Review: “Bad Moon”

Don’t go around tonight, well, it’s bound to take your life…

Werewolves don’t get enough love in the horror community. When it comes to the classic monsters, the Universal line-up so to speak, vampires are the popular choice. Dracula is the Chad of supernatural killers. Sure werewolves are more represented in cinema than dorky mummies, but their appearance in scary movies is not nearly commensurate with how cool they are. I love werewolves. My Halloween playlist contains no less than eight songs about werewolves (Howlin’ for You – The Black Keys, Wolf Like Me – TV on the Radio, Of Wolf and Man – Metallica, Werewolf – Cat Powers, Hungry Like the Wolf – Duran Duran, Bark at the Moon – Ozzy, Dire Wolf – The Grateful Dead (a stretch, admittedly), Werewolves of London – Warren Zevon; indulgent to list these, I know, but maybe one of you needs a starter pack for your own playlist.) Bad Moon has been on my watch list for years for that very reason, but up until recently, I haven’t been able to find it. God bless Shudder, I suppose, as the streaming app has kind of made my October.

Bad Moon is a lot of fun. It plays kind of like Cujo, except the giant dog is a good guy and a werewolf is Cujo. The acting is solid and the plot is simple, yet bulletproof. A photo-journalist gets infected by a werewolf while on assignment in Nepal and returns back to the States with his deadly secret. He ends up on the run from the law by way of doing werewolf stuff and winds up staying on the property of his sister and her pre-teen son. Kind of a dick move, that, but he is desperate and does make attempts to protect them by chaining himself up at night. Of course, that is not an effective tactic or else we wouldn’t have a movie. The family’s huge German Shepperd, Thor, senses the danger immediately, and that leads to a lot of tension and a particularly heart-wrenching moment with animal control removing the small family’s only line of defense.

Bad Moon is certainly not a masterpiece, but it delivers on everything you want from a werewolf movie with modest ambitions. As I mentioned, the acting is pretty good, and the family dynamic between Mariel Hemmingway and Michael Pare is unique and believable. There aren’t many kills, but one of them is an all-timer – just pure brutality. That unbridled ferocity is rarely captured, but sorely missing, from movie lycanthropes. The best part about the film, though, may be the practical werewolf effects. Simply put, the suit and makeup is stunning, basically the platonic ideal of what a werewolf should look and move like. At the other end of the spectrum is the very spotty, mid-90’s CGI that is used for the transformation sequence. As great as the fully transformed werewolf is, the depiction of the transition is equally as spectacular on the failure end of the spectrum. In all, Bad Moon is good fun and a worthy entry into the painfully sparse werewolf cannon, but it falls well short of the other decades-old, previously impossible to find horror movie that Shudder rescued from oblivion this year, Near Dark.

Fucking vampires.

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