Sacre Blech!

Film: An American Werewolf in Paris
Format: Streaming video from Peacock on Fire!

Sometimes, when someone drops a sequel years after the original movie, it turns out decently. Sometimes, you get An American Werewolf in Paris. This is a movie that very clearly wants to capitalize on the vastly superior first film that is more than a decade and a half older. Honestly, it feels like a cheat. If you’ve seen An American Werewolf in London, you’re likely to go into this with expectations. Those expectations are not going to be met. This is equally true if you thought it was instead a riff on An American in Paris.

In terms of the set-up, you don’t really need more than the title of the film and the knowledge of the London version. This time, there’s a trio of Americans, and this time, they’re not walking across the moors but instead find themselves in the City of Lights. Andy (Tom Everett Scott), Brad (Vince Vieluf), and Chris (Phil Buckman) are touring Europe and attempting extreme thrills. Andy, who we are going to be following here, is behind on points, but plans on upping his total by (sigh) bungee jumping off the Eiffel Tower, because that’s something that you won’t get caught doing.

Off Script: Mute Witness

Film: Mute Witness
Format: Internet video on laptop.

If you ever needed more evidence that Alec Guinness was a basass, the fact that his final movie credit was for a low-budget horror/thriller involving the concept of snuff films. Guinness evidently did the role—a single scene—as a favor to new filmmaker Anthony Waller on virtually no notice and did it without charging Waller for his time. The film in question is Mute Witness, which features one of the most tension-filled sequences in its first half hour it has been my pleasure to watch in some time. It’s worth noting that that’s true without the appearance of Guinness, who doesn’t show up until the middle of the film and is only in it for a couple of minutes there and at the end.

We open with what looks like a terrible and stupid slasher movie. A woman is getting dressed and a radio report comes on saying that there has been a breakout from a local lunatic asylum. And, of course, the escapee makes a sudden appearance in her apartment and sneaks into her kitchen for a knife. A stabbing follows, and then we get the single longest and stupidest death sequence in film history. It turns out that this is a movie set and the slashing we’ve seen is a failed take that didn’t work thanks to a language barrier. Our film-within-a-film director Andy Clarke (Evan Richards) is an American, but his cast and much of his crew is Russian, since this is being made in Moscow. Also on the set are Andy’s wife Karen (Fay Ripley) and Karen’s sister Billy Hughes (Marina Zudina), who is a make-up artist and completely mute.