Teen Wolf (1985)

An extremely young Michael J. Fox behaves exactly like he'll behave a decade later in The Frighteners, except this time he's growing long hairs in inappropriate places rather than talking to ghosts. He's friends with a girl named Boof, and hitting on a different girl with a boyfriend.

He's awful at basketball, and his body is going through changes… like experiencing immense pain when a kid blows a dog whistle. His hands are briefly covered in fur, but it somehow goes away when the camera cuts. Shortly after, he finds his mind-control powers and uses them to buy a keg of beer. Mind control is a classic wolf technique.

The break for a Surfin' U.S.A. music video occurs before the plot develops. 80s comedies didn't always need much more premise than "some teenagers go to a kegger," plus several minutes of over-the-top party-themed establishing shots. He's wolfing more and more, that's the point.

Dramatic synths and a slapping upright bass drive the energy as he transforms horribly into an extremely hairy dog-man in his bathroom. Since they didn't know how to animate a transition on screen, in all subsequent transitions he converts instantaneously between shots.

He means to surprise his father with his wolfiness, but is surprised himself when he whips open the door and finds he has a wolf-dad. This makes him angry, because he's a teenager, so he locks himself in his room and refuses to ask any questions about his newfound lycanthropic problems until morning. "With great power goes a greater responsibility," his dad tells him, confusing him with Spiderman.

Fox is already intimately familiar with werewolves because it's a world with movies, so they don't feel the need to explain to us how werewolves work. Except here, it just means a hairy human who is slightly better at athletics, but otherwise unchanged.

He tries to tell his best friend, Stiles, that he's a werewolf. They have a quite offensive anti-homosexual back-and-forth before Fox converts to a wolf at will to prove it. Stiles thinks this is super cool and starts plotting how to use the wolf powers to their advantage.

He wolfs out in front of the whole school during a basketball game, and does an awkward slam dunk and some ball tricks. They room is silent for a few seconds, then they just keep playing basketball while some extremely unbefitting country music plays in the soundtrack. The whole soundtrack is unforgivably bad.

He's now the coolest kid in school, and walks around as a wolf at all times. It's one of those comedies where nobody tells any jokes and nothing funny happens. "Situational comedy," except the situations aren't funny either. The too-cool-for-school montage feels like half of the movie, and, with the main conflict already resolved, all that remains is normal high school drama.

The moral of the story is to believe in yourself, don't get caught up trying to impress others, and bully works just fine. Boof believed in him all along. The denouement is a basketball game played in seemingly real-time, and the credits just roll over it… nothing was established deeply enough to need any resolution. The music over the credits sounds like a built-in demo track on a digital piano.