Howling VII: New Moon Rising (1995)

Howling: New Moon Rising, reviled as one of the worst werewolf movies of all time and the sequel that finally killed off the Howling series, was the brainchild of producer Clive Turner who had worked on the earlier Howling sequels (a location manager on Howling III, and writer/co-producer on Howling IV and V). Turner took over directing duties from original director Roger Nall.

According to Jerry Macaluso, who together with Roy Knyrim, realized the film's werewolf under their SOTA FX firm, the conflict between Turner and Nall was over the film's tone, with Turner responsible for making the film a boring slog about random rural townsfolk;

'They both had very different visions of what they wanted (...) Roger was making a werewolf movie and Clive was making a very character-driven thing. He really wanted to make a movie about the people of this little town, and the werewolf was completely secondary. Roger is a huge genre fan, however, and he wanted to make a horror movie. So they butted heads on that.'

The conflict between Turner and Nall extended to the design of SOTA's werewolf suit, according to Macaluso, ' 'Clive wanted it to look like the one Steve Johnson had done in IV, and Roger didn't want it to look anything like that. (...) So one day Roger came over and went, 'No, no, no - change it to this', and then Clive came over and said, 'No, no, no, it has to look like Steve's.' So we started to go for a middle ground nobody liked and internally ended up doing some of our own thing, We also tried to keep some of Rob Bottin's style from the original Howling in there.'

(Oddly Jerry Macaluso himself told me that it was the other way round, and that it was Nall who wanted a werewolf similar to Johnson's while Turner wanted a more wolfman-style look - given Nall wanted a horror film, this seems more likely)

Howling VII's budget was below $1 million, and there was only a few weeks to construct the werewolf suit, which resulted in it having very limited facial movements. Macaluso also had to use a cheaper form of fur as well; 'In the amount of time we had, you can't order really nice fur, and that was frustrating, (...) So we had to use slightly cheap fur, but other than that, it came out nice considering the amount of time involved.'

Most of Howling VII's werewolf footage was also left on the cutting room floor, which Turner justified; 'You have to do the best you can within the budget, and the problem is you have to cut corners to make it work, (...) So you try to utilize the money for the best effects but unfortunately, when you go to the special effects people, you end up taking as few risks as possible.'

And if you are charmed enough by this suit in stills, well here it is in all its thirty-second long, bad digital effects morphed glory.

Sources: 

• Fangoria #134 'Long in the Tooth' by Anthony C. Ferrante