TEEN WOLF and TEEN WOLF TOO (1985)

Cast

Plot

Hot from the success of Back To The Future, the Peter Pan of 80s Hollywood, Michael J. Fox finds himself in the unenviable role of a High School kid who is going through 'changes', no, not the kind of changes that have you kicking your bedroom door shut, red-facedly telling your mother to 'Get out! Get out!', but a problematic condition that kicks in every full moon. That's right folks, he's a werewolf, just as his daddy was before him. The effects are genuinely unsettling, (borrowing heavily from John Landis's 'An American Werewolf In London'), and the obvious parallels between his metamorphosis and adolescence are dealt with nicely (including a great scene in a broom cupboard). Just why becoming a wolf means that he is suddenly great at basketball and making ladies like him (how many wolves are that good at basketball? Let alone pulling the prom queen?) is a mystery. But an entertaining one. Teen Wolf Too is a much more smug affair and, without the naïve charm of Michael the Elf to dilute the silliness, it's harder to swallow. It's more akin to choreographed high energy comedies, like 'Weird Science', than its predecessor, which is more similar to something like Tom Hanks's 'Big'. Still, Jason Bateman packs a mean right hook as a wolf boxer.