Full Moon High

 



Director - Larry Cohen (It's Alive, Q: The Winged Serpent)
Starring - Adam Arkin (Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, The Twilight Zone), Roz Kelly (New Year's Evil, The Dukes of Hazzard), and Ed McMahon (Sabrina, The Teenage Witch, Baywatch)
Release Date - 1981
Genre - Horror/Comedy
Tagline - "He's today's teenage werewolf...only the rules have changed!"
Format - Bluray (Personal Collection) (Screener)

Rating (out of 5):

      Most of you know I have a soft spot for anything 80s.  I love the 80s and almost any genre of film from that decade is always fun to me.  I've enjoyed comedies, dramas, documentaries, and even romance but my favorite is the horror comedies like Once Bitten, The Monster Squad, My Best Friend is a Vampire, and so forth.  Sometime ago Scream Factory released the 1981 Larry Cohen horror comedy Full Moon High which beat Teen Wolf to theaters by four years.  I've a fan of Cohen but I had yet to check out this one.  Thank you Scream Factory for sending this one my way!

     The film follows Tony (Arkin) who travels with his father to Romania where he is bitten by a werewolf before his big football game.  He doesn't suspect he will be become a werewolf but when the full moon rises before the game he is forced to go into hiding before he can hurt anyone leaving behind a school who was relying on him to win the game and a woman infatuated with him.  He goes into hiding before returning to his hometown 20 years later still looking like he did way back then.  He tries to go back to school to make up for lost time but is thrust back into the football team why pretending to be his own son.  Soon his former friend and classmate suspects he is his father Tony and his former flame knows he is not who he says he is.  The hassle of hiding his secret becomes too much and he attempts to reveal to everyone that he is a werewolf.
     I love the light hearted horror comedies like My Boyfriend's Back, Boltneck, Once Bitten, and so on so I was looking forward to this one.  Cohen has made several unforgettable classic during his career and I'm shocked Full Moon High doesn't get the credit it deserves.  I really enjoyed it and I loved the type of humor it delivered.  The acting in this one is fun and fits the film very well but no one in the cast is winning any awards.  The film is meant to be whimsical and silly so the cast take on the difficult role of appearing goofy.  They do a great job and hit perfectly with the humor.  The story for this one is fun but not that original in terms of werewolf films.  Cohen knew this and added the heavy humor to make an unoriginal story appear more fun for the audience.  The laughs work and the originality is severally masked by the cleverness of the jokes but the film does suffer from slow scenes that are a struggle to make it through.  Finally, if you want the blood and gore you find with most werewolf flicks you will be very let down.  This is one of those horror comedies where it is heavy on the comedy and light on the gore which I am fine with.  I do like the classic look of the werewolf and the effects team took a simple design and made it look awesome.  Overall, Full Moon High may not be a gory horror flick but it works very well as a horror comedy.  I love the style of humor and what the story had to offer.  Fans of Cohen will need to grab this fantastic release from Scream Factory.