Lower your standards. This movie knows it’s bad, but it also knows it’s totally worth it.
Bad movie nights are becoming a staple in my household, and upon being gifted a 100-movie collection of terrible films from the 70s and 80s, I knew I’d be in for a wild ride. Wild is definitely the key word here, because the first movie that struck my eye was 1989’s My Mom’s a Werewolf. We follow Leslie, the majorly unappreciated wife and mother to husband, Howard and daughter, Jennifer. She goes through her daily motions of running errands and being ignored until she meets a tall, dark, and handsome pet shop owner who relentlessly seduces her — that is, until she gets bitten.
Yes, bitten. He bites her.
Leslie then begins to experience changes she can’t stop or hide: fangs appear in her mouth, she craves raw meat and grows long white fur. Her family must find a way to stop her transformation before it’s too late.
What caught my attention first was the accompanying synopsis in the booklet these movies came with: “A housewife finds herself transforming into a werewolf after a bite from a pet shop owner she meets.” She’s bitten not by a rabid dog or forest animal, but by the pet shop owner himself. You’ll be even more pleased to see how it happens. Leslie is out for a day of running errands when she meets the owner of said pet shop, Harry Thropen (a nod to the word “lycanthrope”). His dazzling hazel eyes hypnotize her into his bedroom where he makes a quick snack of her big toe. The situation was so unexpected and campy that every werewolf attack I had seen before pales in comparison.
The hilarity doesn’t stop there either. Leslie constantly has back-and-forth squabbles with her daughter that are on par with Abbott and Costello or the Three Stooges. In one scenario, Leslie remarks on Jennifer’s lack of a boyfriend when she questions her mom’s aloofness. Someone get Jennifer some burn cream, stat!
Despite Leslie’s fever dreams of Harry and weird melt-monsters, we see her try to go about her daily life. At the dentist, her fangs refuse to be sanded down by an overly sexual dentist. Her hair dresser makes her into the prettiest hairball around, and in a full-moon-on-Halloween-night daze, Leslie tries to seduce a high school boy at a party. All along the way we meet dozens of kooky townsfolk that add to the nonsense Leslie is going through.
I absolutely had some favorites here. First was the costuming and makeup. The transformation scenes were subpar, but the human-wolf hybrid scenes were actually pretty well-executed in terms of believability. Both Leslie and Harry’s fangs were stuck firmly in place and looked genuine. Leslie’s pointed wolf ears and pallid face were a simple addition, but a good choice nonetheless. I also thoroughly enjoyed Jennifer’s friend, Stacey. She was the perfect mix of good friend and bad influence; one moment she’s convincing Jennifer of her mom’s infidelity and the next she’s trying to knock some sense into her friend’s werewolf-hunting brain. Stacey is also the perfect character to project ourselves onto. She’s a diehard horror fan, but she also knows the difference between reality and fantasy. She may be a side character, but Stacey certainly held her own.
Now don’t get me wrong, there are huge problems with My Mom’s a Werewolf, the biggest being werewolf lore. There are plenty of stories that describe common werewolf traits, the most known being their transformation by the full moon and aversion to silver. I was most caught off guard by Harry being able to hypnotize people, as I thought that was something only vampires could do. I also had problems looking past the extreme amount of camp. There were points in the acting where the comedy was supposed to shine through, but ended up going too far, making the movie feel cheap. For example, early in the movie, Jennifer and Stacey are at a horror convention. As they exit out of the camera’s view, another convention patron in a monster mask walks up and puts his face into the lense as a sort of scene transition, coming off as an amateur move. At another point, the nosy neighbors make odd gawking noises when Leslie accidentally leaves the house in a revealing nightgown.
But knowing this movie would be bad from the start actually made it the opposite. I was able to fully enjoy the delightfully goofy antics Leslie and her neighborhood got into. I laughed out loud at the bizarre quips the characters blurted out. I even have a few funny phrases I use as inside jokes with others. There are no real scares (unless you really don’t like melt-monsters), but a mediocre werewolf movie My Mom’s A Werewolf fails to be. It honestly isn’t that bad of a movie. How could it be when I had such a good time watching it?
Let us know what you thought of My Mom’s A Werewolf in the comments below!
Article previously written for Morbidly Beautiful. This article has since been updated.
