Full Moon High
The football field, primitive and full of animals, pushing, charging and snarling as the crowd roars and cheers, Tony Walker is the most valuable player of Full Moon High, a young man whose life is about to take a strange turn when his conservative CIA agent father requires his cooperation for an undercover trip to Romania where they will pose together as tourists.
A land “deep behind the iron curtain, steeped in the superstition of the Dark Ages,” a nocturnal encounter with a gypsy fortune teller gives Tony more than he bargained for, his return home leading to complications when the full moon is high, the curse of the pentagram upon him, an immortal and ageless werewolf doomed to walk the earth alone.
Released in October 1981, the tail end of the same year which saw both The Howling and An American Werewolf in London escape in cinemas, while those films have their moments of dark humour Full Moon High is a broader comedy more akin to the 1979 Dracula pastiche Love at First Bite, heavy and obvious and winking knowingly at the audience as it moves through standard high school setups.
Adam Arkin approaching the lycanthropic role of Tony almost as if it were a stand-up routine, an observational monologue where the supporting cast are largely foils to his schtick, written and directed by the prolific and diverse Larry Cohen, after It’s Alive and God Told Me To but before Q, The Stuff and The Ambulance, it is less sophisticated than those films, more commercial but weaker for it, and shot cheaply even by the standards of a guerilla filmmaker.
With What’s Up Doc?’s Kenneth Mars as inappropriately behaved coach and later Full Moon High Principal Cleveland and Gattaca’s Alan Arkin as condescending and unethical Doctor Brand, Tony is surrounded by women irresistibly drawn to his animal magnetism, Roz Kelly, Joanne Nail and The Secret of NIMH‘s Elizabeth Hartman in her last live action role as Jane, Ricky and Miss Montgomery, and not helped by the transition from the late fifties to the early eighties the film is patchy, strung together with little overall plot or direction.
Intermittently entertaining and curious in that it is another film alongside I Was A Teenage Werewolf and Teen Wolf which parallels high school sports and werewolves, presented on Blu-ray by Eureka Full Moon High is supported by audio commentaries by Cohen and Steve Mitchell, director of King Cohen, an interview with Cohen biographer Michael Doyle and a video essay on the evolution of teenage werewolves in film by Kaja Franck.
Full Moon High will be available on Blu-ray from Eureka from Monday 19th January
