| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
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FULL MOON HIGH
Rating:  ½
USA. 1982.
Director/Screenplay/Producer – Larry Cohen, Photography – Daniel Pearl, Music – Gary William Friedman, Makeup – Steve Neill, Art Direction – Robert Burns. Production Company – Larco.
Cast:
Adam Arkin (Tony Walker), Ed McMahon (Colonel William Walker), Roz Kelly (Jane Flynn), Bill Kirchenbauer (Jack Flynn), Joanne Nail (Ricky), Alan Arkin (Dr Jacob Brand), Elizabeth Hartman (Miss Montgomery)
Plot: In 1958 Tony Walker, a star football player at Full Moon High, accompanies his father, a CIA agent, on a mission to Romania. There he is bitten by a werewolf and duly transforms into one himself. After wandering the world for twenty years he eventually returns home unaged, posing as his own son, where he confronts people from his past.
In the late 1970s/early 80s Larry Cohen became a cult director with Blaxploitation films like Blaxploitation films Black Caesar (1973) and Hell Up in Harlem (1973) and a string of inventive low-budget genre works such as It’s Alive (1974) and Q: The Winged Serpent (1982). There are many in the Cohen cult that believe that all he touches is gold.
Cohen has always worked down the low-budget end of the market and here makes a no-budget werewolf comedy. Full Moon High has clearly been mounted in an attempt to catch the tail end of the mini-trend of werewolf movies that came out around 1980-1 with films like The Howling (1980), An American Werewolf in London (1981) and Wolfen (1981). Cohen admits with open amusement that his film is not in the budgetary league of these others. The special effects are all bad in a comically obvious way – a hand comes down and squashes the lead model of a plane as it crosses a map of Europe; and during the transformation sequence the camera lens is ‘accidentally’ shot, which proves the opportunity for an off-screen voice to describe what great effects the audience are missing.
Cohen writes it with a disarming sense of Jewish humour, inserting bad puns into the dialogue – “I don’t believe in vampires, werewolves and virgins – I’ve never seen any of those things.” “You’re a real fox,” comments a woman. “Close but not quite,” replies Adam Arkin. The more the film goes on the more it becomes apparent no ceiling has been placed on how silly Cohen is prepared to be. Sometimes it is deliriously so – Adam Arkin’s problems dealing with fleas and silver restaurant cutlery or the end where the silver bullets fail to kill him because more are needed in these days of inflation. Alan Arkin (Adam’s father) also delivers an amusing performance as a psychologist who practices a form of insult therapy. Unfortunately Cohen is rather too free-ranging in his slapstick and the film suffers from lack of discipline in knowing when to stop. Some scenes like Ed McMahon’s funeral where the assembled soldiers can’t restrain their desire to conduct a gun salute or where Arkin’s transformation is echoed by a whole dance floor are embarrassingly silly.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1993
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