"The injury on your leg, it was not from a dog. It was... from a werewolf."
I thought I'd continue my werewolf streak with one of the many less than good werewolf movies, but tried to keep it connected with a very less than fantastic sequel. An American Werewolf in Paris (1997) is a spiritual sequel to the classic, An American Werewolf in London (1981). Course it's about as loosely connected as a movie can be. An American Werewolf in Paris is about an American named Andy and his two friends, all daredevils and skirt chasers who are having the time of their lives traveling Europe together. All goes well until they get entangled with a pretty girl with a lot of problems.
Ummm... well it actually didn't have any giant gaping holes and followed through on everything it set up, which based on some movies I've seen that is something. I also applaud this film for not just being a rehash or exact copy of the original. It actually tries to improve on the original, even if it doesn't and the additions are kind of dumb (more on that bellow.)
And not that it hasn't been done before, but I liked the coven of werewolves' plan to lure American tourists into a free party then eat them.
The biggest flaw of this movie is how horribly written it is. It really seems like things are just thrown in, and barely anything in this movie connects to anything else. The dialogue is really bad, and all the characters are very one dimensional. Almost every scene in this film is so uninteresting! And the worst part? The film ditches the previous' beautiful blend of horror and comedy in favor of some of the worst comedy you've ever heard. They even slip in some slapstick for no apparent reason!
Pretty much everything about the werewolves in this movie is bad. Unlike the original they opted to switch to full CG for the wolves, which really doesn't hold up at all. I really didn't like the werewolf designs at all. First of all it's obvious they only had one model so all werewolves look exactly the same (confusing). Up close the wolves look like some kind of a strange hairy gargoyle, and from a distance they really look like gorillas. As I said before they tried to advance the wolves from the original, but unfortunately the changes are almost all bad. They make the wolves NEED to eat human hearts for some reason? They continued the illusions of the inflicted from the original but very poorly: they had one ultra-realistic nightmare that's really ineffective and for some reason the inflicted don't just see the people they killed they can see anyone who has been killed by a werewolf... which kinda misses the point. This was a lazy convenience for the script that doesn't help the mythology at all, it takes all the interesting parts of the inflicted seeing the dead and throws them out the window. One of the later plot points is a serum that can instantly transform an inflicted person into a werewolf. What is in it? Moon juice? Yay science!
And the worst addition of all, is they make the werewolf infliction reversible. This takes out all the suffering and pain and horrible parts of being a werewolf out and in the end what does it add? A happy ending? Really, really, really lame.
There's next to nothing magnificent about this film, but I thought the camerawork and cinematography was pretty good (for the most part).
An American Werewolf in Paris (1997) is about as good as a direct to video film. It really feels like they had a mediocre script about fighting werewolves (something somebody thought we needed more of) and then tried to link it to the most popular werewolf movie in recent history. So if you like bad CG werewolves battling, and not much else... this is your movie! 2/5 stars.
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