An American Werewolf in Paris

An American Werewolf in Paris
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Anthony Waller
Screenplay by	Tim Burns Tom Stern
Story by	Anthony Waller
Based on	Characters by John Landis
Produced by	Richard Claus
Starring	Tom Everett Scott Julie Delpy Vince Vieluf Phil Buckman Julie Bowen Pierre Cosso Tom Novembre Thierry Lhermitte
Cinematography	Egon Werdin
Edited by	Peter R. Adam
Music by	Wilbert Hirsch
Production companies	Hollywood Pictures[1] Stonewood Productions[1]
Distributed by	Buena Vista Pictures[1]
Release date	August 31, 1997 (1997-08-31) (United Kingdom) December 25, 1997 (1997-12-25) (United States)
Running time	102 minutes[2]
Countries	United States[3] France[3] Netherlands[3] Luxembourg[3]
Languages	English French
Budget	$25 million[4]
Box office	$26.6 million[4]

An American Werewolf in Paris (the "An" does not appear in the title scene) is a 1997 horror comedy film directed by Anthony Waller, screenplay by Tim Burns, Tom Stern, and story by Waller, and starring Tom Everett Scott and Julie Delpy. It follows the general concept of, and is a sequel to John Landis's 1981 film An American Werewolf in London. The film is an international co-production between companies from the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, and the United States.

Unlike its predecessor, which was distributed by Universal Pictures, it was distributed by Buena Vista Pictures under its Hollywood Pictures label, and upon this film's theatrical release, is met with unfavorable reviews.

Plot[]

Andy McDermott (Tom Everett Scott) is a tourist seeing the sights of Paris with his friends Brad (Vince Vieluf) and Chris (Phil Buckman). When Serafine Pigot (Julie Delpy) leaps off the Eiffel Tower just before Andy is about to bungee jump, he executes a mid-air rescue. She vanishes into the night, leaving Andy intrigued – unaware that she is the daughter of David Kessler and Alex Price. That night, Andy, Chris, and Brad attend a night club called "Club de la Lune". The club's owner, Claude (Pierre Cosso), is actually the leader of a werewolf society that uses the club as a way to lure in people (preferably tourists) to be killed. Serafine arrives, tells Andy to run away and transforms into a werewolf. The club owners transform into werewolves as well, and butcher all the guests. Chris escapes and goes back to Serafine's house. Brad is killed by a werewolf, and Andy is bitten by another werewolf when he tries to escape.

The next day, Andy wakes up at Serafine's house. Serafine blends organs in the blender, and he is still in shock, but Serafine allows him to feel her breasts to calm him down. She tells him he's transforming into a werewolf. This is interrupted by the sudden appearance of the ghost of Serafine's mother Alex. Andy jumps out the window in sheer panic and begins running away. Chris tries to get his attention, but Claude grabs him and holds his hand over his mouth and takes him to the basement. Soon, Brad's ghost appears to Andy and explains Andy's werewolf condition. For Andy to become normal again, he must eat the heart of the werewolf that bit him; and, for Brad's ghost to be at rest, the werewolf that killed him must be killed, too. After developing an appetite for raw meat, Andy hooks up with an American tourist named Amy Finch (Julie Bowen), but he transforms and kills her. Andy also kills a cop who had been tailing him, suspecting Andy was involved in the Club de la Lune massacre. Andy is arrested but escapes. He begins to see Amy's ghost as well, and she begins trying to kill him.

Claude and his henchmen ask Andy to join their society but to prove his loyalty, Andy must kill Chris. Serafine rescues Andy, explaining that her stepfather prepared a drug to control werewolf transformations. However, the drug forces werewolves to immediately transform into their beast form. As a result, she killed her mother and savaged her stepfather. Claude and the other werewolves raid Serafine's stepfather's lab and kill him, taking the drug to transform immediately.

Serafine and Andy learn of a Fourth of July party Claude has planned and infiltrate it. They help the party-goers escape, and Andy manages to kill the werewolf that ate Brad's heart, thus setting Brad free. The police arrive, and a fight ensues. Andy and Serafine manage to kill many werewolves, with Serafine shifting to her beast form to fight when she runs out of ammunition. During a fight between Serafine and another werewolf, Andy shoots one of the wolves, but it turns out that he has shot Serafine. As she reverts to her human form she begs him to kill her but he is unable to and authorities who arrive on the scene assume that he is trying to kill her before escaping.

