40 years ago this summer, Michael J. Fox jumped from TV sitcom Family Ties to the big screen, starring in a coming-of-age comedy with unusual, fantastical elements. He was also in Back to the Future. But before carrying a near-perfect movie with the irresistible premise of traveling back in time to meet your parents when they were in high school, he starred in a movie with the considerably more resistible premise of a teenager also being a werewolf who is good at basketball for some reason. Teen Wolf was shot prior to Back to the Future, and well before that film became a summer-dominating blockbuster. But luckily for everyone involved was released after the latter, presumably maximizing its financial potential. When it debuted on the weekend of August 23, 1984, Fox held the top two spots at the box office. (Back to the Future stayed fast at number one.)
That’s rarified territory entered by the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio at the height of Titanic mania (when his Man in the Iron Mask, also shot before his defining blockbuster, also debuted at number two), or Tom Hanks when a Toy Story movie is in the mix (the second one and The Green Mile were the top two movies for a weekend in 1999). Fox did it before either of them, and at very least, audiences got what they were paying for, assuming they were paying to see Fox sweat, run, and bumble through his signature physical comedy. There’s a shot in Teen Wolf where Scott (Fox), the teenager plagued and then boosted by a werewolf curse, runs down a just-mopped hallway, slips and slides repeatedly, falls, gets back up, and skids around a corner. Director Rod Daniel may not have gone on to greater things, but he captures this beautifully. The camera holds on Fox running down the hall, capturing his flailing from an increasing distance, before cutting to the next corner to capture him sliding, backtracking, and zipping down another hall. It’s a relatively brief moment in the scheme of things; it’s also memorably 40 years later because it frames Fox and his talent so clearly.
As a werewolf story, Teen Wolf is somewhat less hardcore than the 1957 I Was a Teenage Werewolf. Honestly, it’s somewhat less hardcore than a Goosebumps movie. The fact that Scott doesn’t kill, maim, or even bite anyone in the movie, and inherits his werewolfism through his mild-mannered father rather than some gothic mishap, is actually sort of novel, and in keeping, in its way, with the later-period Universal Monster sequels that tended to be a little sillier and kid-friendlier than the originals. The movie’s treatment of his powers, though, are slapdash. Setting aside his hair and claws, depicted in agreeably cheap-looking but not actor-smothering make-up, being a werewolf seems to entail the following: being good at basketball; being good at bowling; increased ability to balance on top of a moving van; being passable at breakdancing; placing others in thrall with your red glowing eyes and forcing them to do your bidding. That last one happens once, then is never used or mentioned ever again.
Some of these abilities could be chalked up to Scott tapping into a more wolf-like aggression and ensuing confidence, and that’s more or less where the movie lands as it decides it’s imperative that he be himself, rather than relying on his wolfiness. But the movie also feints toward an early version of a Spider-Man-style story; Scott’s dad even paraphrases (uncredited) the “with great power comes great responsibility” line. Scott’s responsibility apparently doesn’t extend to helping people so much as not hurting or inconveniencing them – which, again, is sort of refreshingly low-stakes but also hard to dramatize unless, say, you’re hell-bent on making everything come down to a free-throw shot at a basketball game.
Actually, even then, the message is muddy: Scott is supposed to be learning to work together with his team, rather than selfishly hot-dogging, or rather hot-wolfing, his way through life. But he’s clearly the one who stands to gain the most by making those free-throws, the most unabashedly single-player achievement in all of basketball. Then again, it’s hard to rail against the basketball stuff too much, because it also provides the movie’s funniest character: Coach Finstock (Jay Tarses), a laid-back (though apparently IRS-bedeviled) pragmatist who offers advice like: “It doesn’t matter how you play the game, it’s whether you win or lose. And even that doesn’t make all that much difference” and “never play cards with a guy who has the same first name as a city.” Between the hit rate on Tarses’ dialogue and his background as a TV writer, you have to wonder if he supplied all of Finstock’s lines himself.
If the rest of Teen Wolf was populated by similarly funny characters, it could lay claim to being a comedy that happens to have a goofy werewolf element. It has to settle for being a mild charmer with some big if intermittent laughs, appealing primarily to Fox or wolf completists. That’s probably an appropriate place for it to land, now that the movie itself is approaching middle age. After all, the same chilling movie math that can be applied to Back to the Future, where the trip back back from 1985 to 1955 would translate today as a trip back to 1995, can be applied in reverse to Teen Wolf. That movie is now 40 years old; in 1985, a 40-year-old movie was something from 1945, around when original wolf man Larry Talbot was entering House of Dracula and preparing to meet Abbott and Costello a few years later. (He’s not even title-billed in either.) Teen Wolf isn’t formally connected to the early-’80s werewolf boom that gave us An American Werewolf in London, The Howling, and Wolfen. But spiritually, it’s the right kind of throwaway.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.