Counterculture in a Letterman Jacket

Read Time:5 Minute, 36 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
Full Moon High
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Genre: Horror, Comedy
Year Released: 1981, Eureka Classics Blu-ray 2026
Runtime: 1h 34m
Director(s): Larry Cohen
Writer(s): Larry Cohen
Cast: Adam Arkin, Roz Kelly, Ed McMahon, Elizabeth Hartman, Kenneth Mars
Where to Watch: available January 16, 2026. Pre-order your copy here: www.eurekavideo.co.uk

RAVING REVIEW: What happens when a horror-comedy doesn’t care enough about scares or laughs? FULL MOON HIGH is one of those films that practically dares you to misunderstand it. On the surface, it looks like a goofy werewolf parody that came on the scene at the exact wrong moment, released in the same year as some genuinely transformative genre landmarks. That surface exploration is easy, and for many viewers, it’s where the conversation ends. But writer/director Larry Cohen was never interested in making things easy, and even his silliest film carries teeth beneath the fur.

Unlike the nearly perfected, technically advanced werewolf films of its era, FULL MOON HIGH is deliberately unruly. It’s not built around suspense, transformation spectacle, or even mythology. Instead, it’s more like a sketch comedy stitched together by attitude rather than structure. Scenes begin and end abruptly. Some jokes land, some overstay their welcome, or veer into odd levels of discomfort without warning. The film often feels like it’s actively refusing to conform, and that refusal is very much the point.

Adam Arkin’s Tony Walker is a teenage football star who becomes a werewolf after a trip abroad, but the transformation itself is almost beside the point. Cohen isn’t interested in the horror mechanics of the curse. Tony’s condition functions less as a monster movie trope and more as a metaphor that refuses to sit still. He’s frozen in adolescence while the world around him ages and settles into the natural world. The joke isn’t that he’s a werewolf. The joke is that he never grows up in a society that desperately wants him to.

Ed McMahon’s Colonel Walker is a caricature of conservative authority, and Cohen doesn’t pretend otherwise. He’s all fallout shelters, patriotic paranoia, and expectations, a walking embodiment of the America Tony is expected to inherit. Their relationship isn’t subtle, but it doesn’t need to be. FULL MOON HIGH operates with the broadest strokes because it’s aiming at systems, not individuals. Parents, institutions, schools, religion, politics, and respectability all become targets, and Cohen takes shots at all of them with gleeful disregard.

This is where the film starts to reveal its deeper intentions. FULL MOON HIGH isn’t nostalgic about teenage culture or the past it depicts. In fact, it actively resents the way youthful rebellion gets repackaged as something harmless once it’s no longer threatening. Tony’s return years later to a town that’s decayed both economically and morally is one of the film’s most intriguing ideas. The people who once rebelled have grown comfortable (sound familiar?) The city has accepted decline as normal. The werewolf, meanwhile, hasn’t changed at all.

Roz Kelly’s Jane and the supporting cast embody this shift perfectly. They’re not villains in the traditional sense. They’re worse than that. They’re content. Their lives are stable, dull, and stripped of curiosity, and the film frames that stability as a kind of spiritual death. FULL MOON HIGH isn’t angry that the counterculture failed. It’s angry that it was abandoned so easily. That anger bleeds into the film’s sexual politics, which are messy, uncomfortable, and very much of their time. Some jokes and situations land poorly today, and there’s no getting around that. Cohen often pushes boundaries, and the result is material that can feel abrasive or ill-considered.

Elizabeth Hartman’s Miss Montgomery is one of the film’s strangest and most challenging elements. Her arc is intentionally provocative, blurring lines that modern audiences understandably recoil from. Cohen uses her character not as a fantasy but as a critique of repression and social rigidity, though that intention doesn’t automatically make the execution easier to accept. This is one of those moments where FULL MOON HIGH asks viewers to grapple with its ideas rather than enjoy them, and many will understandably reject that demand.

Seen through the lens of Larry Cohen’s larger body of work, the film makes more sense. Like many of his projects, it’s more concerned with confrontation than with craftsmanship. It’s a movie that treats comedy as a weapon rather than an escape, using absurdity to poke holes in American myths about maturity, success, and respectability. It’s also a film that arrived just as the cultural moment it was critiquing was being buried under nostalgia.

FULL MOON HIGH isn’t some hidden gem waiting to be rediscovered. It’s a deliberately awkward, frequently frustrating, and often uneven film that demands patience and generosity; it doesn’t always earn it. But it’s also unmistakably a Larry Cohen film, bristling with ideas, contempt for complacency, and a refusal to behave. For viewers willing to engage with its chaos rather than fight it, something is compelling beneath the mess. This is a film that howls more than it bites, but the echo of that howl lingers longer than expected.

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[photo courtesy of EUREKA ENTERTAINMENT]

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