"We should never try to deny the beast -- the animal within us."

Did you ever hear a movie was really good, so you give it a try, and get bored somewhere in the first ten minutes and give up on it? Then maybe a few years later and you try it again, only to find yourself unable to stay awake beyond the same scenes that bored you the first time. Then, for some reason or other, you decide to give it one last chance and you have to ask yourself, "What the fuck was my problem?"

This week's Thursday Thriller is The Howling.

I've held a completely unfounded grudge against this 1981 Joe Dante film for 37 years because I had no patience to give a damn what TV reporter Karen White (Dee Wallace) was doing in that phone booth, which is weird because her mission wasn't boring at all. White had been receiving phone calls from a notorious serial killer named Eddie (Robert Picardo). She had agreed to meet with him in the seedier part of New York City. At the same time, she was wearing a transmitter so the viewers at home could listen live as she interviewed a murderer then handed him over to the police, but the transmitter went dead moments before Eddie called her in the telephone booth and told her to meet him at the peep shows. The police lose her trail and she is alone with a killer in a peep show booth and he likes to watch roughies, apparently. When he shows her his face, the horror is so traumatizing she can't remember a thing about the encounter to explain later on the air.

Great opener. Did I have the volume down too low or something? Why was I so mad at this movie?

Karen goes to see her psychiatrist Dr. George Waggner (Patrick Macnee) and he suggests she take a vacation at The Colony, a laid-back rustic resort where Waggner's patients can relax, socialize and be treated. Karen brings her husband Bill (Christopher Stone), who later gets bitten and seduced by a sexy lady werewolf named Marsha (Elisabeth Brooks).

The story is fine. The acting is fine. Dante keeps the action moving at an acceptable pace. Pino Donaggio did the music. The special werewolf effects by Rob Bottin were second only to Rick Baker's work on An American Werewolf in London that same year. I've said before that An American Werewolf in London has the best werewolf transformation scene of all time, and I stand by that, but The Howling has two people turning into werewolves while having sex, and that counts for a lot.

Whatever had my panties in a twist before, I'm now over. The Howling is a great werewolf movie for adults. It streams on Shudder.