Teen Wolf (1985)

There is a moment in Teen Wolf when a teenage boy discovers that his body has betrayed him into something hairy and inconvenient, and the film treats this as a modest comedic problem to be solved before the championship game. Rod Daniel directs the proceedings with the efficiency of a man who has been told the budget is four million dollars and intends to spend three of them on Michael J. Fox's charm. The result is a werewolf picture with almost no werewolf in it, a coming-of-age story where the coming of age amounts to learning that you should probably stop hogging the ball.

We are asked to examine this 1985 artifact for signs of contemporary social consciousness, and we find the cupboards bare. The town of Beacontown, Nebraska is white in the way that only a studio comedy from the Reagan era could arrange with a straight face. The women exist to be pursued (Pamela), to be overlooked (Boof), or to be kissed in hallways as a reward for personal growth. Nobody interrogates the family curse as a metaphor for anything, because the curse is simply a way to dunk. A character sells merchandise in the school parking lot, and the film regards this as entrepreneurial spirit, not evidence of a system devouring its young. There is no environmental anxiety, no commentary on racial identity, no questioning of beauty standards, and no acknowledgment that the human brain comes in more than one configuration.

This is not a failing. It is a data point. The picture wants only to be a light comedy about a nice boy who turns into a wolf and wins a basketball game, and it accomplishes exactly that with a shrug and a saxophone. It scored no points in our ledger, which is its own kind of purity. Historians of the form may note that a franchise, an animated series, a sequel, and eventually a brooding MTV drama all grew from this soil. The soil itself contains nothing but topsoil.