Claude makes his way onto a subway train, but he slips onto the tracks. A train slams into him, causing him to transform back to a human. He tries to take another dose of the drug, but Andy stops him. As they fight, Andy discovers that Claude is the werewolf that bit him: a scar on his left shoulder caused when Andy stabbed the werewolf with a spear. Claude tries to inject himself with the drug but accidentally injects Andy instead. Andy transforms into a werewolf, kills Claude and eats his heart and howls, breaking the werewolf curse. Serafine is taken in an ambulance, but she begins to show signs of transforming. The EMT, thinking she is going into shock, administers adrenaline, which stops the transformation. The sedative, which was thought to be the "cure", actually triggered the change and adrenaline has the opposite effect.

Ultimately, Serafine and Andy celebrate their wedding atop the Statue of Liberty with Andy's pal Chris, who survived. The couple seem to be controlling the curse with a steady application of adrenaline-fueled activities, as they bungee jump off the statue.

Cast[]

• Tom Everett Scott as Andy McDermott
• Julie Delpy as Sérafine Pigot McDermott
• Vince Vieluf as Brad
• Phil Buckman as Chris
• Julie Bowen as Amy Finch
• Pierre Cosso as Claude
• Tom Novembre as Inspector LeDuc
• Thierry Lhermitte as Thierry Pigot
• Anthony Waller as Metro Driver
• Isabelle Constantini as Alex Price (credited as Serafine's Mother)

Production[]

Development[]

The film's title has its roots in the production of its predecessor; when production of the original London film ran into trouble with British Equity, director John Landis, having scouted locations in Paris, considered moving the production to France and changing the title of his film to An American Werewolf in Paris.^[5]

In 1991, Landis was approached by PolyGram Pictures to develop a sequel to the first movie, he wrote a first draft, which would’ve focused on Debbie Klein (a character mentioned in the original film) getting a job in London, and her subsequent investigation into the deaths of David and Jack, several characters from the original film, including Alex Price, Dr.Hirsch, and Sgt.McManus would’ve returned, but the studio turned down the script, as Landis recalled in an interview,

"They hated it, they hated the script, it really was odd, it was not conventional in any way, they were horrified, and I thought that was a good reaction to a horror script, but they were aghast: they thought it was too outré"

At this point, Landis and the studio had parted company, with him stating "Ok, I don’t want to know, just send me a check"^{[6][7][8][9][10]}

Around the same time, Writer/Director John Lafia had written and submitted his own draft to the studio while he left to go work on Child's Play 2, the storyline for Lafia's draft focused on a Schoolteacher in Paris who holds forth on good and evil in a class he teaches. The teacher is bitten by a Lycanthrope and goes through the expected changes; while on his trail is the doctor from the first film, who has been working on a werewolf serum. In an interview with Fangoria magazine, Lafia states that the studio wasn’t interested in his script, explaining "It was kind of a metaphor for things like AIDS and Cancer, It had the same attitude as the first film, along with plenty of really scary stuff, as it stands now it will most likely never be made, which is too bad"^[11]

After Landis left the project, Tom Stern and Tim Burns, who had previously worked on the short lived MTV series The Idiot Box and the 1993 comedy film Freaked, were hired to write a new script, with Stern set as Director.

On being hired to write the script, Stern recalled:

"It was a great challenge to do a sequel that didn't just repeat the original, I wanted to find a way to get around the basic werewolf storyline-it's always about a guy who's bitten by a werewolf and starts turning into one, and he kills people and becomes upset by it, and he's usually killed at the end. In our script, that's the first act"

Stern and Burns's script followed a young American named Andy McDermott, who's vacationing in Spain when he's called to Paris after hearing that his uncle was savaged by a mysterious beast there, as Stern recalled in an interview: "Once he arrives, He's pulled into this nightmare by several characters who knew his uncle, and before you know it, he's deep into the Parisian werewolf experience." As part of the pre-production process, Stern had makeup FX artists Steve Johnson and Tony Gardner work on preliminary designs for the monster, who the writers have described as "A 100 percent killing machine, an awesome, huge, 600-pound werewolf, the biggest, meanest predator on land", and Phil Tippett, who had worked on Jurassic Park, was going to use CGI to bring the beast to life for full body shots while the closer stuff would be the makeup FX crew using animatronic heads. Once they turned in their script to the studio, the studio informed Stern that while they liked the script, he was no longer going to be directing the film. As Stern mentioned in an Interview:

"They were planning to do it on, a medium-low budget, around $10-12 million, and they felt comfortable with me directing it at that level," he reports. "Then when I handed it in, they liked it so much that they wanted to do it on a higher budget, and they needed a big-name director they could use the foreign presales, since Polygram, which owns Propaganda, is a foreign company, When I write a script, I conceive every scene as a director, but now that power has been taken away from me, and I can't say how it's going to end up. It's ironic, because the only reason this movie's going is because we wrote a screenplay everybody loved, and the first thing they did to thank us was to kick me off the picture. They don't think about the creative aspects of the film they don't think, 'Is this the right guy to do this kind of movie?' They just think, well, we need somebody who's had a big hit"

