After the atrocious (yet oddly fun) “Howling 2” who in their right mind thought it was a good idea to turn director Philippe Mora loose on another “Howling” film? Aargh. This time we’re in the Australian outback as it appears that all over the world there are various species of werewolves residing amongst us. Australia’s coincidentally are of the marsupial kind, which basically means werewolves with pouches. Yes, just like a damn kangaroo. Jerboa, a foxy young wereroo, decides to run away from her hippy like commune of fellow wereroos after refusing to mate with the leader of the pack. Taking a bus into the city (with what money?) she finds pretty boy Donny who immediately casts her in a local horror film that’s shooting down the street. The two fall in love and eventually Jerboa becomes pregnant with Donny’s wereroo baby. To make this blissfully short, Jerboa and Donny eventually wind up back at wereroo headquarters as the government has now declared open season on lycanthropes. Aided by a sympathizing Professor, Jerboa and Donny trek across the outback with baby in tow, while their fellow wereroos try to hold off the advancing invaders.

There’s a ton of various subplots running throughout, including some spiritual/occult mumbo jumbo to explain the wereroos, the addition of a Russian werewolf ballerina to mate with an Australian wereroo, but ah, you won’t really give a rat’s ass about that. This one tried to cram so many ideas into it I’m surprised it had any coherence whatsoever. The main problem I had with this one is that Mora seems to have a hard time deciding on whether he’s making a straight out horror film or a parody. The movie is full of little comedic moments, many of them pointing fun at werewolves in general. And when you’re poking fun at the monster, how can you possibly make it scary?

The movie is also rated PG-13 and is extremely light on any truly horrific moments, which sort of reinforces my idea of Mora making a “werewolf-lite” kind of flick. The acting and overall look of the film, to be fair, was fairly good. The surprising production values however certainly don’t extend to the werewolf f/x, and thanks to the PG-13 rating there’s hardly any blood splashed. In one scene where Jerboa and Donny are in a theatre watching a (surprise, surprise) werewolf flick, Jerboa comments on a scene where some guy is painfully turning into a wolf. “It doesn’t happen like that”, she says to Donny, when in fact every person to wolf change in the actual movie does indeed happen “just like that”. That shit's gotta hurt. The transformation scenes themselves are somewhat decent, but still nothing like what we saw in the first film, and the final wolf costumes just don’t look right. The final product however is just too uneven to be a decent film. To many plot ideas, uneven special effects, unsure if wants to scare or laugh, and, last but not least...fucking wereroos. Give me Sybil Danning’s breasts and fornicating werewolves any day.