I Was a Teenage Wereskunk (2017)
Starring Scott Monahan, Shey Lyn Zanotti, Charlie Farrell, Amy Heidt, Sean Cork, Melanie Minichino
Written and directed by Neal McLaughlin
Take an homage to 1950’s monster movies, a dash of John Waters’ Hairspray, sprinkle in some silly Zucker Bros.-style comedy, and you get the hilarious cinematic oddity that is I Was a Teenage Wereskunk.
I’d also say toss in a smidge of My Demon Lover, but we’re all better off forgetting that Eighties horror comedy. Just forget I even brought it up.
I readily admit that my expectations were not particularly high going into a 1950’s drive-in movie parody about a teenager transforming into a murderous half-man/half-skunk whenever he feels sexually aroused. Not just because of the loopy premise; I’ve seen so many of these retro creature features, and while they may have been made by people with their hearts in the right place, typically, what they’ve made tends to be so beholden to the tropes of the genre they suffer from being too dry, too talky, not particularly witty, and strain to stretch razor-thin material out to feature length.
When I talked some b-movie-loving friends into watching this one with me, they were also quite skeptical at what I was about to subject them to. Ninety minutes later, we were all pleasantly surprised – kinda shocked, actually, not just that this wereskunk didn’t stink, that we all laughed our asses off as much as we did.
I Was a Teenage Wereskunk defies the trend by becoming its own creature. Whereas most similar stylized flicks are tongue-in-cheek love letters that don’t have a lot of appeal to anyone outside of hardcore fans of atomic age b-movies, writer-director Neal McLaughlin has smartly crafted a horror comedy that hits all the notes, plays off all the tropes, but is as much in the vein of a broad comedy along the lines of Scary Movie as it is a comical recreation a la The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra.
Curtis Albright (Scott Monahan) is your stereotypical early 1960’s teenager forever adorned in his letterman jacket and with more raging hormones than common sense. He tends to take what people say a bit too literally, often with comical results. He’s also far too eager to convince the local beatnik that he’s a cool cat and not a “Clyde.” This also gets him into more misadventures that ultimately lead to stinky terror.
Just as so many teen-centric sci-fi horror movies of the 1950’s were metaphors for teenage sexuality, most notably I Was a Teenage Werewolf, the wereskunk takes that metaphor to literal and ridiculous extremes.
You see, Curtis is in love with the kindly, yet equally dimwitted Mary Beth (Shey Lyn Zanotti) but isn’t particularly good at expressing how he really feels about her. He needs the prodding of a beatnik whose lingo may as well be an alien language to get in touch with his true feelings for his roller skating lady love who thinks a blowjob actually means breathing really hard on a guy’s pants. But before he can give in to his animal urges, sexually repressed Curtis gets sprayed by a skunk while peeping in a woman’s window as she undresses. Now he finds himself cursed by “the one who squirts,” forever doomed to transform into a killer wereskunk whenever feeling the urge.
The Teen Wolf-inspired look of the wereskunk is, for lack of any other work, inspired, even if you can see the painted string keeping the skunk snout in place on the actor’s face. That string becomes the subject of a joke seen during an outtake during the closing credits. This is one where you need to watch all the way to the very end. Again, what could have been a straightforward parody of the genre frequently veers off into downright quirky and uproariously unexpected areas thanks to a witty script loaded with double entrendres and an assortment of zany characters.
A deputy keeps making anachronistic references that don’t exist yet in the film’s early 1960’s setting, leading to a truly out of left field revelation that caused a friend to nearly fall on the floor laughing.
Another is the overeager, easily grossed out, motor-mouthed, and always wrong but never willing to admit it Deputy Gary, clearly played by a woman in a mustache – just because.
It’s actually amazing any crime ever gets solved in this town what with Curtis’ father, the Sheriff, seeming more concerned with rifling through his secret stash of nudie magazines or clowning around (literally!) with his ever-horny wife; that is, when she’s not cooking up colossal stacks of pancakes big enough to play ultimate Frisbee with.
Say, Mrs. Albright bears a disturbing resemblance to Deputy Gary. You don’t suppose…?
Throughout the film we’re treated to a variety of parodies of Fifties pop rock songs, my personal favorite being the one that plays off all those insipidly peppy malt shop pop songs of the era about sugary candy by including the ever-looming threat of diabetes.
There’s even a brief movie-within-a-movie when Curtis attends a 3D screening of that classic sci-fi shocker It Came from Uranus that’s primarily an excuse to make a series of jokes about exactly what you’d expect from the title.
Yes, some of those jokes are quite puerile. Some will make you roll your eyes. Some are intended to make you roll your eyes. A few miss the mark altogether. Overall, I Was a Teenage Wereskunk succeeds at being a loving spoof of the genre that’s a little raunchy but never outright dirty and gorier than you’d expect from this type of homage but not a bloodbath. McLaughlin’s inventive script and his committed cast hit this one out of the park.
Speaking of which, that baseball death scene… Even in a movie where a teenage wereskunk blasts debilitating clouds of putrid stink out of his posterior upon sexual arousal, that death by baseball was a whole other level of WTF.
I want to give I Was a Teenage Wereskunk four stars, but I’m afraid I might be overselling it. Eh, screw it! There’s a sight gag revolving around how a character acquires a cigarette that had us all laughing so hard it alone earns the four-star rating.
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