Seeing certain memory movies blow my mind more than others, I haven’t seen Full Eclipse in decades, and seeing it last night kind of, you know, blew my mind. I did at one time own the VHS, but that memory is so deeply buried I have no idea when that was. I was 24 when this aired on HBO and they aired it around Thanksgiving, I always thought that was strange. A movie about werewolf cops airing around the Holidays?! Okay. Sure. Whatever. Around this time I remember seeing Stallone’s Cliffhanger on Pay-Per-View (nowadays referred to as VOD, Video On Demand . . . I feel old). Another memory that pops up is an old high school friend, Chris, coming back to visit. He moved away back in August, and the only memory I have of his Thanksgiving visit is he and I getting food at the drive-thru at Burger King. I may or may not have brought up Full Eclipse. I’ve been wracking my brain for hours trying to remember what came first, seeing the preview on HBO a month prior, or reading about it in Fangoria #129. I want to say I saw the preview first, because I have this vague, vague memory of knowing it was going to be covered in Fang and being surprised it made the cover.
If the notion of “werewolf cops” ever popped into your head, and you thought that would make a great movie, just know it’s been done. Twice. That’s right. Twice! Once as a straight action horror flick (Full Eclipse), and once as a comedy, WolfCop (2014), coming soon the sequel, Another WolfCop (2017). Its apples and oranges, here, my friend, well, more like apples and bananas. Today, I’m in the mood for a nice, juicy apple, aka Full Eclipse, and by God that’s what I’m going to eat!
Speaking of eating, Patsy Kensit is in this, but, as usual, I’m getting waaay ahead of myself. Let’s start with Detective Adam Garou (Bruce Payne), since everything that happens in this film revolves around the decisions he makes, and has made. Garou (Half of a French term meaning werewolf, loup-garou) is currently the Detective in charge of Officer Crisis Counseling in Los Angeles. He’s also a goddamn werewolf! And not just any ordinary goddamn werewolf, but an immortal one too! Eventually, through the main character’s research scene at the library we learn some preliminary background info about him from old newspapers and he’s been creeping around since 1910, looking no different than he does in 1993. He also has various aliases and most of them involve being a cop, or a Captain, so it’s a cinch “Adam Garou” isn’t his real name. Besides, earlier, he reveals he grew up in France. I suppose if you’ve been around since 1910 and don’t age you tend to get a little creative, or in this case ironic, with your aliases.
He’s also reputed to be a biochemist, but we never see any proof of that other than a character simply mentioning it to another. Later on, in the final act, we finally get a “confession” from Garou about who he is, and he doesn’t quite consider himself a werewolf. Sure he started out as one, but being at the mercy of the lunar cycle and constantly hunted got old real fast, so over the centuries he learned to control the “curse,” right down to being able to shape-shift whenever he wants. Once 
he came to America he looked at it as the greatest country in the world and wanted to give something back, so he became a cop. Admirable, but there’s an unfortunate and tragic pattern to his process of cleaning up crime. He wonders from city to city setting up a specialized task force that involves selecting certain cops to become part of his pack, once he’s got that built up, they simply go about killing off drug dealers, and other general “criminal sleaze.” But he doesn’t bite them and infect them, he gets them hooked on this “drug,” which is revealed to be syringed directly out of his own fuckin’ brain! First dose heals you, further doses change you, muscles grow, fangs appear, a funky brow forms, and your weapon of choice are claws that pop out through your skin over your knuckles, a blatant homage to Marvel’s superhero Wolverine’s adamantium claws. Jacked up on Garou’s brain you’re also invulnerable to basic damage from bullet wounds and even explosions. All of Garou’s task forces end on a lunar eclipse, this is when he kills the rest of his pack and takes off to another city to repeat the process. A lunar eclipse also makes Garou immune to silver bullets.
I’ve been a fan of Bruce Payne ever since I saw him in Passenger 57 (1992). He’s in three flicks I currently own: Full Eclipse, Necronomicon and Warlock III. He‘s great playing villains, but is turn as a grieving boyfriend in “The Drowned” in Necronomicon might be his best performance in a non-villain role I’ve seen from his U.S. films.
Full article from Fangoria #129. Click photos to enlarge and read.