Marco Brambilla, whose film Demolition Man was a major international hit, was then brought on to take over directing, not long after both Stern and Burns moved on to other projects^[12][13][14]

The project fell into limbo for about two years, during that time, Twelve Screenwriters, including Larry Brothers, Neal Purvis, Robert Wade had done their own rewrites on Stern and Burn's Script, with Purvis and Wade contributing the Danger tour and the bungee jump off the Eiffel Tower. During the hiatus Brambilla left, and was replaced by Anthony Waller, who had gained a cult following for his low-budget thriller "Mute Witness" Upon joining the project, Waller had rewritten the script, after the arbitration process, the final screenplay credit went to Stern, Burns, and Waller^[15][16]

Locations[]

Filming took place in Amsterdam, Luxembourg, Metz, New York City, and on location in Paris.^[17]

Alternate ending[]

In an alternate ending, after Andy eats Claude's heart, Serafine has a vision of her stepfather in the back of an ambulance, explaining how he found a cure before his death. The closing scene shows Andy and Chris visiting Serafine at a hospital, where she has given birth to a child, whose eyes shift to look like the werewolves', another version of the alternate ending features Inspector LeDuc (In Chris's place) at the hospital.

Release[]

An American Werewolf in Paris opened theatrically in the United Kingdom on October 31, 1997, in the United States on December 25, and in France on May 6, 1998.

Box office[]

In its opening weekend, the film ranked seventh in the United States and Canada box office and third among new releases, earning $7.6 million.^[18][19] By the end of its run, Paris grossed $26.6 million from a $25 million budget.^[4]

Critical reception[]

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 7% based on reviews from 29 critics, with an average rating of 3.72/10.^[20] On Metacritic it has a score of 31 out of 100 based on reviews from 13 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews".^[21]

Unlike its predecessor, which had Oscar-winning special make-up effects by Rick Baker, Paris relied heavily on CGI for its transformation effects and chase sequences, a common point of derision from most critics.^[22][23]

The film was nominated for Worst Sequel at the 1997 Stinkers Bad Movie Awards but lost to Speed 2: Cruise Control.^[24]

John Landis; the director of An American Werewolf in London didn’t like the movie, saying "I was really disappointed when I saw that film, I thought it was lousy".^[25]

Soundtrack[]

An American Werewolf in Paris
Soundtrack album by Various artists
Released	September 23, 1997
Recorded	53:21
Genre	Pop, Rock and Roll

A soundtrack for An American Werewolf in Paris was released on CD and cassette tape through Hollywood Records on September 23, 1997. It featured music from artists such as Bush, Better Than Ezra, and Cake.^[26] The film's soundtrack is largely responsible for the Bush song "Mouth" releasing as a single in October 1997 as it was featured prominently in the film and trailer. The single, marked as a release from the soundtrack, charted on several Billboard charts, including the Mainstream Rock Tracks and Modern Rock Tracks charts.^[27]

The soundtrack was on Billboard's Top Album Sales chart for five weeks and at its peak placed at position number 80.^[28]

Track list[]

No.	Title	Writer(s)	Performer	Length
1.	"Mouth"	Gavin Rossdale	Bush	4:35
2.	"Psychosis"	Roger Clyne / Arthur Edwards	The Refreshments	5:45
3.	"Normal Town"	Kevin Griffin	Better Than Ezra	3:38
4.	"Never Gonna Give You Up"	Barry White	Cake	3:49
5.	"Sick Love"	Eddie Kurdziel / Jeff McDonald	Redd Kross
6.	"Break the Glass"	Grant Lukacinsky	The Suicide Machines	3:09
7.	"Human Torch"	Tony Scalzo	Fastball	2:42
8.	"Soup Kitchen"	Grant Shanahan	Eva Trout	4:02
9.	"Hardset Head"	cEvin Key / Nivek Ogre	Skinny Puppy	4:05
10.	"Turned Blue"	Jimmy Newquist	Caroline's Spine	3:03
11.	"Downtime"	Paul Andrews / Gareth Prosser / Dan Woodgate	Fat	3:35
12.	"Adrenaline"	Phunk Junkeez	Phunk Junkeez	2:24
13.	"If I Could (What I Would Do)"	Peter Daou / Vanessa Daou	Vanessa Daou	3:32
14.	"Loverbeast in Paris"	Smoove Diamonds		3:42
15.	"Theme from An American Werewolf in Paris"	Wilbert Hirsch	Wilbert Hirsch	1:51

References[]

External links[]

• An American Werewolf in Paris at IMDb
• An American Werewolf in Paris at Box Office Mojo