Humor was always integral to the crime, horror, and science fiction films of Larry Cohen but it took the maverick independent writer-director-producer nearly a decade to make his first all-out comedy. Completed prior to the early 80s boom in lycanthrope movies typified by The Howling (1981), An American Werewolf in London (1981), Wolfen (1981), and Teen Wolf (1985), Cohen's Full Moon High (1981) had been shot in 1979 but was shelved due to the financial woes of its distributor, Filmways Inc. (In 1983, Filmways was acquired by Orion Pictures.) Released in October of 1981, months after those other films had redefined the werewolf movie, Full Moon High looked less to the undiscriminating moviegoer like a contender and more like a pretender.

Reassessed at the distance of more than thirty years, and within the context of his other motion pictures, Full Moon High can be seen to further Cohen's examinations of the American family in extremis. The former television writer's feature film debut as a writer-director, Bone (1972), had focused with blackly comic acuity on the tensions boiling within the crucible of the middle class American marriage, while his 1974 monster-on-the-loose movie It's Alive and its first sequel, It Lives Again (1978), spoke to the anxiety of parents as to the destructive potential of their offspring. As had Cohen's 1973 Blaxploitation two-fer Black Caesar and Hell Up in Harlem, Full Moon High is, in its own satirical way, about the complicated (to put it mildly) codependency of fathers and their sons, with the legacy of the past impinging on the future satirized in the curse of the werewolf.

Superficially akin to the drive-in classic I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), Full Moon High stars Adam Arkin as an Eisenhower era teen who, on a trip behind the Iron Curtain in 1958 with his government agent father (Ed McMahon, taking a breather from his standing gig as a sideman for late night talk show host Johnny Carson), is bitten by a werewolf - which renders him not only accursed in the Lon Chaney, Jr. tradition but immortal to boot. Steering clear of his hometown for twenty years, the ageless Arkin elects at last to return to his alma mater in the guise of the son he never had, and to conceal his monstrousness from former classmates who have matured into the town fathers. Cohen scored a casting coup in retaining the services of his leading man's real life father, Alan Arkin, as an abusive psychotherapist (Arkin had played Sigmund Freud only a few years earlier in Nicholas Meyer's The Seven Percent Solution, 1976) who is part Werner Erhard, part Don Rickles.

By the time that Teen Wolf rolled into the cineplex as an economic cash-in on the rising stardom of Michael J. Fox post-Back to the Future (1985), not enough people had seen Full Moon High to complain that it had stolen not only Larry Cohen's thunder but a number of his plot points as well. True to character, Cohen never looked back and plunged forward with one of his best efforts, Q: The Winged Serpent (1982), a smart send up of The Giant Claw (1957) and other monster-takes-Manhattan movies in which an ancient Aztec deity bedevils the NYPD and various roof-dwelling urbanites from its base of operations (a giant nest) in the Chrysler Building. Critical opinion, even among genre aficionados, remains divided on the merits of Full Moon High but Larry Cohen fans will find much to chew on as he reworks some of his pet themes in a loosely comic, borderline improvisational fashion.

A footnote to Cohen's overall career, Full Moon High remains of interest to classic film fans for offering the last on-camera appearance of Academy Award nominee Elizabeth Hartman. The fair-skinned, red-headed, and surpassingly delicate leading lady of Sidney Poitier in A Patch of Blue (1965), Alan Bates and Dirk Bogarde in The Fixer (1968) and Clint Eastwood in The Beguiled (1971) would provide vocal work for Don Bluth's The Secret of NIMH (1982) before worsening depression, a failed marriage, and a precipitous decline in the demand for her work as an actor drove Hartman to jump to her death from a window of her Pittsburgh high rise apartment in June 1987.

By Richard Harland Smith

Sources:

Larry Cohen interview by Andrea June and V. Vale, RE/Search: Incredibly Strange Films, no. 10 (RE/Search Publications, 1987)
Larry Cohen profile by Dennis Fisher, Horror Film Directors, 1931-1990 (McFarland & Co., Publishers, 1991)
"The Short Life of Elizabeth Hartman: Instant Stardom in 'A Patch of Blue,' Then Unemployment, Then Suicide," by Sandra Hansen Konte, Los Angeles Times, November 22, 1987