Ha ha, it’s Burl here with a new movie review! I revisited an old classic today, Teen Wolf! I saw this one in the theatre, but not exactly by choice! My friend Doug and I decided to go see Return of the Living Dead, but it was rated R and we were much too young! So, ha ha, we decided to try to look older by smearing honey on our faces and sprinkling a lot of pepper there so it would look like five o’ clock shadow! Then we biked downtown to the multiplex, getting a lot of dirt, leaves, bugs, what-have-you, stuck to our faces along the way, and when we arrived the girl at the ticket booth looked at us strangely and refused to let us in! So we had to see Teen Wolf instead, and sit through the whole thing with sticky, grimy faces!
Sure wish I’d known the trick the Teen Wolf uses in this movie when he wants to buy a keg! His eyes turn red and he drops his voice about three octaves, and he growls “Give me… a keg… of beer!” Something like that would have got us into Return of the Living Dead for sure! “I want... in the zombie movie… now!”
Anyway, what’s the story, Burl, I hear you saying! Poor put-upon Marty is an average high school kid in his mid-twenties, and he’d give just about anything to stand out from the crowd! His friend “Boof” is pretty sure he’s special already, but Marty is too thickheaded to realize it! Other than “Boof,” his dad (also a werewolf) and maybe his young friend Lewis, everyone in Marty’s life is petty, venal and nasty, even the basketball coach and the team fat kid, Chubby! But when Marty grows fur, fangs and an increased sense of self-confidence, ha ha, all bets are off!
He becomes popular but starts getting a little too pleased with himself! He makes sweet love to the beautiful girl of his dreams, shoots hoops like Dr. J and somehow gets himself an ice-cream disco suit! But he alienates “Boof,” worries his dad and angers Porky, who looked familiar to me and turned out to be played by Pee Wee Herman’s friend Francis, seen in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure!
By the end he learns a few lessons in humility and being yourself, of course – and wins the big basketball game without once resorting to lycanthropy! I liked the movie, even though I still would much rather have seen Return of the Living Dead, but it left me with more than a few questions! I wondered why living proof of the existence of werewolves was not a bigger deal in the world of Teen Wolf! I was never sure if the character “Styles,” played by Jerry Levine from Out of Bounds, was supposed to be genuinely considered a cool guy or if he was a despised, showboating clown! Did Fatty's diet ever pay off? I didn’t understand why the dad was not affected by dog whistles, as Marty was! And, “Boof”? There were yet more mysteries, but I won’t list them all here!
Anyway, watching the movie again sure brought me back to that long ago day when I had syrup on my face! Again, I can’t say I’m glad I had to see this movie instead of the one I actually wanted to see – it would have been a great victory for Doug and I to have disguised our way into an instant classic like Return of the Living Dead! – but it was still a pretty entertaining romp! It’s got a great 80s party scene, a great 80s prom scene and a worthwhile moral at the end – what else could you want! I give it two kegs of beer!
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