Teen Wolf Too (1987)

the audience applauded

Sorry, this movie sucks

For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Teen Wolf Too (1987) * (out of 4)Todd Howard (Jason Bateman), the cousin of the teenage werewolf from the first film, finds himself in college on a sports scholarship even though he doesn't play sports. It turns out that Stiles (Stuart Fratkin) pretty much added him to the team hoping that he could have the same wolf powers. When it turns out Todd is a werewolf, his entire life changes.TEEN WOLF was a film that most people make fun of or look at as a piece of trash but I've always had a soft spot for it. Yes, it's quite stupid but at the same time it was a fun movie with some good performances and for the most part it featured a character that a lot of young people could connect with. TEEN WOLF TOO, on the other hand, is pure garbage and the worst thing is that it's pretty lazy and just a boring rehash of the first picture.Everything that happens in the first picture basically happens here, although the quality is much less. You've got a teenager struggling with life who finds himself becoming popular. The teen loves the popularity but soon realizes it is costing him real friends. He soon realizes that the party girl isn't what he wants. He realizes that the party life isn't what he wants. Does all of this sound familiar? If so, I'm sure you know how it ends.Worst of all is the fact that all of the goofiness that worked in the first picture just doesn't work here. Bateman is a complete bore in the picture. Fratkin can't compete with the original actor. Even John Astin is wasted in a boring role. The film has a couple cast members from the original but even they can't add much here.TEEN WOLF TOO is just a really lousy movie that was made to try and make money off of the original. There's nothing fresh or new here and the end result is a real turkey.

If you have watched Teen Wolf, then change out Michael J Fox for his wolf cousin Jason Bateman, replace basketball with boxing and move everything to college not high school and there is no need to watch this pointless sequel. It's a badly made, badly written, badly acted movie. It looked like a cross between a Teen Wold rehash and a discarded Animal House or Stripes style script with a boxing / dancing wolf thrown into the mix. Sometimes films should not have been made and this is clearly one of those times.The only reason I can come up with is that it was the 80's and apparently Hollywood was cocaine filled or so the stories go. There has to be a link, doesn't there? Now for the good points…………………………………………………………… Featured on Episode 71 of The Emerald Reprobates Podcast.

There seems to be so much going wrong with this movie before you actually put it into the DVD player and press play to actually question whether it is actually going to be worth your time (all one and a half hours of it, and remember that you are never going to get those one and a half hours back) sitting in front of the television screen (or in my case, the computer) and watching it.Okay, we can forgive the fact that Michael J Fox does not return as the lead character. This is understandable considering we are dealing with a new place and apparently new people. Well, that is actually what made me start thinking about this film and that is that as far as I could tell, there was only one actor, and that is the father (James Hampton) that actually came across from the original movie. However, there were a number of characters that came over as well (including Styles and the Coach) but it appears that these actors had better things to do with their time.Oh, the guy that plays Chubby comes over as well, but maybe that was because he was having a lot of difficulty finding work in Hollywood at the time.Okay, now that we have put that aside, I might then go on to suggest that this film reminds me of The Hangover Part II. No, not because it is about a bunch of guys that get outrageously drunk and have to piece the previous night together (though if they had thrown a werewolf into it, it might have made that movie somewhat more interesting) but rather because it is an exact duplicate of Teen Wolf, to the point that we pretty much know exactly what is going to happen. The only difference is because we are dealing with boxing as opposed to basketball, and we are in college as opposed to high school.Oh, we do have mention of those dreaded sports scholarships that seem to full American Universities with semi-literate people we are able to coast through their courses simply because they are really good at sports (and considering that college and highschool football is actually a big money spinner over in the states, I can see why they want to attract the best athletes). However, we must remember that while the athletes may become millionaires (if they are lucky and don't land up like Al Bundy, working in a ladies shoe shop, caught in some familial situation where he is the butt of all the jokes), it is the geeks that go on to become billionaires (unless, of course, you are like me that you did not actually use your geekiness and your intelligence wisely, and ended up wasting your time playing Dungeons and Dragons, and wasting your money buying Magic Cards).

Although he is Scott's cousin, Todd Howard has managed to dodge the "family problem" and is a perfectly normal young man starting a promising college career. Despite being very weedy and interested in becoming a vet, Todd has managed to get a sports scholarship without being sure why. Turns out that the Dean has assumed that Todd can do for the college boxing team what Scott did for his high school basketball team what with him being a werewolf and everything. Todd discovers this quickly and is keen to disappoint but his genes betray him as the "family problem" manifests itself suddenly. Overnight Todd is a star in the ring and on the campus – but can he manage this sudden change?When I read overly negative reviews of the first Teen Wolf film I can only silently shake my head and wonder what the same viewer makes of the sequel. I say this because, as basic as the original film is, Teen Wolf Too/Two/2/whatever is like the makers condensed the original film to the basics and then just put that out on as little money, time and effort as possible. It shows in all areas of the film but I have to start somewhere so I will do so with the actual story. The flow of it is this (a) studious kid doesn't really fit into school/college, (b) kid becomes werewolf, (c) kid becomes popular but also a major a**hole, (d) kid learns life lesson. OK, so you can see it is essentially the same film as the first time, with the sport and setting different. In terms of the telling of the story though, we literally jump between these parts without any gradual development between them. I'm not saying it needed a lot of complexity but maybe just one or two scenes bridging the gap between the elements – instead it will literally have 1 scene of him becoming a werewolf for the first time, then the next scene is him popular and doing a 50's twist (for some reason) at a party – not even a bridge which shows him winning over an initially hesitant campus. This is the same across the whole film and it makes it weaker as a film – a problem considering it would still have not been great with these scenes.This slapdash approach is reflected in the whole film and it is no surprise that the script is poor. The dialogue matches the "good enough" approach to the narrative – ie lines are clunky, obvious and lacking anything that would make you care enough to listen. However, producing even this level of trash was clearly too much for the writers because they appear to have been too busy to get laughs, fun or energy into the script. Visually it looks cheap. The sets are faded and unconvincing while the aim appears to have been to try and pull off "crowd" scenes with as few extras as possible. The wolf makeup is also really bad – never great of course but in Too it looks like a mask purchased at a corner store.With all this it is no surprise that the cast can do nothing with it. I feel sorry for Bateman but he is poor here and cannot do anything with the material handed to him. He has almost zero chemistry with Chandler as well – again neither of them helped by the material having no bridge between "oh hi" and "you are the love of my life". Astin must have hoped for more but, even though he has a glint in his eyes that suggests a fun role in the film, he does nothing and has nothing to do. Fratkin and Holton are both annoying and deliver nothing in the way of laughs that the writers clearly just assumed they would do on their own (wackiy guy and fat guy – practically writes itself.....errr, no, no it doesn't).The end product is not so much a terrible film in that everything was misjudged but rather a terrible film because nobody seems to have given a single, flying f**k about it from conception to final delivery. The plot is the same as the first film but yet so much worse and basic, with similar dialogue. The "feel" of the film is likewise cheap and "make-do" and it is no surprise that nobody in the cast can do much of anything with the whole affair. The only value the sequel has is making the first Teen Wolf film seem more fresh and filled with fun that it was.