The Lunar Pack

I freely admit, the surprising quality of None Left Standing and So Mort it Be left me foolishly overoptimistic about the likely quality that was going to be found on disc 8 of the Tomb of Terrors set. Fortunately, The Lunar Pack was here to set me straight about what I could legitimately expect.

Hosted by Debbie Rochon (who will clearly do anything for a small paycheck) as an Elvira-style character complete with terrible jokes, as she shares with us three short films about werewolves that share a commonality only in their overall terribleness. The first features a vampire and a werewolf fighting, and rather than fighting in any way that would show off that they are, in fact, a vampire and a werewolf, they just kickbox each other a bit instead. Presumably this was inspired by the modern classic Underworld, where we also learned that being a monster isn’t nearly as cool or interesting as wearing leather and dual-wielding guns. Seriously, why even bother making them non-human if you’re planning on making the film like that?

The next short film is done as a detective story (complete in black and white and voice over narration), that seems to be trying to make it a mystery about what the deal is with a housewife that’s been acting strangely recently. It probably would have been slightly more of a mystery, of course, had Rochon not told us before the film started that she was a werewolf, but you work with what you’ve got. Incidentally, each of these short films has its own end credits, which ensures that we get the brilliance of the filmmakers telling us that if we enjoyed this segment (“Sheep’s Clothing”), we can easily find more werewolf films by them on their Geocities page. I won’t lie. That made my day when I saw that.

The final film revolves around a man who is wounded and has his wife killed by a giant wolf out in the wilderness, and now a month later he shows up at the sheriff’s in the hopes of being locked up before the full moon can rise and he kills someone. Now, I will admit that I judged the film a bit too hastily here. When I saw what was clearly a garage with patio furniture inside, I initially thought it was just the most wonderfully nonexistent effort ever expended to try to pull off a sheriff’s office. It of course wound up being the sheriff’s garage at his house, but when the first short film featured a crypt that had an electrical generator inside, I think giving the benefit of the doubt goes out the window. Of course, the remainder of the short film is as lousy as the first two (given that there’s a total of one other major character in the story, guess who the original werewolf turns out to be), but I am curious about one thing. Despite feeling the need for four different end credits sequences, the entire movie was written and directed by Jason Liquori. So why do the werewolves look different in every single segment? Are they supposed to represent different breeds of werewolf, or were the segments just filmed months apart, and they had to keep getting new costumes for some reason? It’s ponderous is what it is.

Rating: ½ *