Che fatica essere lupi

A surprising misfire from the usually reliable Larry Cohen (God Told Me Too, Q, etc.), Full Moon High tries so hard to be funny and fails miserably, even with decent turns by Ed McMahon(!) and Kenneth Mars. Alan Arkin looks embarrassed throughout his performance and son Adam simply looks numb. This makes Teen Wolf look like a comedy classic.

Yeah....this movie's bad but here's something you have to realize before watching it (and you probably should have while watching it): it's supposed to be. The thing about this movie I guess is that it seems to only be funny to the right people: a) huge werewolf fans and b)people with a really low-brow sense of humor, and I'm proud to say I'm both. Some of the best jokes in this movie were the worst ones, like some of the newspaper headlines ("Werewolf easts Chinese, hungry again 30 minutes later"...please tell me somebody got the double-meaning) or the Romanian woman who reads palms for entertainment (I read 14 last week, I couldn't put one down til I was finished!)

But if you watch it for no other reason, watch for Bob Saget; this is probably the best god damn thing you'll ever see him in.

Aiming at a blend of Airplane! style wackiness and Mel Brooks-a-like angsty spoof, this is almost good - the occasional inspired moment (Werewolf Annoys Community) keeps you watching through the massive swathes of so-so gags, occasional clunkers and habitual dragging out of jokes way beyond their peak. Part so-bad-it's-good, part nearly quite good, and with a typically intense, shouty performance from ace Alan Arkin, this just about scrapes into the Watchable category. Probably a gem to obscure B-horror fans.

In continuing to review werewolf movies in chronological order, we're still at 1981 with probably the most obscure one yet, one that I didn't even know of its existence till a few weeks ago when I saw it listed on Wikipedia before then finding it on YouTube. It seems to mainly be inspired by the Michal Landon-starred I Was a Teenage Werewolf as Adam Arkin plays a teen named Tony (like Landon) and it takes place during the late '50s (like IWATW) but then moves on through the years (as exemplified by the changing of the presidential portraits though the one after Carter was meant to be a joke) before Tony comes back to his high school of the title to once again play football having not aged during that time. I'll stop there and just say while I was pretty amused much of the time, there were also many places where I wondered if maybe it could have been funnier. I did like the scenes involving Ed McMahon as Tony's father and Adam Arkin's real dad-Alan-as an insulting shrink. Oh, and also the scene involving his new girlfriend and her tying up Tony in bed was also fun in an adult humor kind of way. So on that note, I say give Full Moon High a look.

"Full Moon High" is a werewolf horror/comedy that got released in the year 1981, meaning almost simultaneously with two of the greatest classics in the same sub genre, namely "The Howling" and "American Werewolf in London". No wonder practically nobody remembers this film. While certainly not as great as those two, "Full Moon High" nevertheless deserves a little more praise from the genre fans and a little more recognition in general. The film definitely hasn't got the same premise as the other werewolf classics and goes straight for laughs. Tony, a popular American high school student and fanatic football player travels to Romania with his sleazy businessman father. While the latter is talking about the promised land to a couple of prostitutes, Toney receives bad news from a local fortune teller and gets attacked by a red-eyed werewolf at night. He transforms for the first time on the plane back to the States, but nobody notices because hijackers blindfolded everyone on board of the flight. What an oddball sequence that was, actually. Once back at his school and surrounded by his obsessive girlfriend and football buddies, Tony can't resist to bite girls in the bums and decides to disappear. Twenty years later, he returns to his hometown and is mistaken for his own son. "Full Moon High" is, as said already, a straightforward comedy and I'm really not used to seeing that from writer/director Larry Cohen. True, his film always contain social mockery and black comedy (like "Q – The Winged Serpent" and "God Told Me To"), but this really feels like a liberating side project for him. There's too few horror for my liking, for example the transformation sequences are worthless, but I appreciated the film as a relaxing and occasionally very hilarious horror comedy.