The start of An American Werewolf in Paris is extremely promising. For about half an hour, we feel like we're watching a horror movie straight from the 80s, with that mocking, light humor that never allows the tension of the story to be dissipated.
Coming from a fine example of the snuff style (Mute Witness, 1994), Waller was a highly regarded name to assume the responsibility of commanding a bastard son of a classic eighties. To that end, he called on two rising names in the film industry as protagonists, the young Tom Everett Scott, compared to Tom Hanks (including himself) having done a good job in The Wonders; and the beautiful Frenchwoman Julie Delpy, from Before Dawn (95). But Waller wouldn't have been the first choice: John Landis himself had written a rough script and was even advertised as occupant of the director's chair for the six years it took to make the film.
After a chase scene through the streets of Paris, with the sound of screams muffled by a classic performance, An American Werewolf in Paris features a group of backpacker friends traveling across Europe, scoring points for each achievement on an intimate scale. Andy McDermott (Everett), Brad (Vince Vieluf) and Chris (Phil Buckman) invade the Eiffel Tower at dawn to enjoy the beautiful view. Andy decides to bungee jump, but is interrupted by the presence of the cat Serafine Pigot (Delpy), daughter of David Kessler and Alex Price from the original, about to commit suicide. He saves her from the fatal fall, but ends up hospitalized after a severe shock to the metals in the tower.
Wanting to find her at any cost, the friends search the Parisian streets for the suicide note, while Andy finds her in the hospital stealing organs to feed. When looking for her, after the girl's contempt, they are invited by the strange Claude (Pierre Cosso) to a night of fun at the "Club de la Lune ", a kind of Titty Twister, created to provide a feast for several werewolves. In the process, saved by Serafine, Andy is wounded in the leg while escaping through the sewer, leaving his friends at the mercy of the creatures. The next day, he's in the girl's care, already undergoing the transformation process when he sees Serafine's dead mother and also his friend Brad, in addition to the strange nightmares that plagued David Kessler in the original.
The script hits us with a series of jokes involving an undead in a state of decomposition and the story is lost. Of course, a movie like this has to have a bit of humor (one of the strengths of An American Werewolf in London, by the way), but wait... everything has its limits. A movie like that is rich in that silly, ironic and naive teenage humor at the same time, and it works wonderfully. In fact, we have some examples of this humor at the beginning of the film, as in the sequence where Chris, while looking for a note, stares at a girl's breasts, or when Brad, who is trying to read over an old man's shoulder, pretends to be dancing to outwit. It's an inconsequential humor, but it fits perfectly in the mood of these films, having fun. Unfortunately, screenwriters Tim Burns, Tom Stern and Anthony Waller seem to find it more fun to show an undead girl trying to whistle to no avail, as every time she blows a stream of blood comes out of a wound in her cheek or her eye. Ejected. Besides not working as an escape', scenes like these end up destroying the suspense atmosphere built at the beginning of the story. Horror gives way to slavish comedy.
Unlike the macabre style of the masterpiece, which subtly worked with humor in ghostly apparitions, this one has more scattershot and exaggerated scenes, often leaving horror in the background. The chemistry of the cast is even interesting and promotes an identification with the audience, but the creative freedoms of the script by Tim Burns, Tom Stern and Anthony Waller himself widened the distance with the classic. Among the nonsense, they invented a possibility to end the curse, the cursed being enough to feed on the heart of the werewolf that contaminated him! They also erred in creating a formula that allows for immediate transformation into a werewolf, a solution that only serves to allow monsters to appear without the need for the moon. Remember that in the original, David spends three weeks in the hospital, suffering nightmares and apparitions, until the transformation in the fourth week.
The script creates interesting situations through the streets of Paris, emulating passages from the previous film, now reinterpreted in another way, as for example, the classic passage of the car pileup in the middle of a full moon night, confusion caused by the werewolf in full attack, but that here it takes on a parodic tone, in broad daylight. Persecutions are also efficiently handled by the sector, trained in monitoring the constant action of young Andy in his new "human condition". However, what was incredibly developed to establish an intriguing atmosphere in the 1981 film is not repeated in this aesthetically inferior sequel, released so long later and with technical resources capable of making an even better story. It didn't happen that way, mainly due to the mistaken work of the visual effects sector, which depend exclusively on digital resources, without the old and functional double of makeup + CGI.
Werewolves are well conceived and scary indeed. Unfortunately, the composition of the film was poorly done, which means that the animals do not fit perfectly into the environment in which they are inserted, becoming a little lighter, without shadows. What's more, it gets scarier when we can't see clearly where the danger is coming from. Fully revealing the werewolf is visually interesting, but takes some of the tension out of it. The makeup effects created by Rick Baker for the first movie were more effective.
Wallen's direction is good - he knows how to play with his camera, always adept at capturing really interesting frames. However, the director fails to surprise us: there are few scares and truly tense moments in the story - which is regrettable, as this is the kind of thing we look for in films like this. Still, more than two decades after its release, An American Werewolf in Paris remains good entertainment, due to the claustrophobic scenes, in the club and the sewer, and the nightly chase in the cemetery by the mausoleums. It may not reach the lycanthrope's paw hair from the original movie, but it still provides a good experience.
