Movie Thoughts: Challenge to White Fang (1974)

• Released: 25 October 1974
• Directed by: Lucio Fulci
• Running time: 1 h 29 min
• Rating 2.5/5

Synopsis

White Fang, Jason Scott and their friends return to once more take on the greedy Beauty Smith.

My Thoughts

So this is a sequel to White Fang (1973), which was a decent movie. The original didn't pay much heed to the literary source material, and honestly, neither does the sequel. So don't go in suddenly expecting them to be more loyal to Jack London's novel.

This movie was honestly just kind of eh. It started out doing something I really am not okay with: killing off Mitsah, a Native boy and White Fang's best friend from the first movie. Then it replaces him with a white boy who serves exactly the same purpose as Mitsah. So, yeah, way to not only pointlessly kill of your only major character of color, but also to just replace him for no reason. Seriously, there's nothing Bill does that Mitsah couldn't have done. My guess on why they did this is that they needed a new cute kid standin to hang around White Fang, since Mitsah has aged quite a bit in this film. Still, yikes man.

There's also the return of Beauty Smith. You'd really  have expected him to have died in the explosion last movie, huh? Well, turns out he's not only alive, but also still totally okay. The movie starts out making you think that he's become paralyzed from the explosion, but it's soon revealed that this is just a hoax Smith is keeping up to seem less like a threat while meanwhile hoarding all the town's money and looking for a mine. 

Other than these two points, there's really not much worth bringing up for this movie. White Fang is still played by a German shepherd and acts like a dog, so him being a wolfdog is downright unbelievable. One of the dogs playing him also has a large chunk missing from its ear, so it doesn't look very consistent. The wolves are played by wolfdogs or just dogs in general and barely appear. The blood is horrendously fake-looking. The sound effects are recycled way too much. 

This just wasn't a very good movie, but it's not horrible either. Just a step down from the original, I guess.