Warning – Major Spoilers! – This film is too goofy not to talk about the problems in context.
While on a jungle expedition, Ted and his girlfriend are attacked in their tent by a werewolf. Ted alone survives and kills the beast, but receives a scratch that infects him. Sometime later, Ted’s sister Janet gets a call from him stating that he is living in a trailer a few hundred miles away and that she and her son should come visit. During the trip, which Ted insists end before sundown, Janet attempts to persuade Ted to move out of isolation and come stay with them. It’s an offer Ted later accepts when the bodies of local hikers and rangers start to turn up near his trailer.
Upon moving his trailer into Janet’s backyard, the family dog Thor (the smartest character in the movie; when she invites Ted to stay with her, the dog knows who she is talking to and what about), becomes immediately suspicious of Ted and his nightly ‘jogs’. It turns out that Ted is chaining himself to a tree every night so that when he becomes a werewolf he won’t be able to hurt anyone. This plan works for exactly one night before the cuffs break and Thor has to fight the werewolf to protect his family. The werewolf later murders a trespassing ‘flopsy’ (a person who pretends people’s dog bit him to extort money. Is this a thing?) and frames the dog for it. When that doesn’t work, Ted, in human form, provokes Thor to bite him so Janet will give the dog to the pound. (This is a strange reversal of motivations that happens with Ted over and over in the film. He’s alternately trying to protect his sister or clear a path to kill her at different points in the film for no real reason.) Once Thor is out of the way, Janet decides to go up to the woods, totally unarmed (no really, she pulls out a gun from a hiding spot and then does not load it and puts back where she found it), to confirm what she already knows and the film rolls to the standard werewolf climax.
Bad Moon is a terrible, silly film that reaches Ed Woodian levels of awful. This is precisely why I recommend buying it; I hate the term ‘so bad it’s good’ but in this case it really does apply. This is a movie that is just ripe for riffing the next time you have some friends over and want to do some amateur MST3K. Whole sequences, (like the ‘Flopsy’ subplot) make no sense and only seem to be there to insert the mandatory plot beats later in this werewolf retread.
The dialogue is hideous, with every line consisting of ham fisted exposition and foreshadowing. Eric Red has writing credits on The Hitcher and Near Dark, so it’s shocking to hear every single line clumsily scream ‘her brother is clearly a werewolf (or at least a psychotic) but she’s stubbornly not going to see that till the second act reveal’. A personal favorite of mine is how Ted says ‘sis’ every other line just to reinforce that they are related.
The fun continues on a technical level with a werewolf that is actually pretty scary looking, but is so brightly over lit that it is very clearly a puppet head, moving in robotic, jerky, shaky movements. Much of the film is set at night, but we never get anywhere near dark. All the night scenes are lit with spot lights so it looks like they are in the middle of a baseball stadium all the time. Finally, we are treated to a cringe-inducing CGI werewolf morph right out of a first season X-files episode (Theatrical version only, more on that later).
Scream Factory does a reasonable job of assembling extras for those brave souls adventurous enough to dare purchase and watch Bad Moon. Storyboards, Theatrical Trailer, and various interviews with cast and crew are included. To his credit, Writer/Director Eric Red is proud of his work and stands up for it in two audio commentaries (One for each version of the film). Both a Theatrical cut and a Director’s Cut are included on the disc. The director’s cut adds in a nipple, some gore, and removes the cringy CGI morph altogether; this causes its runtime to be slightly shorter than theatrical’s already scant runtime of 79 minutes.
Adam Ruhl is a writer and life long Cinephile. He is the Executive
Cinema Editor of Pop Culture Beast’s Austin branch; covering festivals,
conventions, and new releases. When not filing reports, Adam can be
found stalking Alamo Drafthouse Programmers for leads on upcoming
DrafthouseFilms titles. Adam once blocked Harry Knowles entrance to a
theater until he was given extra tickets to a Roman Polanski movie.