Reviews

I was fortunate enough to see this film without preamble. Unfortunately, it seems to have a special appeal for people (Family Guy fans?) who find incredible amusement in the hyper-mundane. When the friends of such zealous fans come along expecting grand comedy, it's no wonder there is disappointment.

Napoleon Dynamite is not a hilarious movie. My impression is that it was not intended to be that. More, it is a kind of irony play on the tropes of the teen comedy genre. Hess turned Hollywood-plot style romanticism of adolescence on it's head by portraying it (by the numbers) with bumbling, and uncomfortably familiar, naturalism. I adore it, but it's no laugh riot.

Napoleon Dynamite is something like Robert Altman's The Player. Both are unusually clever. Both are hugely popular with certain people. And in both cases, the most ardent fans seem to have actually missed the point.

I disagree 100% with the reviewer who disagreed 100% with the reviewer who gave this short movie an "F" grade. Cashing in heavily on political propaganda only obscures Joe Dante's lack of ability to pull another Howling out of his bag of tricks. The Masters of Horror series was a phenomenal collection of truly horrifying tales, save for this episode.

Despite gaining acclaim from those who wish to promote it's political slant, "Homecoming" is the least effective episode of MOH season one. Unlike the rest of the series, Dante's entry is a parody of the genre, falling short of both horror and humor in it's ham-fisted delivery of a hackneyed political point.

Dante can really only be blamed for pulling this stinker off the shelf, as it wasn't his creation. The zombie sub-genre is very popular this decade, and among the crop of predictable George Romero tributes and vacuous fantasies are a number of works designed to push political or (ir)religeous messages. Such works are not written by or intended for true horror fans. Maybe Dante really isn't a a Master of Horror, either. What has he been up to since The Howling, after all?

If you want a lame anti-war zombie flick with a few pop culture references passed off as humor, Homecoming may be just your thing. If you are a horror fan looking for something Masterful, pick up... most any other episode of the series. My personal favorite was Dario Argento's "Jenifer," based loosely on a classic comic short by the team of Bruce Jones and Berni Wrightson -- truly creepy.

Fox television was just starting out, so it is not fair of me to judge too harshly the low-budget fur-suit effects of Werewolf. Even if they were often ridiculous.

However, as a genre fanatic I stuck with the show religiously in '87, despite the modified gorilla suits. The series started out well and remained engaging for the better part of it's run, following the tradition of the Fugitive, the Incredible Hulk and the Night Stalker.

Then it started trying to become artsy. The imagery of Werewolf's last episodes may remind some viewers of David Lynch's work a few years later, or vice versa. Whether this was the director's attempt to make up for increasingly dodgy writing, or an exercise of artistic freedom following early news of cancellation, the result was arguably a bad end to a potentially classic TV show.

For the sake of nostalgia, I do hope to see this series published on DVD. Newcomers would probably dig the show, though it isn't going to live up to the high praise some reviewers give it.