• Directed by Jeff Burr
• Written by Benjamin Carr
• Starring
  • Ashley Lyn Cafagna
  • Robin Downes
  • Len Lesser
  • Bogdan Cambera
• Produced by Vlad Paunescu
• Executive produced by Charles Band

Let’s see. In my review of Frankenstein Reborn! (1998), which was released before this one, I mentioned how the ‘Filmonsters’ series was conceived as re-imaginings of the famous public-domain monsters for a young audience… how they were conceived basically as double-length Goosebumps! episodes for release on cable… how after four were announced and two were completed, lack of interest/funding cause the plug to be pulled on the project, leaving only that one and this one of the intended twelve-episode series… Yup, I guess I’ve covered all the background. Onward!

“Torches? Check! Pitchforks? …You mean nobody brought the pitchforks?”

This installment was helmed by Jeff Burr, who had churned out acceptable product for Charles Band several times before and would continue to do so afterward, from a script credited to Benjamin Carr. Like Frankenstein Reborn! before it, The Werewolf Reborn! banks hard on the fact that the default shooting location for practically all Band-related flicks in that time period was Romania, which lends itself well to the Old World origins of the “classic” monsters. There’s also the fact that, since the silent short The Werewolf in 1913, there have been a crapload of werewolf movies. It’s well-trodden territory, and the Benjamin Carr 2.0 Script-O-Matic simply had to churn out the most shop-worn — excuse me, “timeless” — elements of werewolf mythology, slap on a teenage protagonist, and call it good, or at least done.

New York teen Eleanor Crane (Ashley Lyn Cafagna, later to do over 200 episodes of the daytime soap The Bold and the Beautiful) arrives by train in a small, unnamed Eastern European town where no one wants to be friendly with her once she tells them that she’s there to meet her uncle Peter Kranek. (Maybe they’re all just grouchy because, as we’ve seen, the menfolk were up all night, wandering in the woods with torches.) Her uncle Peter (Robin Downes, who’s amassed an incredible list of credits doing voice work in videogames) lives alone in a creeper-covered mansion five miles out of town (and that’s the one thing that Romanian shooting locations really bring to the table: absolutely terrific old building exteriors). He isn’t happy to see her either; he explained by mail to her father that he can’t look after Eleanor while her parents are in Geneva (all we’re told is that it’s ‘a convention’), but you know how reliable the postal system is. He tries to palm her off on someone in town overnight until the next train, but the locals, led by Police Inspector Krol (Len Lesser, one of the great heavies and henchmen of ’70s and ’80s TV) are like, ‘Oh, really, Peter? Is there something unsafe about being at your mansion on the night of the full moon? Something you’d like to confess?’

“You American teens sure pack a lot of attitude into two small cases.”

So when Peter gets Eleanor back to his place, he locks her in her room with the standard ‘Ignore any sounds your hear outside’ warning. And then…

Look, it’s a Pulsepounders!/Filmonsters movie. If you’re expecting some great lycanthropic transformation scene, you’re looking in the wrong place. When the moon rises, Peter starts clawing at his shirt and whipping his head side to side (his long, fine hair was probably a large consideration in casting him). Pointed teeth appear in his mouth between edits. One hand goes through terrible stop-motion hair application. And then — ta-dah! He looks like the star of a fan-film tribute to the first five minutes of Michael Jackson’s Thriller video.

“Damn this angina!”

After a night of getting shot at in the forest by the locals, WerePeter stumbles home to where Eleanor (who’s broken out of her room, naturally) catches him as he faints. She sees bullet holes in his chest heal themselves, and when he comes around, he tells her the story of how, two months ago, a manbeast came through his study window at night and bit him before he drove it off with a silver letter opener. Since then, during the nights of the full moon, he becomes an animal, blah blah blah, driven to kill, blah blah blah. Unfortunately, that last part is taken as a confession by Inspector Kohn, who is lingering outside the door with a couple of officers. Not that he believes in werewolves, of course, but Peter could just be your average non-supernatural delusional homicidal maniac.

Meanwhile, Eleanor has been contacted by the gypsies who’ve set up camp out of town. Seems they’re kind of responsible for the whole werewolf thing; one of their members is cursed, and they usually keep him chained up for the full moon, but darned if he didn’t get out a couple of months ago and get himself killed with a silver letter opener. Now they’ve made the letter opener (I guess their werewolf made it back with the opener sticking out of him) into three silver bullets, which they’ve loaded into a revolver and now give to Eleanor. Good luck, kid!

“I’m not only the police chief, I’m also the closest thing this town has to a silver-tongued lothario.”

There’s really not much more to the movie, aside from the obvious and hasty climax; it plays out like the Cliff Notes version of every werewolf movie you’ve ever seen. The most surprising element is the casting of Robin Downs and Len Lesser as Peter and Krol, respectively. We’ve seen tons of these Full Moon movies from the late ’90s with Romanians faking being Americans; now we’ve got one where two of the lead roles are Americans faking being Romanians!

The location shooting actually gives the ‘Filmonsters’ episodes a leg on their inspiration, Goosebumps!, which was studio-bound and looked it. It’s a competent but unambitious little production, probably best exemplified by the night shoots of the werewolf prowling around the woods: everything is clearly visible, but it always looks like there are headlights just off camera.

Note how the werewolf makeup doesn’t look at all wolf-like.

Say what you will about the perfunctory nature of a program that condenses the most “archetypal” elements of the werewolf genre down to 45 minutes, but just about Full Moon-related family feature of that era would have benefited from being chopped to under an hour.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 4
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0
  • (Robin Downes (Peter) provided ADR voices for the 2009 Star Trek feature, but that doesn’t really count as an “appearance”)