For most, the idea of taking a story as truly unsettling as perhaps the world’s most famous body snatchers and turning it into dark comedy may seem an almost herculean task, but it’s hard to argue with the vision of John Landis, who has An American Werewolf In London under his belt.
The story of the eponymous heroes is quite simple; two destitute men looking for a path to an acceptable lifestyle discover that a medical doctor requires fresh corpses for anatomy lectures. They stumble into such an unfortunate and discover that habeas corpus is just such a method; though the film distorts the facts surrounding their first payment slightly, what they are given today amounts to just over a thousand dollars, and all they had to do was stick a body in a barrel and roll him to the not-so-good doctor. Of course, the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry, and when demand is up and supply is low, they set to work making a killing.
Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis play the pair with delectable glee; Serkis’ well-known talents with motion capture provide him with plenty of elasticity for physical comedy, while Pegg’s deadly timing and concise facial expressions do all the work that his razor-sharp tongue doesn’t do for him. Watching people die and seeing the human form perverted for the sake of easy transportation has never been so funny.
When the film leaves the facts aside, however, the story loses its way. The fate of the two protagonists is a matter of public record, so the makers force their story to fit the facts in the beginning and the end with the middle becoming more of an unnecessary love story than an examination of the type of mindset required to do these dirty deeds. Aside from a completely fabricated epilogue (apart from the involvement of one of the world’s foremost scientific minds), the biggest distortion of the truth comes in the indictment of the two men; historical record shows that one party sold out to save their own skin and found themselves in destitution, but having one main character act entirely out of self-interest while condemning another to death might be too dark a territory for even Landis to mine for comedy.
It’s not an astounding effort, but it deserves more recognition than it’s currently getting. Ever since The Twilight Zone tragedy, Landis’ career has been understandably caught in a quagmire, so he’s been quietly making a few decent films without widespread acclaim, and it’s difficult to argue against the fact that this is his best since Coming To America, and having stated that he’s ready to return to horror with a new film, this serves as a perfect tool to whet the appetite.
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