Hey, it’s a movie from when I graduated high school. Damn, I feel old. BAD MOON is one of those movies I saw on the shelf of the local video store every weekend but somehow never rented it. Which is odd since I rented just about every other horror movie they had to offer in my quest to broaden my horizons. Odd too, considering I am a big EDDIE AND THE CRUISERS fan and Michael Pare is in this. So it was nice to get a chance to watch it on THE LAST DRIVE-IN a few weeks ago.
Anyway, BAD MOON tells us the tale of a photojournalist named Ted (Pare), who is attacked by a werewolf in Nepal. He is wounded but his girlfriend is killed. However, he does blow the head off the creature, so at least there’s some closure on that end. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the end of his woes, as you might have guessed that Ted starts to turn into a werewolf himself when the moon comes out. So he does what anyone would do with a curse like that.
He moves to a trailer in the woods in Washington.
Eventually, his sister Janet (Mariel Hemingway) comes for a visit with her son Brett (Mason Gamble) and their dog Thor. The canine immediately senses something is amiss and runs off to the woods and finds some of Ted’s victims hanging around in the trees. As the sun begins to set, Ted ushers his sister and her family out of the trailer to head home so he doesn’t accidentally murder them instead. Janet asks him to come stay at their house, but he declines, knowing that would put them in danger. When the authorities show up the next day looking for hikers that have gone missing, Ted decides to take her up on her offer and brings his trailer down to her home.
Will he be able to get his wolf problem under control? Or will Janet and her family be the next victims of the werewolf?
This is a surprisingly good little thriller. It doesn’t offer a lot of twists and turns, but gives you the setup you want in the ticking time-bomb of Ted’s werewolf problem in the proximity of the ones he loves. You know it’s going to go off at some point, and you’re just hoping they get out of the way before it does. Pare gives a great performance as Ted, his expressions running the gamut of tortured loner to feral creature and everything in between. There’s one stare down with Thor in particular that is fantastic and we’re rewarded with a great scene because of it. Hemingway does great as the concerned sister and mother, but doesn’t have too much to do. This is Pare’s film, with Gamble and Thor following him on the depth chart and honestly, the dog comes before the kid by a country mile.
That should come as no surprise as the movie is based on the novel “Thor” by Wayne Smith, which is a werewolf story told entirely from the perspective of the dog. Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t quite commit to that, though it would have been pretty rad. We do get a few “dog cams” though to help sell it, and Thor does the majority of the work in uncovering Ted’s hairy little secret.
Writer/director Eric Red (writer of BODY PARTS, THE HITCHER and NEAR DARK) does a solid job with the adaptation. It’s lean and mean but hits all the notes it has to. There probably could have been a few more scenes between Ted and Janet to give them a better sense of family, especially when it is all going to get torn down later, but that’s my only quibble. The kills and effects are good, with a fun transformation that works despite some wonky CGI. Credit to Steve Johnson for that great work.
BAD MOON is a fun and breezy little werewolf movie that does a lot of things right and I’m glad I finally got a chance to watch it. If you’re looking for a way to beat the heat or stay away from the full moon yourself, it’s definitely worth checking out.
