Directed by
Larry Cohen
94 minutes
Rated M
Reviewed by
Bernard Hemingway
Full Moon High
Writer-director Larry Cohen is one of those B-grade film-makers who maintains a steady roster of work, none of it very good and none of it under any delusions about its merit. Being essentially derivationist the spoof is well-suited to such films and with Full Moon High, a spoof of the teen werewolf movie, in the Zucker/Abrams Airplane / Naked Gun spirit he comes up looking quite good. It’s main point of difference to its more expensive peers is that it wears its low budget heart on its sleeve and this tend to push it into MAD Comics territory.. It certainly isn’t hugely funny but it’s funny enough and when it’s not, it’s just plain silly and that may even have appeal to some.Adam Arkin (son of Alan Arkin who turns up to help the film over the line) plays the son of a Joe McCarthy-worshipping, Commie-fearing CIA operative who goes with his father to Romania where he is bitten by a werewolf.. He returns to his hometown and begins to ravage young devotchkas.
OK, let’s not worry about the plot, the film is a series of gags some of which work, some of which are tedious. Let’s face it, there’s only so much you can do with the material. The rough and ready production values, exaggerated by some crude editing only help to make it work to the extent it does. And in a treat for cultists, Kenneth Mars who played the Nazi playwright in the Mel Brooks classic, The Producers, 1968, appears as a homosexual football coach,
FYI: Elizabeth Hartman, once a bright star of the 1960s but by this time a casualty of failed dreams makes her final screen appearance as Miss Montgomery
DVD Extras: None
Available from: Shock Entertainment
Want something different?
