Teen Wolf
Slight Supernatural Comedy | 92 Minutes | 1985 | United States
(1.5/4)
Director: Rod Daniel | Writers: Jeph Loeb, Matthew Weisman | Starring: Michael J. Fox, James Hampton, Lorie Griffin, Susan Ursitti | Music: Miles Goodman | Cinematography: Tim Suhrstedt
It would be naive to suggest that things were simpler back in the 1980s, but when it came to the movie preferences of adolescent males, they were less demanding at least. True it was the era of high concept film, of space operas and extra-terrestrials and all-action archaeologists, of darkening or neon-clad dystopias, of robots and terminators, of zombies and ghosts and gremlins. But not everything supernatural needed to be super-powered and laden with special effects. Even in the Ghostbusters franchise and other fantastical comedies, and in spoofs and high school coming-of-age films, there was a place for the slight and listless and the mostly directionless, still relatable enough or containing one or two chuckles plenty to pass the time.
Teen Wolf both capitalised on and was ultimately overshadowed by the success of Back to the Future, Michael J. Fox’s big Hollywood breakthrough, released a month earlier in the summer of 1985. It debuted at number two at the United States box office, just behind Back to the Future, ultimately attaining a respectable $33 million gross. It offers another oddball teen rite of passage narrative, quaint and quirky and playing on nascent genre norms, and it’s no worse for being less convoluted or for proferring no discernible message.
In fact nothing much happens in Teen Wolf. The few conventional conflicts the movie sets up never amount to real conflicts, and it turns out that high school life as a teenage werewolf can be carried off pretty much swimmingly.
Michael J. Fox stars as Scott Howard, a 17-year-old kid of middling achievement, who plays for his high school’s second-rate basketball team the Beavers, but otherwise he easily gets lost in the crowd. He has a close friend, Lisa ‘Boof’ Marconi (Susan Ursitti), who is obviously attracted to him, but Scott lusts instead after Pamela Wells (Lorie Griffin), really no prettier than Lisa, yet Pamela is blonde and popular and unattainable and has those things in her favour. After school, Scott helps out at his father Harold’s (James Hampton) hardware store, in the picturesque environs of small-town Nebraska.
Scott begins to notice the burgeoning effects of lycanthropism: hair sprouts all over his face and hands, and when he is compelled to make out with Lisa in the closet at a party, his emerging claws tear the back of her blouse. No big deal: everybody likes a little bit of rough loving. Perhaps some of the movie will now be devoted to its inherent conflict, that of living as a werewolf in a world mostly inhabited by human beings? Not here: it turns out that Harold too is a werewolf, and hadn’t told his son only because ‘sometimes it skips a generation’, while at the next Beavers basketball game Scott’s condition affords his team a rare win, so instead of consternation and a spell in the shadows, he becomes exceedingly popular.
There is some stuff involving the school drama club, as Scott’s animalism successfully woos Pamela, and a brief subplot involving Harold and the high school principal. Eventually a very minor scuffle at a high school dance convinces Scott that things are spiralling out of control, and he decides he must prove himself without the mask of the werewolf. There’s nothing really to all this, it’s played nicely enough by the cast, and it would be utterly formulaic if it wasn’t so insubstantial. Teen Wolf lasts around ninety minutes, and it’s a decent enough movie to put on if you don’t really want to watch anything.
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