EDITOR’S NOTE: Howling IV was on USA Up All Night on July 3, 1992, April 23, 1994 and April 13, 1996.

John Hough has some great movies in his directorial history, including Twins of Evil, The Legend of Hell House, The Watcher in the Woods, The Incubus, American Gothic, Escape to Witch Mountain, Return to Witch Mountain and Biggles. That’s a great run. He also made this movie, which attempts to revive The Howling series, bringing it closer to the original film.

Author Marie Adams keeps having visions of nuns and werewolves attacking her from a fire. It seems that the same imagination that helps her write is also driving her to madness. Her husband takes her moving all the way to madness, to Drago, where a small cottage will be the place that she plans on resting and relaxing away all the terror that she is going through. That would work if she didn’t keep hearing howling in the woods.

Much like the first film, her man can’t stay faithful. The small town is also rife with werewolves, ghosts and visions of the nun. The whole thing ends in a burning church, and yes, that same werewolf leaps through the flames.

Well, if anything, this is the only werewolf movie I’ve seen that has a theme song by the lead singer of the Moody Blues. So there’s that.

That said, this is a more faithful version of the book than The Howling. Yet it’s not as good a movie. Writer and co-producer of the film, Clive Turner, was originally going to direct, but when the financiers pulled out, he had to get Hough on board.

That’s one story. The other is the one that Hough told Fangoria. The script was written by someone named Freddie Rowe and he would also receive notes and messages from him, as well as additional pages of the script, while making the movie. However, when the director asked for Rowe’s contact information, he was never given it, leading him to suspect Rowe of actually being Clive Turner, who really wanted to be the director of the movie. Seeing as how Rowe only wrote one other movie — Howling V: The Rebirth, which Turner also wrote — that may or may not be true.

Making that story sound even more true is the fact that Turner recut and re-edited the film, adding scenes like the one where the evil werewolf queen Eleanor went bobbing for hot dogs with Marie’s husband.

You can watch this for yourself on Tubi and try and make better sense of it than I did.