compare them to films like Saw and other films they've seen earlier. People who saw them when they first came out got the full impact of the new ground they were breaking at the time.The Howling: Reborn breaks no new ground. It does however break one of the cardinal rules of screen writing: avoid voice-over as much as possible. This film is plastered wall-to-wall with the pretentious observations of a "teenaged mind." The main characters are like rejects from an MTV dramedy, slinging pseudo-pithy ruminations of teen angst that only a pre-adolescent could find intriguing.It's not all bad though. There is Lindsey Shaw to look at. And the lighting is top notch. Unfortunately the cinematography is lost in a flashy mess of music video after effects and choppy editing, apparently used to cover up the less-than-state-of-the-art CG work.The original Howling was a notable entry in the horror genre. Aside from the fact that it was genuinely scary and atmospheric, it featured the first truly impressive "real time" full body on screen transformation of a man into a werewolf. (Yes American Werewolf had good efx too, if you found it impressive to see one hand transform at a time.) And this was before CG, when make-up artists had to figure out complex robotics combined with masterful sculpted skins.And while the original Howling drew you in with realistic situations and characters, Reborn starts off with a few unreal clunkers. One is a security guard in charge of a school lockdown system that would be the envy of any maximum security prison. The second is when a high school student is pushed against a locker and has a three inch blood-gushing gash sliced across his jugular, and shrugs it off as if the school bully just rubbed a booger in his hair.Not long after that we find ourselves immersed in a wannabe feature length MTV video with standard rock video efx like color desaturation, flash cuts, and worst of all, a string of songs with sappy vocals that make the mickey mouse orchestral score even more mickey mouse.In the end, the bombastic direction and flashy editing fail to make up for what this film lacks: substance.Kids will probably like it though. Fans of the original hoping for a state-of-the-art update will be sorely disappointed.

'THE HOWLING: REBORN': Two and a Half Stars (Out of Five) This reboot to the 1981 Joe Dante cult classic is sort of like 'TWILIGHT' with werewolves. It's not quite that horrifying but it is definitely aimed at the teen youth market with a lot of the same styled gimmicks. It's full of attractive young actors and the star (Landon Liboiron) looks a lot like 'Harry Potter' (Daniele Randcliffe) actually. There are some cool visuals and effects (the werewolves actually don't look half bad) but it's still got all that cheesy teen angst and melodrama. Not quite as poorly done as the 'TWILIGHT' films but it's still pretty bad.Liboiron plays Will Kidman, an insecure nerd crushing on a popular hot girl at school, Eliana Wynter (Lindsey Shaw). He lives with his father Jack (Frank Schorpion) and has been brought up under the impression that his mom died giving birth to him. Oddly Eliana is impressed by his stalker like obsession with her and invites him to a party one night. Once there Will is drugged by a popular clique of creepy guys and believes he's being pursued by a monster he thinks is a werewolf. Will goes to his friend Sachin (Jesse Rath), a media school nerd working on a horror project, the next day at school and asks him what he knows about werewolves. He soon believes he is becoming a 'teen wolf' himself and also learns that his mother may not be dead after all.The story has nothing to do with the other films in the 'HOWLING' franchise and is a reboot by all senses of the word. It's credited as being based on 'The Howling II' novel and was written and directed by first time filmmaker Joe Nimziki. I haven't seen any other chapters in the 'HOWLING' series except this and the first one so I can't say how it compares to the entire franchise but it definitely doesn't live up to the beloved original. The production values are impressive for such a low budget film it's just a shame they're all spent trying to cash in on the 'TWILIGHT' craze. Fans of that series will probably be more than pleased with this but I doubt die-hard fans of the werewolf franchise it's attached itself to will be happy. Overall I'd say it pretty much matched my pretty low expectations (maybe even exceeded them). I found it mildly amusing and definitely would say this is one time when the rip-off is better than the material it's knocking off (I'm referring to the popular teen vampire series of course).Watch our review show 'MOVIE TALK' at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sd0S1srQ9T8