FULL MOON HIGH
***
Directed by Larry Cohen.
Starring Adam Arkin, Roz Kelly, Ed McMahon.
Horror/Comedy, US, 94 mins, Certificate 15.
Released in the UK on 19th January on Limited Edition Blu-ray by Eureka Entertainment.
Tony Walker (Adam Arkin) is a senior high school student whose father, Colonel William Parker (Ed McMahon), is a government spy. For his latest mission, the Colonel has to go to Romania and takes Tony along with him - you can see where this is going - so whilst Walker senior is doing whatever he needs to do, Tony gets his palm read by a local mystic woman before getting lost on his way back to his digs, where he hears a snarling and becomes the target of a very hairy man-beast. Fortunately he survives this encounter and returns to the US, but then there is a full moon...
Released in 1981, when for some inexplicable reason we got several werewolf-themed movies produced in a very short space of time, FULL MOON HIGH was writer/producer/director Larry Cohen’s attempt at using the werewolf as a metaphor for change and how people start out as one thing and become something else, or how some people change as they get older whilst others don’t, or how America had changed since the 1960s. There are several sources where the late filmmaker talked about his thinking behind the story, and being a Larry Cohen movie there is plenty of subtext to dive into, but somewhere along the way it seems that Cohen might have gotten so wrapped up in metaphors that writing a cohesive story took second place.
The bones of the movie are that a young high school student - Adam Arkin was in his mid-twenties when he made this - gets bitten by a werewolf whilst abroad and has to come back to America and deal with changing into a bloodthirsty beast every full moon. So far, so standard werewolf movie, but once Tony gets back home there is very little for him to do except change into a werewolf, maul a few people - he doesn’t kill as he’s a nibbler - and then feel guilty about it until the next full moon. This happens a few times until the (very late) introduction of psychiatrist Dr. Brand (played by Adam’s father Alan Arkin) in the third act and then we have a nemesis and somewhere for the plot to go, but by then there isn’t much of the movie left and the meandering script does not leave enough room for a properly structured conclusion.
But then again, FULL MOON HIGH is not AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON (although there is a resemblance between Adam Arkin and that movie’s David Naughton) and as well as being Larry Cohen’s thoughts on change it is also a comedy and the gags come fast and furious. Not all of them hit, not all of them would be considered acceptable today - Kenneth Mars was a fine comic actor but his overly camp sports coach/principle character was badly judged, even for 1981- but the ones that do work do so extremely well. Larry Cohen was known for metaphors and sly satire - which he would go on to nail with 1985s THE STUFF - but here he is trying out broad jokes as if he were writing for SNL or a zany sketch show, and when you have Alan Arkin in your cast then there will be more hits than misses. If only he had been in the movie more...
Nevertheless, FULL MOON HIGH just about passes the threshold for recommendation, as not only is Larry Cohen trying out his comic chops, but it is a fun movie overall. The editing is a bit choppy and the timeline is never really explained - because apparently the first half of the movie is set in 1959 before shifting to the 1980s, but we find that out after key events have happened so it feels a bit disjointed - but the strong performances from Adam and Alan Arkin, the nods to THE WOLF MAN and I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF come from a place of love and - if you are a child of the 1980s - seeing where TEEN WOLF got most of its ideas from all make it worth watching, and along with the accompanying archive commentary by Larry Cohen, plus a new commentary by filmmaker Steve Mitchell, there is enough supplementary material to get more out of it. It may not be Larry Cohen’s finest, but FULL MOON HIGH is an enjoyably flawed piece of work.
Chris Ward