An American Werewolf in Paris (1997)

An American Werewolf in Paris arrived in 1997 as a sequel to a film that had won an Oscar for its makeup and, more to the point, had a sense of humor about the whole business. The sequel has the comic timing of a man falling down a staircase. Tom Everett Scott plays Andy, a tourist who rescues Julie Delpy from the Eiffel Tower and is rewarded with a curse, a dead best friend who will not stop talking, and an underground nightclub staffed by werewolves who have learned to transform at will. There is a serum. There is a Fourth of July party. Almost everyone dies. The picture was assembled by a rotating cast of writers and directors, and the seams show in every tonal lurch and every computer transformation that resembles a screen saver from the period.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film is a barren field. The cast is white and European, and the screenplay has no interest in remarking on that or on anything else. Serafine is a capable woman with a tragic family history, and nobody involved thinks to make a thesis of it. The werewolf society is a pyramid scheme of appetite, with no economic subtext to speak of. Nobody lectures. Nobody learns. The ghosts are annoying, not allegorical. Claude wants power and flesh, and the film is content to let him have both until the third act removes him.

The whole enterprise exists to deliver gore and gags, and it delivers them badly. Critics at the time were unkind, the box office was indifferent, and John Landis himself said he thought it was lousy. He was correct. This is a film with nothing on its mind, which in a certain light is a kind of integrity. The classification is straightforward. Zero.