Media

Home Theater Movie Renter's Guide - May, 2011

"Teen Wolf" (Blu-ray) - Reviewed by Tyler Stripko

Synopsis

Scott Howard (Michael J. Fox) is your normal high-school student.  He plays basketball, has some odd friends, and wants to date the popular girl.  However, Scott has a real whopper of a secret: he’s actually a werewolf!  When his secret comes out, Scott must deal with a meteoric rise in popularity while keeping the wolf’s ever-growing ego in check.   Forced with losing his identity, Scott must make a choice – be himself or the Teen Wolf.

Commentary

As a child of the 1980s I may be a bit biased, but I love this movie.  The story is simple, but carries a strong message – remain true to yourself.   The characters are varied and entertaining, particularly Stiles (Jerry Levine).  Michael J. Fox plays the role of Scott with tremendous believability, which really makes this movie shine.   While this is not a deep or complex film, it moves along well and will keep you entertained for its entire 92-minute run-time.

Technical

Despite the AVC encoding at 38 MBPS, the picture quality on this Blu-ray is not very good.  Overall picture quality is barely better than DVD.  There is a haze over the image most of the time and there is a tremendous amount of dirt, speckles, and other assorted grime on the source print.  I’m really disappointed that MGM didn’t give this release a bit more attention, as the film deserves it.  On the plus side, the colors are pretty accurate and natural looking.  The Mono DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack is also a disappointment.  There is little dynamic range and due to the mono nature of the soundtrack, there is absolutely no surround or LFE usage.  Again, why couldn’t MGM spend a little more time on this?  At least dialogue intelligibility is good.

Extras

Extras on this disc are pretty light. Included are the original trailer for the film and a trailer for MTV’s new series “Teen Wolf.”  At least both are in HD.