Four years before the release of Teen Wolf (and in the same year that saw the release of An American Werewolf in London and The Howling), Larry Cohen – the maverick independent filmmaker behind the cult classics It’s Alive, The Stuff and The Ambulance – took a werewolf to high school in Full Moon High, a high-energy, horror-comedy homage to the teen-orientated genre pictures of the 1950s.
The year is 1960, and high-school football star Tony (Adam Arkin) is living with his conservative CIA agent father, Colonel William Walker (Ed McMahon). Their relationship takes a turn for the worse when Tony accompanies the Colonel on a diplomatic trip to Romania – where he is promptly bitten by a werewolf, transforming the teenager into a monster. Upon returning to America, Tony’s newfound curse causes his behaviour to spiral out of control and he is forced to leave his small town behind. He eventually returns twenty years later in 1980 – but a marked side effect of his curse is that he doesn’t look a day older than when he left. No matter how much the world has changed, Tony is forever a teenage werewolf…
All at once a loving tribute to “teenage monster” movies of the 1950s, a genre parody in Mel Brooks style and a political commentary on the rise and fall of the American counterculture, Full Moon High is one of Larry Cohen’s most madcap and idiosyncratic movies. Eureka Classics is proud to present the film for the first time on Blu-ray in the UK.
