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Howlingween 4: Beastly Mist

A surprisingly intelligent swarm of flesh-eating insects is terrorising a small tourist community in Florida, leaving skeletons in its wake. It's left to a professor in entomology and the Forran family to battle the swarm.

While still in Florida and not long after surviving Jack O'Beggar (in Howlingween 3: Red River County), the hapless Forran family meets its greatest challenge: an insatiable swarm of tiny flesh-eating bugs.

Even eight-year-old Tracy Forran's other father, a huge supernatural wolf (named Wolf), cannot defeat the swarm.

The family finds an ally in Professor Fred Rolfe, a retired entomologist, whose hobby is making and selling honey in the tourist community of Mayerling where he lives. Unfortunately, he has lost his wife to the swarm and is determined to rid the swarm from Mayerling.

What the professor fears most is the swarm's ability to learn. It becomes a contest as to who learns quicker about the other: the swarm about the ways of humans or the humans about the swarm.

In the meantime, the professor is working feverishly to create a new insecticide. Ordinary insect sprays won't do as the bugs are so formed, due to their unique evolution, as to be practically immune. He guesses, however, the swarm’s nest lies beyond the marshes and somewhere along the edge of the swamp.

Al Grassley, an African-American celebrity, in his 60s, who is probably Mayerling’s major tourist attraction, joins the professor and the Forran family by bringing his drone to search for the swarm's nest and then crash into it, hopefully destroying its entrance/exit. The strategy fails as the swarm envelopes the drone in mid-air, clogging its propellers and bringing it down into murky swamp waters.

Other attempts to destroy the nest or the swarm also fail.

Wolf's role is ambivalent: he will protect his daughter (Tracy) but will not destroy the nest as he has a long history of hatred towards humans, originating from 1891 when white hunters killed his pack.

In this fourth instalment, we learn for the first time that Wolf is doubly conflicted: not only is he constrained from hurting humans by his obligation to his human daughter, but his immortality was achieved by allowing into his soul on that fateful day in 1891, Skull, the ever-vengeful spiritual leader of all wolves. Should Skull leave Wolf’s soul, Wolf will lose his immortality.

However, after eventually seeing the swarm is an existential threat to his daughter, he disobeys Skull and becomes mortal and a normal-sized wolf who nonetheless helps the professor and Thomas (Tracy's biological father) to finally rid the swarm from the community.

The world celebrates the heroism of the professor, the Forrans and Wolf and thereafter the Forrans, Wolf with them, travel to a landscape in Montana where Wolf originally lived in 1891. To Tracy’s sadness, the Forrans see off Wolf as he joins a wolf pack.

But to her joy, she sees her biological mother, whom Wolf transformed into a she-wolf after her murder by human-organ hunters (please see first instalment, Howlingween), join Wolf as the two of them disappear into the forest to presumably live happily ever after.

Script Excerpt
Written by:
Format:
Screenplay
Genres:
Budget:
Low
Posted:
06/18/2020
Updated:
04/15/2023
Author Bio:
UPDATE: 15 APRIL 2023 Great news! Today I have completed a rewrite of Counterchance. Please, if you have read the screenplay before, read it again. Up to 96 per cent of errors in word usage and syntax have been spotted and corrected. Many ambiguities in expression have been set right. Several drops in story consistency have been detected and straightened. In my opinion, Counterchance has the ingredients for a huge commercial success while at the same time being a thinking person's film as it explores the theme of crime and punishment without being didactic (ie, the story comes first, not the theme).

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