Full Moon Fever!

For whatever reason, Larry Cohen's Full Moon High (1981) has never really gotten a decent MGM release onto dvd and it could use a blu-ray by a company like Scream Factory. I think it deserves to a more circulated werewolf film than it is currently. Go on to Amazon.com and see how much dvds are going for on there for this film?

That said, catching this on cable or satellite at the right time will be how you get a gander of it these days, I guess. Youtube has it, too, though. I caught it on Turner Classic Movies, Summer Under the Stars for Alan Arkin (although, it is Adam Arkin who was the star of this, with papa Alan showing up towards the end as the worst psychiatrist in the world; he is known to "shame" his patients to being cured, although his first scene, while attempting to talk a jumper from taking a leap from a ledge winds up enraging the firefighter who was there before him! Yes, the firefighter winds up going after Arkin instead, with the jumper having to try and subdue the very one wanting to save him from the "big leap"!), and it was just a return to a fun comedy romp that often gets lost in the shuffle of all the werewolf movies that were popping up during the early 80s.

Cohen said it best in regards to how this film conveys the change in mores and sexuality from when high school quarterback Arkin gets bit while in Rumania (yep, with a "u") with his pops (played by a blustery, unfiltered Ed McMahon who is quite hilariously a product of the 50s/early 60s). Pops was supposedly on a mission to confiscate microfilm for the CIA, but this doesn't stop him from cavorting with the ladies (he promises to take to America where can they be out at night, total freedom; he emphasizes that they will be out at night on the street, if you catch his drift). In the village, inside and near a barn, Arkin encounters a werewolf, is bitten, and soon becomes one himself. McMahon has a bomb shelter, with a photograph of "commie hunter" Joe McCarthy he talks to for comfort! Too bad he fires his rifle inside the shelter as the bullet ricocheted eventually into him!Yeah, he wasn't about to let his werewolf boy get him...not in his shelter!

Returning home, Arkin can't help conceal the beast within as the moon is full, and no teenage girl is safe, their bums certain to be nipped. Cohen loves to show a bandage slapped on those nice ass cheeks. And that's part of the film's charm. This is about taking the werewolf genre and using humor that pokes fun at attitudes of the kids in the 50s/60s, and then showing an out-of-place Arkin returning home after "walking the earth like Caine from Kung Fu" (just had to quote Samuel L) to find his high school riddled with drug use, violence, deviancy, sex, delinquency, and unbridled misbehavior. It's the 70s! Bring on the disco and loose women!

Part of the joke is that Arkin is such a dreamboat for the ladies. He's ogled. Roz Kelly (of New Year's Evil (1981)) couldn't help herself. She is always wanting to fuck his brains out. Anyway, it is rather amusing seeing her in this film, in comparison to New Year's Evil where she's this punk pop diva hoping to make it as a celebrity. She winds up marrying Arkin's buddy, played by Bill Kirchenbauer), for whom she really couldn't care less about. He's more or less a rebound. He's a cop twenty years later, balding, and rather square. Roz realizes no matter what Arkin says (he claims to be the son of "the star quarterback who left the high school before the big game") he is her one true lay.

Joanne Nail (I know her from my favorite exploitation film, Switchblade Sisters (1975)) is the current high school girl Arkin falls for. There's an entire sequence designed with her wielding a silver butcher knife (one that Michael Myers would have gladly chosen out of the kitchen drawer), chasing after Arkin in werewolf form instead of vice versa. There's even a homage to Psycho (1960) in this scene. This also comes after Arkin demands to be leather strapped to his bed and recorded as evidence to show the world with Nail believing he's kinky, giving him a whipping with a belt! She even *really* gets into the whole deal before he goes all wolfy on her.

Arkin gets to play in the big game, but after scoring a touchdown (while his team is already down 41-0!), in werewolf form, he eats the football! Yeah, kind of defeats the purpose. No worries, as it takes more than a couple silver bullets to keep Arkin down.

Elizabeth Hartman (I know her from the excellent Sidney Poitier film, A Patch of Blue (1965), also starring a fantastic Shelley Winters; Hartman was the blind girl he falls in love with (as she does him)), here a school teacher victimized by her unruly students (the joke of this film was kind of a bit unsettling to me: she was sexually abused at every school she teaches before the job at Full Moon High, including an all-girls' school!), has a couple scenes, eventually supposedly killed by Arkin's werewolf. In six years, she'd jump out her apartment window in a suicidal leap. My heart sank when I read this. Truly a pitiable means to a career that seemed to have such promise early on.

The werewolf make up is purposely cheesy and not all that elaborate (it really shouldn't be). This is more funning I Was a Teenage Werewolf with Michael Landon than the Chaney classics. Setting the film early on in the 50s is an obvious sign of the homage. Arkin is a rather aloof and go-with-the-flow kind of character, dead-panning beautifully to the nonsense that happens to him. He's a hoot. He's so fresh-faced, though! His scene with a palm-reader in Rumania had me grinning quite a bit. He got plenty of foreboding news, but not everything...he was out of palm! There's a fun bit of recollection to the "nuclear scare" of the 50s when schools prepared for the possibility of bombs dropping. Kenneth Mars (who had hilarious scenes in Young Frankenstein) is the very chummy high school football coach who just loves to slap the asses of his players, later becoming the effeminate principal of Full Moon High!