There are good sequels, there are bad sequels, and then there is The Howling II: Your Sister Is A Werewolf, which is a sequel that more or less exists on its own planet. When the movie, directed by Philippe Mora in 1985, begins we see what happened to Karen White (played by someone who is not Dee Wallace, the actress who played the part in the original film) after she was killed while morphing into a lycanthrope. From here, we visit her funeral where her brother Ben (Reb Brown) is warned by a mysterious older man named Stefan Crosscoe (Christopher Lee) that Karen isn't dead. Nope, she's still around and she's definitely a werewolf and the only way to really send her off to the great beyond is to stake her.

Understandably, Reb, thinks this older guy is a nut but his girlfriend, Jenny (Annie McEnroe), who used to work with Karen? She's not so sure… she thinks Stefan might be onto something. Of course, Stefan is right, Reb learns this first hand when Karen rises from the grave in full on furry bitch mode. Thankfully Stefan is still around to deal with it. Now realizing that this guy is speaking the truth, Ben and Jenny accompany Stefan on a voyage to Transylvania where the werewolf queen, Stirba (Sybil Danning), and her male companion Vlad (Judd Omen), are planning to host a huge carnally themed gathering of werewolves. Stefan figures if they can get in there and stop Stirba from becoming uber-powerful and launching into action a plan that will see werewolves take over the world!

A weird, hyper-sexualized mish-mash of a film, The Howling II: Your Sister Is A Werewolf is very definitely an odd duck of a film. While on one hand it's cool to see genre stalwarts like Christopher Lee, Sybil Danning and Reb Brown in large roles, on the other hand the story is ridiculous and the werewolf effects work that was such a huge part of the original's success is… wrong. It's interesting, it's funny to look at, but it's wrong. The werewolves in the original were scary, but here? No. The werewolves in this movie, as horny and promiscuous and prone to group sessions as they are, are not scary.

The movie, as bad as it is, is definitely watchable though. The site of Lee zipping around in eighties era ‘new wave' glasses while a ‘punk band' plays a set is reason enough to want to see it just because it is such an odd thing to imagine someone as noble and refined as Lee doing in the first place. Lee's performance here is also about as good as it realistically can be given what he had to work with and while it's hardly a highpoint in his filmography, he's fun in the part. Reb Brown sort of barges through the film with an amazing lack of subtlety while Sybil Danning as the werewolf queen is definitely a site to behold. You'd wager, after watching the movie, that a sizeable part of the film's budget went to her wardrobe, which seems to include only the finest in tacky eighties fetish garb.

As a horror film this one crashes and burns but fans of trash cinema should at least appreciate how the sleaze factor, already significant in the original movie, has been cranked up here. There's also plenty of practical effects work on display, some of it pretty impressive in how gory it gets, so for all its flaws the movie is never dull. The Eastern European locations don't do such a good job doubling for California in some scenes but once the action heads to Transylvania (where the story quite obviously borrows from the Dracula mythos) the locations work quite well. There's some great architecture on display in some scenes and even a little bit of genuine atmosphere here and there. So yeah, this is goofy, silly, trashy stuff but it's nothing if not entertaining.

Video:

The Howling II arrives on Blu-ray framed at 1.85.1 widescreen in AVC encoded 1080p high definition. Generally speaking, the transfer here looks pretty good. Black levels are strong and shadow detail is actually pretty decent. There aren't any obvious compression artifacts and the picture stays clean and free of any major print damage though there are some scenes that use optical effects that, as you'd expect, show a drop in detail (that'd be the way that the movie was made and it isn't necessarily a flaw). Grain is present, as it should be, but never overpowering and skin tones look good. Detail and texture easily surpass the previous MGM DVD release and there are no issues with any noise reduction or edge enhancement.