Before TEEN WOLF, Larry Cohen brought the teenage werewolf back to high school in the comedy FULL MOON HIGH, on Blu-ray from Scream Factory.

Tony Walker (Adam Arkin, HALLOWEEN: H20) is just your mild-mannered, average, popular captain of the high school football team until his CIA agent father Colonel Walker (THE JOHNNY CARSON SHOW's Ed McMahon) takes him along on a trip to Romania to learn about "communist infiltration" which finds the elder Walker spending most of his time gathering intelligence from prostitutes while Tony sees the sights from dungeons to the Museum of Mental Illness. After a palm reader predicts that he will never age or die, Tony is attacked by a werewolf on a lonely country road. Returning home, Tony starts "annoying" the town with nightly gentle nippings of coed posteriors. When his father discovers the nature of his affliction, he accidentally kills himself by firing a gun in his fallout shelter. Feeling guilty about his father's death, Tony drops out of school just before the big game and wanders the world for thirty years before returning home to fulfill his destiny. He finds Full Moon High much changed in the early 1980s with disco, dope, and gangs. What has not changed is his ex-girlfriend Janie (Roz Kelly, NEW YEAR'S EVIL) – now unhappily married to his former buddy-turned-town sheriff Flynn (Bill Kirchenbauer, GORP) – who sees through his assumed identity as Tony's son Tony Jr. and wants him to bestow the mark of the beast and eternal life to her. Complicating matters is his newfound attraction to coed Ricky (Joanne Nail, THE VISITOR) and his increasing difficulty resisting the kill until he fulfills his destiny which he believes is to break the jinx on Full Moon High's football team.

Larry Cohen has always had a knack for comedy within other genres from the monster movie (Q: THE WINGED SERPENT) to sci-fi (THE STUFF), but he pretty much strikes out with pure comedy in the form of FULL MOON HIGH which gets intermittent laughs from sight gags but not from his scenery-chewing leads or their relationships. Tony's seemingly important destiny is so incidental to the story as to take a back seat to the climax which is either supposed to be tragic or comic but is neither (or even tragicomic). Whatever one ultimately thinks of TEEN WOLF, it does better handle the scenario (come to think of it, so does the shoddier TEEN WOLF TOO). Wasted in supporting roles are the late Elizabeth Hartman (THE BEGUILED) and, most unforgivably, Kenneth Mars (YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN) as "Coach Grab-ass" who showers with his players and cannot later remember as principal whether he "had" Tony Sr. The film also includes appearances from SANFORD AND SON's Demond Wilson, TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT's Jim J. Bullock as Janie and Flynn's effeminate son, and HAPPY DAYS' Pat Morita as a silversmith. Arkin's father Alan (GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS) plays a quack doctor who wants to get his hands on Tony for dissection.