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.
Lo and behold, though, as he is about to jump, he sees a young woman leap in an apparent suicide. Andy leaps and saves her, but she runs away, leaving her to track her down. This is Serafine (Julie Delpy), and she is inexplicably going to be Andy’s love interest for the rest of the film.
What we’re going to learn over time is that Serafine is a werewolf. She’s also friends with Claude (Pierre Cosso), which is honestly a great name for a werewolf character. Claude and his werewolf friends want to overthrow society, mainly by turning into werewolves and killing everyone they can. Serafine is not on the same page, and so while Claude and his friends run an underground club with the hope of murdering and eating the people who attend, Serafine gets locked in a basement. Andy and his friends go to the club. Chris decides to see if he can find Serafine (he does) and she locks him in the basement and then transforms. Brad gets munched and Andy gets wounded, which means that now Andy is going to be our title character.
Honestly, there’s a lot of plot going on here, and the movie genuinely isn’t worth the time to discuss all of it. Basically, anyone who is wounded by a werewolf (like Andy) becomes a werewolf. Anyone who is killed by a werewolf becomes undead, visible only to the werewolf, and hangs around until the werewolf that killed them is itself killed. It also adds a new piece of lore—if a werewolf kills the werewolf that caused their infection and eats its heart, they’ll be cured of their lycanthropy. Why is this here? Because someone decided that Tom Everett Scott deserves a happy ending.
An American Werewolf in Paris is at least ostensibly a comedy. There are things that are supposed to be funny in here, but not many of them actually are. The conceit of the London film, that our werewolf can see his mutilated friend, loses all of its charm when the person who shows up is a humorless frat bro with nothing interesting to say. The same is true when Andy’s victim Amy (Julie Bowen) starts appearing as well, attempting to get Andy killed.
A bigger problem, and that’s saying something, is that this was made in 1997 and makes extensive use of CGI. Do you remember what CGI looked like in 1997? It wasn’t great. This is several years after Jurassic Park was released and it looks decades worse. It’s also a movie that came out 16 years after An American Werewolf in London, which still has boffo special effects. The werewolf transformation in Landis’s film is still one of the best ever done. Here, it looks cartoonish and embarrassing.
There is essentially nothing to recommend this film. It took me several days to plow my way through it because I was suffering from second-hand embarrassment for virtually everyone on screen. The acting is silly, the plot is all over the place, and the effects are terrible. Worse, our two leads have absolutely no chemistry. Julie Delpy is quantum levels above Tom Everett Scott. And worst of all? It goes for a happy ending. Werewolves don’t get happy endings; they’re all about the tragedy. This stupid film couldn’t even get that right.
Why to watch An American Werewolf in Paris: You have a low threshold for what you consider entertaining.
Why not to watch: It's stupid.
