NIGHT SHADOW is a rarely seen low-budget werewolf flick from 1989 for which I cannot help but have a soft spot. It’s a shame this has been so buried, or at the very least never took off the way so many other small-scale creature features from that era have done. The plot revolves around a TV reporter returning to her small home town for a much-needed break and to reconnect with her brother. It’s a fairly standard setup for a movie like this, but it’s cool to see it handled with non-white leads. As she’s driving into town, she passes a shady drifter on the side of the road who immediately gives her a bad vibe.
The first thing I love about this is that the drifter looks so sketchy, that you’d almost think it has to be a bait-and-switch. But no. Within a minute, a truck driver offers him a ride and the drifter goes to the back of his broken-down car and right away, we can see the torn and dismembered bodies of two human beings inside. That’s minutes into the film, barely after the opening credits, and already the audience knows exactly who’s responsible for the killing. The plot plays out like a mystery, but I like that we already know. There’s an engaging kind of suspense in waiting for these forces to converge.
The brother and his friends make up an honestly charming and harmless gang of meatheads who decide to take matters into their own hands and solve the murders going on in their town. One of the meatheads is played by Kato Kaelin, who gets impaled with a pipe in slow-motion.
Like many low-budget horror movies of the late ‘80s, there’s a gag Freddy glove because the NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET franchise was booming in popularity at the time. Unlike most, this is not a one-and-done, because the character’s Freddy glove is actually suspected as a murder weapon and used to incriminate them, which makes it possibly the greatest gag Freddy glove in film history.
There’s a fun sense of humor, sometimes, and other times there are moments that befall so many of these movies that are likely less intentionally funny. In one of my favorites, the coroner is standing in front of a dumpster talking to the sheriff, while people are literally pulling body parts out of the dumpster directly behind her, and says, “Sheriff, I’m convinced this body was dumped.”
The werewolf doesn’t really appear in full until the very end, but that doesn’t bother me too much, as I’ve been trained to expect that by several HOWLING sequels. This werewolf is a chonky boy, too. One of the unique things about this movie’s approach to its creature that I haven’t really seen before is that there’s absolutely no distinction between the human form and the werewolf form. THE HOWLING werewolves are kind of like that, able to transform at will, but this takes it to another level. The drifter doesn’t even really talk. His entire human persona just seems to be a glamour to hide its true form, and in wolf form it clearly demonstrates just as much human consciousness and intelligence. I think that’s neat.
Stuart Quan as Tai, the brother (wearing a shirt so small it could be considered a sports bra) clearly wanted to show off his martial arts skills and gets plenty of opportunities to do so, and the fights often come out of nowhere, but there’s one fight I love toward the end, where he fights a cop who actually stops to point out the absurdity of this and other ‘80s movie overreactions, saying that he could’ve helped if Tai had actually talked to him.
NIGHT SHADOW is very cheap and in many ways is exactly what you expect from a tiny werewolf movie you’ve never heard of, but it’s got some surprises and some cool ideas that absolutely make it worth checking out.