Beware The Moon and watch this film. Now.

Crikey, my nails need cutting.

I don’t know about you, but there are certain movies I gravitate back to. Nights when you aren’t tired enough to sleep and you want to stick a film on you are familar with, a film that you dont have to concentrate too hard on plot, characterisation or dialogue. A film you could probably recite and certainly have seen end a thousand plus times. Some are obvious to blokes of my age: The Great Escape, Escape to Victory, Alien, Die Hard, The Godfather, Goodfellas etc etc.

One film I never tire of was released in 1981 and is mainly about two American lads in their late teens, who come to England for a summer vacation and ultimately die. Both of them. It is directed and written by John Landis, while he worked as an assitant on ‘Kelly’s Heroes’ in Yugolsavia and witnessed a gypsy burial where the corpse was buried feet first, covered in garlic as to not rise from the grave.

The film is ‘An American Werewolf in London’ and I love it.

From the opening set up of meeting the Americans and establishing they are good mates simply by piss-taking, nose-running dialogue through to the final distraught sobs from the lovely Jenny Agutter (Unusually for any film, it was filmed completely in sequence) the film is a joy to watch.

It moves at a hurtling pace and is relatively short at 1 hour 37 minutes, but it establishes characters and relationships (David and Nurse Price do jump into bed in a relatively short time but you understand why and how it happens) and includes some of the most tense moments of 80s cinema and a whole boat load of quotable lines (“Mummy a naked American man stole my balloons”) and of course the piece de resistance, the werewolf.

Designed and created by Rick Baker and based on his dog Bosko, it still stands out now as a piece of technical brilliance. So much so that the Academy Awards created a Best Make-up Oscar and awarded it to Baker. Have a look at the werewolf transformation clip on Youtube and if you are seeing it for the first time I challenge you not to go “Bloody hell”.

Apart from the two American actors it is packed with established, top-notch British actors and an early appearence from a young Rik Mayall.  The script contains great dialogue and elements of surprise and pathos, the sight of Jack decaying before my eyes gets me every time. Oh and for people brought up on films like Saw and Hostel now there is still gore aplenty, each subsequent werewolf attacks get bloodier and bloodier.

I really can’t recommend this film enough. It is up there in my top 5 of all time and no doubt can be picked up for a couple of quid on ebay or amazon or wherever (try and get the 25th Anniversary edition as there are some great extras on it).

A couple of more things, every song in the film is about the moon and has that word in the title and like every Landis film, it features a movie within a movie ‘See You Next Wednesday’. Here in the guise of a 70s porno viewed in a seedy Soho cinema.

Finally. Beware the Moon and stay on the road when you walk around at night because you never know if something has strayed from those moors.

Teg.