This month’s Full Moon Feature is one I’m not going to dwell too long on because the wolfman content is minimal — and ultimately toothless. A product of the post-Roger Corman New World Pictures, 1985’s Transylvania 6-5000 is of a piece with the company’s previous PG-rated horror comedies The Private Eyes (1980) and Saturday the 14th (1981), which were similarly anemic in the horror and comedy departments. It is also reminiscent of the following year’s Haunted Honeymoon, which features its own werewolf, but is more competently put together by co-writer/director Gene Wilder.
In the case of Transylvania 6-5000, the principal architect is writer/director Rudy De Luca, also a frequent collaborator of Mel Brooks, making his feature directing debut and swan song simultaneously. The basic premise is reasonably solid — two mismatched tabloid reporters are dispatched to the title locale to investigate the possible return of Frankenstein’s Monster — but the execution is lacking, as if De Luca shot his first draft and hoped the actors would breathe life into it. And with actors like Jeff Goldblum, Ed Begley Jr., Joseph Bologna, Geena Davis, Norman Fell, Jeffrey Jones, Carol Kane, and Michael Richards on hand, he may have thought that would work. As it stands, though, they can only do so much, and some wind up doing too much to compensate for the threadbare script. (Richards’s physical schtick wears out its welcome the fastest, but he has plenty of competition for the film’s most grating performance.)
Then there’s the matter of the film’s wolfman, the son of a gypsy who tells Goldblum and Begley of a “creature that walks as a man by day, but as the full moon rises, he becomes a wolf. He’s a werewolf.” He also goes by the name Lawrence Malbot Jr. (har har) and is played by Donald Gibb between stints as hulking frat brute Ogre in the Revenge of the Nerds movies. While he’s certainly hairy enough, Lawrence Jr. takes forever to show his furry face, and the mundane explanation for his condition — hypertrichosis as opposed to lycanthropy — is the definition of anticlimactic. When Goldblum moans that he’s wasting his talents (“This is my contribution to journalism. Waiting for a werewolf.”), it’s remarkably easy to sympathize.