Director: Rino Di Silvestro
Cast: Annik Borel, Howard Ross, Dagmar Lassander, Tino Carrato, Elio Zamuto
Screenplay: Rino Di Silvestro
98 mins. Rated R.

I promise, I’m not trying to cover movies that only start with “W,” but it seems fate has selected it. In fact, if there was any way to avoid covering today’s film, I probably would have, but I’m sticking to my guns. Today’s movie is a bad movie, a lycanthropic tale that seems to suggest sexual awakening and traumatic childhood memories but really just wants to display a bunch of nudity, werewolf boobs, sexual encounters, and the occasional throat-rip. I know that might sound enticing to you naughty terror fiends, but I assure you, it’s not.

Daniela Neseri (Annik Borel, Truck Turner) has been having recurring dreams that she is a werewolf, only to discover that she had an ancestor accused of lycanthropy, one that looks just like her. She struggles with forming romantic or sexual bonds with others due to some childhood trauma, but when her delusions of this curse bleed into her regular life, she begins taking sexual partners and then murdering them soon after. It’s only after she finds a loving partner that she feels she can shake the curse, but when a traumatic event occurs in their home, she loses all control over her “curse.”

Werewolf Woman sells you on the risqué nature of the film, but writer/director Rino Di Silvestro (Deported Women of the SS Special Section) can’t seem to decide between selling the smut and actively making a film that wants to speak about survivors and the impact of decades of trauma on the human mind. The result is a movie that doesn’t really have an identity, moving from nude scene to sex scene to violent scene before beginning the cycle all over again. Wash, Rinse, Repeat.

Maybe the pulpier elements would’ve had more impact had the performers been able to play the eroticism with any amount of earnestness. Everyone here looks rehearsed and pretty uncomfortable, making the sex feel robotic and pretty dull. On the sexy werewolf scale, this one is closer to Howling III (you know, the one with the Australian nipple lycanthropes) than The Howling.

Werewolf Woman begins with a lot of flavor, and it sets forward with a pretty intriguing dream narrative, but that goes away rather quick, and we’re left with a dull and meandering narrative that plays out its hits in the first 30 minutes and then cycles through it all again and again. When the movie is interacting with Daniela’s dreams, things are working, but it doesn’t happen often enough. You’d have better changes with a random Howling sequel than with Werewolf Woman.

2/5
-Kyle A. Goethe