Bad Moon (1996)

User Rating:

4.9/10   

Director:

Eric Red

Writers (WGA):

Wayne Smith (novel)
Eric Red (screenplay)

Release Date:

1 November 1996 (USA)

Genre:

Horror

Tagline:

Half man. Half wolf. Total terror.

Plot:

One man's struggle to contain the curse he hides within... and his last-ditch attempt to free himself with the love of family...

Plot Keywords:

Werewolf | Dog | Thor | Trailer | Human Animal Relationship

Cast

Mariel Hemingway	...	Janet
Michael Paré	...	Uncle Ted (as Michael Pare)
Mason Gamble	...	Brett
Ken Pogue	...	Sheriff Jenson
Hrothgar Mathews	...	Flopsy
Johanna Lebovitz	...	Marjorie (as Johanna Marlowe Lebovitz)
Gavin Buhr	...	Forest Ranger
Julia Montgomery Brown	...	Reporter
Primo	...	Thor

Also Known As:

Thor (USA) (working title)

MPAA:

Rated R for horror violence and gore, brief language and a scene of sexuality.

Runtime:

80 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Sound Mix:

Dolby

Certification:

Canada:13+ (Quebec) | Canada:R (Manitoba/Nova Scotia/Ontario) | Germany:16 | Australia:MA | Finland:K-16 | South Korea:18 | UK:18 (video premiere) | USA:R (certificate #34872) | Iceland:16

Filming Locations:

Ansmore Village, British Columbia, Canada

Company:

Morgan Creek Productions

Trivia:

In the scene in which Janet makes breakfast, her son Brett is watching Werewolf of London (1935) on the television, and he and his Uncle Ted argue about werewolf lore. Actually, the lore that Brett argues that "everyone knows about", such as details about silver bullets and wolfsbane, comes from The Wolf Man (1941), which Curt Siodmak totally made up.

Goofs:

Continuity: Thor sustains a head wound in a night fight but there is no sign of the injury the next day.

Quotes:

Janet: [to Ted, when the dog Thor is reluctant to approach him] What did you do, spit in his Alpo?

Movie Connections:

Features Werewolf of London (1935)

Bad Zoom

As another reviewer said, Bad Moon is high concept: "Lassie meets a werewolf". "Lassie" is a German shepherd named Thor, which is also the name of the novel by Wayne Smith that provided the launching pad for the film, and the werewolf is Uncle Ted, a researcher of some stripe at the beginning of the film who becomes afflicted while in a remote location when a werewolf first grabs his girlfriend, Jason-style, from their tent while Ted's bonking her. Soon after, Ted is living back in the Pacific Northwest, in an old Airstream parked next to a lake (he's suddenly like white trash with a good view). He waits a couple months to contact his sister and Thor's owner, Janet (Mariel Hemingway), who lives a few hours away. Understandably, Janet is concerned and talks Ted into moving his trailer to her back yard instead. He does, and the rest, which is the bulk of the film, you could probably write yourself as long as you've seen a handful of horror films.

Coming from Eric Red, a writer and director who showed amazing promise with films such as 1986's The Hitcher (which he only wrote) and 1991's Body Parts (which he helmed and wrote), Bad Moon is an equally amazing disappointment.

Even though there are a couple nice landscape shots in the beginning, and there is some fabulous gratuitous nudity, I knew we were in trouble shortly after the beginning, when the first werewolf attack occurs. Red directs his cinematographer to shoot the attack way too close (a problem that curiously plagues the entire film), and he shoots it too dark, often with a "blur cam". The close ups quickly become annoying. Half of the shots in the film feel like someone asking you to read something that they're holding an inch from your eyes. Maybe Red is incredibly nearsighted? One later scene, a kind of "staredown" between Uncle Ted and Thor that goes on way too long, is hilariously cut so that we get progressive, successive close-ups of the two until we zero in on a few hairs on Thor's face and a mole on Ted's nose. Maybe Red was trying to frighten us by making us go cross-eyed.

After the questionable beginning, Bad Moon isn't too bad until we get to the climax. The problem is that there just isn't much that happens. There seems to have been an attempt at keeping the costs down by limiting the size of the cast and number of locations. Most of the film takes place on a smallish set (Janet's home) with only three actors and the dog. The other location is a forest (possibly some of this was on a soundstage, also). Surprisingly, the budget of the film was reported (by Eric Red in a Fangoria interview) to be around 8 million dollars. I can only guess that most of that money went to pay for the animatronic werewolf suit (which is pretty good) and Hemingway (who is even better). Unfortunately, both would have been even more effective if Red would have moved the camera away, just a little bit, for more shots.

Most of the middle of the film feels like a way to waste time to get to the end. Red has said that he sees the film as kind of a metaphor for schizophrenia, but Bad Moon isn't any more effective as such than any of the other gazillion werewolf films made in the last 70-something years. So instead, it just feels slow and uneventful.

Some attempts are made to extend or change the werewolf mythos, but it's difficult to say why. For the most part the werewolf stuff is very standard and banal. The funniest change is the claim that a werewolf doesn't need a full moon to lycanthropize and turn into a beastie. It's funny because in the end, Red seems to have had second thoughts. Even though Bad Moon takes place over at least a week, there is a full moon every night. It's quite comical after awhile.

Once the climax arrives, any brownie points earned earlier in the film are quickly lost. The climax seems to be an exercise in absurdity, but unfortunately, Red didn't intend the film to be a comedy. For the first time in this section, we get to see some transformation effects. Unfortunately, the cgi here looks like those "liquid" effects that used to come with that free graphics software on new computers--you know that effect where you'd drag your mouse to distort someone's face in a photograph. Red said that "there would be no comparison" between Bad Moon and An American Werewolf in London (1981), and boy was he right.

Also in the climax, we get a human character who can outrun a huge werewolf, even though the human only has maybe a 50 yard head start and they seem to be running at least half a mile, and we get another character who can almost "outrun" both of them, despite having to travel at least a couple miles.

There is copious blood in the final scene, although most of the characters don't seem that hurt in the end, and the final moments of the climax, as well as the dénouement, couldn't be more clichéd. I haven't read the novel source material yet, but I've read about it, and it sounds much more unusual and interesting than this film turned out to be.

Even though there are enough positive points with Bad Moon to merit a "D" (my equivalent to a 6 out of 10) rather than an "F", it's sad to see Red make such a misstep. It appears to maybe have killed his career (or at least his spirit for making films). He had a couple projects in the works while Bad Moon was in production, but to date, almost ten years later, he has not written, directed or produced anything else.