Howling IV: The Original Nightmare - dubbed in English?

Right now, I’m watching this movie on the Scifi channel. It would appear that the actors are American, speaking English, yet it also appears they have dubbed themselves, in English.

Is it my imagination? Is the sound just off slightly?

Looped-garou, huh? (Sorry.)

I’ve only seen the first one, so I can’t do any better than a bit of hearsay from an anonymous IMDB user:

I’m not sure how much I credit someone who’s capable of typing “Whom went on,” though. :smiley:

Really, I just came in to make the lame pun.

I guess I’ll go with that. But why on earth would you have your actors dub over their own voices - poorly?

It’s actually a pretty common technique, from what I understand. Few movies redub the entire soundtrack, but most will have one or two scenes where the dialogue you hear was recorded later in a studio. It cuts down on background noise, clears up indistinct line readings from the actors, and helps with scenes where getting a boom mike into the shot unobtrusively is problematic or outright impossible. A lot of movies that are in English but feature actors with strong regional accents also get redubbed. The original American release of The Road Warrior was completely redubbed because it was felt US audiences wouldn’t be able to understand the cast’s thick Aussie accents. I also believe that it used to be more expensive to shoot synch sound than it was to dub the film after the fact, but that’s probably not the case any more.

Of course, most movies are made by people who are a hell of a lot more competent than the folks who did The Howling, so it’s usually not nearly as obvious. But that, of course, applies to a hell of a lot more than just the audio in those flicks.