I asked a variation of this question before, in reference to Starz, and their airing of “Tron: Legacy.”

Now it’s Netflix’s turn, which when I watch I expect to see a movie in its entirety, exactly as it was shown in theaters.  So, imagine my surprise when I was watching Joe Dante‘s “The Howling”–quite possibly one of the most literate horror films I have ever seen, which makes sense considering John Sayles wrote the screenplay–when I noticed a scene was missing.

I haven’t seen the movie in years, yet I remember the scene because it was quite possibly the most shocking in the entire film.  It was when Eddie Quist, played by Richard Picardo, (a Dante favorite) is about to kill either the photographer (well-played by Terry Fisher), when he digs two fingers into his skull, via a bullet hole he got earlier in the movie, and says:  “I want to give you a piece of my mind,” and proceeds to do just that.

Why this scene was cut, when it’s no gorier than numerous others that weren’t, makes me wonder if it’s little more than an oversight on the part of Netflix, which bothers me because, besides being arguably the best werewolf film ever–even better than “An American Werewolf In London”–a viewer who had not seen the film would have no idea that the scene was absent.