The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, March 23-29
The Howling (1981)
Directed by Joe Dante
Dante’s films are cartoons yanked from their two-dimensional safety into our postmodern reality. Of course life looks considerably more elastic when accommodating a sensibility that’s one part Roger Corman, one part Chuck Jones and two parts Frank Tashlin. Dee Wallace plays a reporter whose hunt for a serial killer (Eddie The Mangler, one of the greatest villains in film history) ends in post-traumatic stress. She and her husband enter the care of a New Age therapist living in a commune in a beautiful coastal California town. The cultists have a secret that the movie doesn’t pretend is much of one. And that’s how you know you’re reading Dante’s unmistakable handwriting. A film that looks ostensibly like a genre exercise will quickly turn into a loving, sumptuous essay on genre’s importance in the life of a young moviegoer. The Howling is a very 80s spin on the Universal monster movies, complete with righteously seething, misandrist subtext, but its love of the movie monsters (and the pop culture marginalia all over the script) that shaped our nightmares and fed our morality is timeless. Scout Tafoya (March 25, 26, midnight at the Nitehawk)
