Howling II: Stirba - Werewolf Bitch (1985)

Interesting facts

• Budget: $2M
• Based on: The Howling II
• Filmed in: Czech Republic

Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf is a 1985 American horror film directed by Philippe Mora and direct sequel to the 1981 film The Howling. The film stars horror film veteran Christopher Lee, Reb Brown, Annie McEnroe and Sybil Danning and focuses on a group of people trying to stop werewolf queen Stirba and her group's plans to conquer the world. Although Gary Brandner, author of The Howling novels, co-wrote the screenplay, the Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf is largely unrelated to his 1979 novel The Howling II.

Production

While the first The Howling was a financial hit, producer Steven Lane never saw any of the profits due to the poor financial standing at Avco Embassy Pictures which offset several unrelated costs towards The Howling and consuming much of the film's revenue in the process.

This film is the only Howling sequel that directly follows the original film's events and is also the only Howling film to feature the input of the original novelist, Gary Brandner. Brandner was critical of the original 1981 film, which was only a loose adaptation of his 1977 novel, and some elements of this sequel may have been deliberately divergent from the previous film, though some (such as this film's retconning of the worldwide revelation…

Director Philippe Mora said during that he originally chose to repeat the shot with Danning revealing her bare breasts 5 times during the end credits "because I thought it was funny. Unbeknownst to me, the producer saw it and thought it was the greatest thing he'd ever seen. He said to the editor, 'Reprint that!'" The final print repeats the shot 17 times during the end credits.

Some scenes were shot in Los Angeles, but most of the film was shot on locations in what was, at the time, the country of Czechoslovakia—for example, in the ossuary in Mělník, a town in Central Bohemia, as well as at Barrandov Studios, Prague. Shooting in communist Prague offered difficulties: Mora's government-assigned assistant director knew nothing of filmmaking.

Co-stars Marsha Hunt and Christopher Lee previously appeared together in Dracula A.D. 1972. In 1990, when Lee was cast in Gremlins 2: The New Batch, one of the first things he did was apologize to director Joe Dante (who directed The Howling) for being in this film. Lee had also played the antagonist in Captain America II: Death Too Soon (1979), which starred Reb Brown in the title role.

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