Teen Wolf (1985)
Directed by Rod Daniel
When a shy teenager's new-found powers help him score at basketball - and with the popular girls - he has some pretty hairy decisions to make.
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What critics compared Teen Wolf to
With an appealing-enough cast headlined by Lucy Hale (Aria on ABC Family/Freeform’s Pretty Little Liars ) and Violett Beane ( Slash ), with decent supporting work from the likes of Tyler Posey (Scott on MTV’s Teen Wolf ) and Hayden Szeto ( The Edge of Seventeen ), there is nothing so terrible here that a better script couldn’t fix.
For example, annoyingly virginal Olivia (Lucy Hale, of Pretty Little Liars ) has a crush on Lucas (Tyler Posey, of Teen Wolf ), the rather dull boyfriend of Olivia's best friend Markie (Violett Beane, of The Flash ).
Lucy Hale (Pretty Little Liars) plays Olivia, a college student lured away from a Spring Break trip filled with Habitat For Humanity-style servitude to go on a booze-filled south-of-the-border bacchanalian with her best friend Markie (Violett Beane, The Flash), Markie’s boyfriend Lucas (Tyler Posey, Teen Wolf) and a few other housemates and friends.
Yeah, “Teen Wolf” did it first – and “Turning Red” shares a few aspects with that 1980s Michael J. Fox hit – but Shi crafts a heartwarming, empowering and fun narrative about female puberty and a changing mother/daughter relationship.
Sure, Teen Wolf sorta got there first, but this is smart, elevated children’s fare.
Though it may take a page or two from the “Teen Wolf” playbook, the premise of “Turning Red” is a more thoughtful repackaging of that narrative.
Adolescence is tough enough without turning into a hideous monster, and movies from Teen Wolf to Ginger Snaps have gotten plenty of mileage out of conflating those two experiences.
Yes, there’s more than a hint of “Teen Wolf” in this script by Julia Cho and director Domee Shi, who directed the adorable and Oscar-winning Chinese mom and her baby dumpling short, “Bao” a few years back.
What if Pixar made Teen Wolf for younger girls?
We've seen teenage werewolves before, from Michael Landon in I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) to Michael J. Fox in Teen Wolf (1985) to Seth Green in TV's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."
It's a cinch to connect the hairy howling of adolescence with the legend of lycanthropes -- hence ''I Was a Teenage Werewolf'' and Michael J. Fox in ''Teen Wolf.''
O’Brien, who plays a modern incarnation of Stiles on MTV’s Teen Wolf, does a nice job in the lead.
The young cast is for the most part an agreeable bunch: O’Brien, who cut his teeth on MTV’s “Teen Wolf,” and Scodelario, who was in the original British version of “Skins,” go through their paces efficiently enough, and though Poulter is stuck in a one-note angry-young-man persona that doesn’t give him room to build on what he managed in “Son of Rambow” and “We’re the Millers,” he does what the role demands of him well enough.
The film’s lead, Dylan O’Brien, star of the MTV series “Teen Wolf,” gets his big screen comeuppance (he had a supporting role in last year’s “ The Internship “) as a frightened young lad in a locked elevator cage going up, without a clue how he got there, and without his memory.
This aim is bolstered by a surprisingly strong cast, led by Teen Wolf ’s Dylan O’Brien, who charges Thomas with a restless, intense charm that drives the movie’s sense of restless wanderlust hiding beneath the survivalist structure.
That's not Dylan O'Brien's ("Teen Wolf") fault.
In particular, they streamline the book’s interminable opening, in which newcomer Thomas (Dylan O’Brien, star of TV’s Teen Wolf) asks more frustrated questions than a secondary character on Lost, and gets fewer answers, with less reason.
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Starring: Dylan O’Brien (Maze Runner, “Teen Wolf”), Jessica Henwick (“Iron Fist,” “Game of Thrones”), Michael Rooker (Guardians of the Galaxy), Ariana Greenblatt (The One And Only Ivan, Avengers: Infinity War).
The Maze Runner and Teen Wolf star plays Joel Dawson, a twentysomething informing us via opening voiceover that most of the world’s population has been wiped out by the Monsterpocalypse.
O'Brien, who first broke out in Teen Wolf and then The Maze Runner films, is quite good at portraying Joel, a self-deprecating everyguy who's known more for making his colony minestrone than for fighting the monsters aboveground.
Joel (Dylan O'Brien, of Teen Wolf and the hazily remembered Maze Runner movies) still loves his girlfriend, Aimee (Jessica Henwick), even though he hasn't seen her in seven years.
He’s been an obvious leading man since his days on Teen Wolf and has seemed to have numerous big screen misfires, this one chalked up to 2020, but has always solidly displayed his acting chops.
I mean, Hardy is the literal face of this anti-hero origin story, but its failure is not his fault; that the film (and his character’s journey) intermittently resembles “Teen Wolf” and “Liar Liar” (complete with Hardy channeling Carrey’s manic energy) explicitly feels like the byproduct of the worst sort of committee thinking.
The script is funny and sharp, and filled with references that most older horror fans will appreciate, from "Teen Wolf" to "The Shining," but the film errs more on the side of slapstick than scary.
In a movie long on detail but short on humanity, the final third, the assault on the Abbottabad compound, where bin Laden spent his final years, sharing with operatives’ families and a haul of VHS tapes (including the United States’ copy of Teen Wolf), is almost light relief.
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A former addict, Luke owes a scummy dealer $50,000, and has estranged his father (Linden Ashby, MTV’s Teen Wolf , Mortal Kombat ) in the process.
The exception is Richie Boyle (Dylan O’Brien of “The Maze Runner” franchise and “Teen Wolf”).