Howling II: Stirba - Werewolf Bitch (1985) on Netflix
R19851h 31mComedyHorrorThriller
Ben White buries his sister Karen. Stefan Crosscoe tells him she was a werewolf and leads Ben and Karen's colleague Jenny Templeton to Transylvania to face the werewolf queen Stirba.
- Netflix1.7/5
- IMDb3.8/109,349 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes31%
Trailer
Plot summary
At the funeral of the journalist Karen White, her brother Ben meets Jenny Templeton, a colleague of Karen's, and Stefan Crosscoe, a stranger who says Karen carried the werewolf curse. When Karen's body rises from the mausoleum, Crosscoe destroys it and proves his claim. He asks Ben and Jenny to travel with him to Transylvania, where Stirba, an immortal werewolf queen, leads her own kind. On the road the group meets Mariana, a werewolf siren with a servant in tow. In the Balkans, Ben and Jenny wander a folk festival while Crosscoe introduces them to villagers who have sworn to oppose Stirba because she killed members of their families. Stirba is in a castle nearby.
Cast
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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Howling II: Stirba - Werewolf Bitch (1985)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- When Howling II put out a casting call in communist Prague looking for "punks", 1,000 people turned up, so many that the local authorities called in both the police and the military. An army colonel let director Philippe Mora finish the scene only if the crowd left in groups of no more than three.
- Director Philippe Mora repeated the shot of Sybil Danning baring her breasts five times in the end credits because he thought it was funny. The producer loved it and told the editor to reprint it, so the final print shows the shot 17 times.
- Philippe Mora agreed to direct Howling II because Hemdale had not yet paid him for directing A Breed Apart. The studio arranged a deal in which he would be paid for both films if he took on the sequel.
- Producer Steven Lane never saw any profits from the first The Howling because of Avco Embassy Pictures' poor finances. He had bought out co-producer Jack Crawford and owned the sequel rights, but the rights to a direct sequel stayed with Avco Embassy.
- Hemdale misrepresented its financial standing to producer Steven Lane, so both pre-production and production were hit by repeated stops and location changes. Gary Brandner rewrote the script multiple times to account for the new locations.
- Howling II is the only sequel in the series that directly follows the events of the original film, and the only Howling film to include input from Gary Brandner, the author of the original novels.
- Effects artist Steve Johnson said Hemdale's financial troubles were also behind the poor quality of the special effects, many of which were added in post-production several months after filming had wrapped.
- Shooting in communist Prague brought unusual problems: Philippe Mora's government-assigned assistant director knew nothing about filmmaking, and Mora had to import trash from America to clutter the clean communist streets.
