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Lycanthropic growls and gridiron grunts blur in the opening titles, just one suggestive note tossed off as a gag in a sustained swarm of them. The high-school quarterback (Adam Arkin) dodges the pushy girlfriend (Roz Kelly) under the bleachers and Coach Grab-Ass (Kenneth Mars) in the showers, a trip to Romania adds another predator with a furry figure stalking the shadows to dramatic violins. "Don't dogs have masters here? Only musical accompanists?" Back home the lad metamorphoses into a hirsute rump-nipper, not a killer but "a nosher," Dad (Ed McMahon) hugs a rifle in his bomb shelter and confides into a photo of Joseph McCarthy: "The Commies turned my son into a wolf!" Larry Cohen's allegorical monsters and generational abrasion, treated as paroxysmal slapstick in a pell-mell burlesque. The alma mater repressed under Eisenhower and dilapidated under Reagan, between them is a world spin for the protagonist cursed to perpetual adolescence. ("Wolfman Eats Chinese," reads the Hong Kong newspaper headline, subheaded with "Thirty Minutes Later, Hungry Again.") The mad scientist (Alan Arkin) subscribes to insult therapy, the lustful coed (Joanne Nail) wields a silver knife for the Psycho shower, the timid teacher (Elizabeth Hartman) embraces the beast within. A jamboree of surpassing chaos, far closer to Klein's Mr. Freedom than to Mel Brooks or Airplane!, a stream of guerrilla invention on a fraction of the budget of mainstream werewolf releases. "The best scene and the best special effects, and we're missing it because he shot the camera." Cohen elaborates on his own punchline in It's Alive III: Island of the Alive. "Your turn to bite me now." With Bill Kirchenbauer, Jim J. Bullock, Demond Wilson, Louis Nye, Pat Morita, Tom Aldredge, James Dixon, and Bob Saget.
--- Fernando F. Croce |