The situation surrounding the Dwayne Wade statue is wild to me. He was reportedly heavily involved in the process and was good with it. Not only that, but his defense of the goofy face is weird. "It don't need to look like me. It's the artistic version of a moment that happened that we're trying to cement."
I don't buy that. It doesn't need to look like you? Dwayne, my brother in Christ, the statue is supposed to BE you. How does... that... cement a moment in time? That's gotta be him running damage control and not wanting to bury the artist, right? In any case, at least the memes are great and in 2024, that's all you can ask for. So yeah, let's move on to...
Bad Moon (1996)
I said this last year and it bears repeating, there aren't enough good werewolf movies. I don't know if that's the case, or if I just haven't seen enough, but I'm sticking with it. I believe part of the reason is that a werewolf is a creature that can be tough to make look good on film. I love Lon Chaney Jr.'s Wolfman. It's simple and because Chaney is such a big, imposing dude not much else had to be done outside of the makeup and furry face. But the movie werewolf has evolved to look more beast than man and while some of them look really cool at times, it's not always the case. Sometimes even the best costumes don't translate when the monsters are forced to move, which is a problem with Bad Moon.
The movie begins with a photojournalist and his girlfriend doing some work in Nepal. To celebrate a job well done, the two start banging in a tent. Because this is a horror movie, we know they done goofed, because a short time later their camp is attacked by a werewolf. It grabs the g/f, quickly murders her and then bites the photojournalist, Ted, in the shoulder. Ted manages to get a hold of a shotgun and then blows the head off the wolfie.
Ted then goes back home and does what he can to keep people safe. He tries handcuffing himself to a big tree at night, but despite his best efforts, he keeps killing people. Eventually, he's visited by his sister, Janet, who offers him the opportunity to stay with her. Naturally, he declines because he'd put them in danger. But he eventually has a change of heart and believes she can save him. What he thinks is spelled out in a journal entry, and no, I'm not making this up, that the power of love might be able to save him. It may be the worst reason for a bad decision I've ever seen in a horror movie. That's saying a lot for a genre that is chock full of them. So he takes his Airstream and goes to live in his sister's backyard. If I can give you a spoiler right now, the power of love does not save him, but more on that later.
This movie is based on a book called Thor. I'd never heard of it before, but the book sounds interesting. It has the same plot as the movie, but it's told from the perspective of the dog, Thor. Thor is a good doggie (is there any other kind?) who considers his family his pack. In the movie and book, Thor sniffs out what Ted is quick. But in the book, Thor is confused because he doesn't know if Ted is a threat or is a member of the pack. I know you can't do a movie through the eyes of the dog, but I find that premise a lot more interesting than the straightforward story we ended up with.
The movie's not great, and I know this may sound odd based on some things I've talked about in the past, but one thing I enjoyed about it is that it played with the werewolf lore. Once Ted moves in with the family, he sees Janet's son Brett watching the 1935 movie Werewolf of London. He scoffs at the idea of only turning at the full moon and gets annoyed when Brett questions him. They even talk about how to kill one and he disagrees about silver bullets, saying you can just blow their heads off with a shotgun. It's kind of funny because he understands so much more than this kid and seems like he's itching to reveal that he's a werewolf just to rub it in the kid's face. And I can respect that. It made me smile because everyone knows that feeling; arguing with someone much younger than you about something they know nothing about while you know a whole hell of a lot about it. Plus, a lot of the most famous werewolf lore comes from the original Wolfman movie and that was just the writer making stuff up.
Quick story; to graduate high school I had to do community service. I chose to sit with after-school kids at Gesu. It was 2005, after the Chris Moneymaker poker explosion, so we were playing Texas Hold Em with checkers pieces as chips, and this one kid... I was not a fan. He was just so smug about everything. Near the end, I got a funny feeling about the cards so I took them and started counting them. He did not like that... one... bit. I got to the 30s and he told me "You're starting to make me mad." I didn't care. I kept counting. I got to the 40s and the tension was palpable, he was practically shaking with rage, but we got to 50 and we were one card short. I had a quick pace as I was counting but when I hit 49, I slowed down. 49... 50... I held the final card in the air, staring right into his eyes and set it down... 51. I don't want to say I'm proud of that moment, but he had it coming. I just smiled at him and that was it. I did feel a tinge of sadness when his mom picked up. The first thing he did was announce his deck had only 51 cards. His mom didn't understand what that meant and asked why that mattered. "Because I can't use it anymore!" he protested. I didn't feel bad for him, of course not, but for his mom who had some unnecessary hassle coming her way. Still, I like to think that the kid learned a valuable lesson that day and is a better person for it. All thanks to me. He'll probably cure cancer thanks to the path I set him on.
Anyways, the movie... I liked it for the most part, but it did have its issues. The characters were entertaining enough and I loved Thor. He's a big German Shepherd who wants nothing more than to expose Ted. This movie spends a lot of time on the chess match between the two and it's my favorite thing about it. Thor spends almost the entire movie giving Ted the side eye and being on his ass every moment possible. It's funny because both of them want to kill the other but they don't want to get caught, so it seems like they are just waiting for the other to make the first move. The mental fight between the two is a joy to watch.
I'm not going to harp on the appearance of the monster too much, it looks OK at times, but when it's fighting, it seems too much like a dude in a suit. The werewolf does a lot of punching which isn't how I like my monsters handling their business, unless their punches pack some serious power like Jason Voorhees. Another thing that I didn't particularly care for was Ted himself. I had no problem with the actor, but I didn't quite understand the character. Despite doing things like handcuffing himself every night, he seemed to enjoy being a werewolf. He kept dropping hints to the family about what he was and seemed to always be seconds away going into a rage and murdering everyone.
It's solid and entertaining enough. It's shorter than most, clocking in at a little more than 80 minutes, so it gets to where it wants to go pretty quickly. As I write this, I keep going back to the "Power of Love" nonsense from earlier. The more I think about it, he actually WAS right, just not how he thought. It WAS the power of love that saved the family and ultimately him from his curse. He managed to get Thor taken away to the dog pound, but it's love that convinces Brett to bust him out. It's that same love that gets Thor to rescue Janet from the wolf. Finally, it's love for her family, and her brother, that gets Janet to blow Ted's head off with a big ass gun, freeing him. I don't know if that's what they were going for, or if I'm giving them too much credit. In any case, there are worse ways to spend 80 minutes.
6.5 Dr. Chainsaws!
