With less than two months until camp-lovers can attend their local showing of Rocky Horror, the Oakland International Film Festival will fill that hole with an 85-minute, campy, indie film on Sept. 13. The film, Werewolf Serenade, serves as entertainment for the locavores of the Bay Area and its wine valleys.
Like its title, the film doesn’t take itself too seriously, and the audience isn’t expected to either. Director, actor and writer—and Weeklys editor—Daedalus Howell wrote the script as a course project while finishing his degree at San Francisco State in the late half of the pandemic.
Deciding to take it further, his wife, Kary Hess, joined him to form a husband-and-wife team making a film about a husband-and-wife team who elude evil and vastly improve their sex life.
Howell hopes the film fills the theater with laughter and excitement, as it did at the cast-and-crew screening in Petaluma. Hess and Howell—both artists, writers, filmmakers and journalists—chose their own town for the film’s setting. It’s an homage to horror classics and to Petaluma, itself a movie town—think American Graffiti, Peggy Sue Got Married, Inventing the Abbotts and more.
When the main character, played by Howell, runs through the town growling and snarling, it’s the restaurant patrons at The Shuckery who turn with raised eyebrows. Easter eggs like that brought much laughter to the 280 attendees at the screening.
The Kafkaesque narrative of the natural changes life brings is represented by the main character’s animal transformation. It’s this metaphor of lycanthropy that made the story so easy to write. “When you get to my age, at 51,” Howell said, “at this point, change is not just inevitable. You literally wake up with hair growing out of places you thought would’ve been impossible the night before.”
Which begs the question: Is that how the sideburns happened, Howell?
Peter MacTire (Daedalus Howell), an on-the-nose tribute to the story Peter and the Wolf, is a college professor who notably hasn’t read Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse—which, of course, has everything to do with the plot. His faculty peer, Stu, works as a professor in the leading parapsychology department in the nation, according to the dean (Alia Beeton). Stu runs a secret research project for a wealthy donor and winds up dying under suspicious circumstances.
As every mad scientist is doomed to be, Stu ends up his own guinea pig. Now desperate for a new researcher so she can keep the donor’s funding, the dean recruits someone who has absolutely no expertise on the subject, Peter.
With Howell’s natural sideburns cutting monster-prosthetic costs, Hess’ wolf-saint portrait covering a mirror on the wall and a character whose t-shirt is a blaring statement on his current predicament, the film is entertaining and easy to watch.
Sitting in a theater, out of the summer heat, knowing one doesn’t have to look very far for the jokes or the Easter eggs may just make one want to howl at the moon.
‘Werewolf Serenade’ plays Fri, Sept. 13, at 8:30pm, Mills College at Northeastern University, 5000 MacArthur Blvd., Oakland. oiff.org.
