Bad Moon Rising (Werewolf #1 of 5)

Motorcycle Werewolves: Been There, Done That

Genre: Horror

Premise: A group of motorcyclists, who are also werewolfs, murder a series of individuals in a small West Virginia town. (The sheriff is one of the first people to die and his son replaces him. A werewolf hunter, who speaks the ghost of his mentor, eventually comes to town and hunts down the gang. There’s the inevitable monster movie show down and unlike Hollow Man, this actually one works).

About: I couldn’t find the exact chronology of Bad Moon Rising, but I’m pretty sure it falls somewhere in the late 90’s. I first heard about it on an infamous top ten unproduced scripts list four or five years back. Consensus seems to be it was written purely as a spec.

Writers: Scott Rosenberg. High Fidelity, Beautiful Girls, Things to Do In Denver…Oh man, do I love Scott Rosenberg. His dialogue is mon juste. His characters sparkle with originality. He has a fixation with Warren Zevon. This guy’s every bit as competent as Shane Black or Tarantino.

I saw an interview with Rosenberg once where he said that plot was for sissies and that real men worked around characters. Bad Moon Rising doesn’t have a horrible plot, but it’s the characters in this thing that make it really shine. Oh man, does this guy know how to write good characters.
First off, he uses great names: Packard for a werewolf hunter, Ginny for a young black girl, Dakota for the hot motorcycle chick, Teddy for the sheriff’s son, Inkslinger and Vulture for guys in the gang. You see how each one of these names automatically gives us a persona and a vibe? Rosenberg is characterizing a lot before he even describes them.

Inevitably, if you’re going to have good characters at some point they have to expose info through dialogue that normally just wouldn’t. Either you rely on the humorously trivial like Tarantino, the banter of Black, or you can do what Rosenberg does which is use personal anecdotes at just the right time. A lot of stories are told in Bad Moon Rising, and the script veers in a bunch of different angles. But this is part of the charm of the story. It feels like watching an Altman horror film sometimes.

The other awesome thing is, Rosenberg celebrates the whole Lon Chaney-classic Werewolf-classic rock vein of Werewolfs. This script is fun. It’s not a straight plotline, and it’s not structured in a conventional linear Hollywood narrative focusing on one character but it’s highly enjoyable.

If you’re going to blame Rosenberg for something, though, it’s that he doesn’t do a hell of a lot of follow through with his characters. He sets up well, presents good problems, and then doesn’t really do much to make us feel like we see these characters through anything. Actually, this script feels awesome but unfocused. Like something Rosenberg might have written on a rush after he’d completed a Hollywood project.

Scooby Doo (Complete Crap)

Atilla (Poor, Few Redeeming Qualities

X - Wedding Crashers (Mediocre)

Hot Rod (Good)

Definitely Maybe (Pretty Darn Good)

Isla Prospects: There’s Dakota, a pretty hot motorcycle chick with a sex scene but I imagined her being small town in a way I’m not sure Isla could pull of. But that’s okay. I highly doubt this ever gets made.

What I Learned: Rosenberg has a really cool trick he uses in the screen directions where he writes the persons name, then a space, then describes them. This really worked for me, and made the directions seem less tense and focused my attention to what was really important.
For example, rather than:

GWEN CROFT is 25. And ethereal. Airy, light, heavenly

Rosenberg writes

GWEN CROFT
Is 25. And ethereal. Airy, light, heavenly

It’s small, but it’s a cool technique. In general, Rosenberg’s screen directions are worth studying. They make the directions fun the read.