The movie’s main protagonist is L.A. detective Max Dire (Mario Van Peebles) (last name probably inspired by the extinct prehistoric Dire Wolf), and from a birthday party thrown for him we also know he’s on the verge of turning 30, from the marriage counseling scene we learn he’s three years into a marriage with his wife, Anna (Victoria Rowell). It’s also implied he’s had lots of partners, lost a lot of them in the line of duty, and can’t keep his job out of his marriage.
His current partner is Jim Sheldon (Anthony John Denison) who’s about to meet the same fate as Max’s previous partners in the opening of the movie as they take on three psycho’s who’ve taken hostages in a nightclub. Most of the early action scenes have a nice John Woo vibe to them as Max has a penchant for leaping into the air with two automatic’s blazing away. Not surprised since John Woo was getting popular in the U.S. around the early 90s, and Woo’s American debut Hard Target (1993) happened the same year as Full Eclipse. It was in the mid-90s when I finally saw his action masterpiece Hard Boiled (1992) on cable too, along with The Killer (1989) and A Better Tomorrow (1986).
Jim is blown into I.C.U. and on the verge of death when out of the blue one of Garou’s pack members, Officer Doug Crane (Jason Beghe), decides to sneak in and dose him, just to see what would happen as he later explains to his boss. The next day Jim is back on the job, but acting more heroic than usual, as well as displaying some mindblowing athletic prowess he never had as he and Max take down a car load of gangbangers who just did a drive by shooting.
This mid-way transformation make-up, done by David W. Smith, also seen on Fang’s cover, is only glimpsed ever so briefly when Garou morphs via CGI into his full werewolf form at the end of the movie.
We don’t know early on what the fuck that cop injected him with, who the fuck he was (his face was never shown) or why Jim healed so fast and seems so distant and super human. His tale comes to an abrupt end though when he visits Max and his cop pals at a local bar, tells Max he’s not marrying Helen (blink-and-you’ll-miss-her-cameo from Jennifer Rubin), then pulls a gun, sticks it in his mouth and kills himself right there in front of everyone!
This is where Garou comes into the picture. Earlier at a Medal Of Valor ceremony where Max gets yet another medal for heroic actions in the field, as the camera pans over the crowd seated in back in uniform you’ll see Garou and his “mate,” Officer Casey Spencer (Patsy Kensit) in attendance. Garou’s been keeping tabs on Max, because he’ll reveal in the final act he’s really looking for someone to carry on the fight when he’s gone, and he thinks Max has got what it takes to wolf out on a regular basis and show crime “wolf cops” can beat their ass ten times better any “normal.”
He meets temporary love interest, Casey, at a meeting Garou lures him into, with the rest of the pack, under the guise they’re just going to talk about their problems, but it ends up being a ploy to get Max out into the night to see how they take on crime “off the books.” There’s a drug dealer, Teague, they take on throughout the film played by Scott Paulin, and this night they’re going to take down this party he’s throwing. This is when we see more X-Men influence in the specialized suits they wear, mostly in the wrap around head “gear.”
Casey’s job is to get Max on the drug and she eventually does that by shooting him after they have sex. Injecting him heals him up, but Garou is pissed because he didn’t tell her to fuck him and that encounter leads to him asserting his dominance over her in a very weird feral way.
There are two other pack members: Officers Ramon Perez (John Verea) and Liza (last name unknown) played by Paula Marshall, who’s had parts in other films Anthony Hickox has directed. She was a desk jockey after being stabbed in the back by a prostitute and Perez was effectively gunned down weeks before, both gaining their “freedom” back through Garou’s brain serum. These two end up getting killed by Garou in the final act when he transforms fully into a werewolf; pack member Doug also gets killed by Garou when he refuses to dose up, and Casey dies on the beach after she and Max dive out of the top floor of Garou’s condo to escape, with one dose left, she gives it to Max to take instead, so he can stop Garou.
Max faces off with the leader of the pack at the docks after what’s left of his pack heads out to finally take out drug dealer Teague, during that fateful lunar eclipse! Max’s secret weapon is a syringe full of silver nitrate mixed with various other heavy drugs he had the local medical examiner mix up. Once injected Garou reverts to human form, but he’s now an old man; he begs Max to pick up the mantle, all he has to do is lay down in his blood. Cut to three years later we see Max and his wife living in Denver; Anna’s cut her finger, but it heals up instantly, showing us Max has passed on his newfound wolf powers and the last shot is he in his den on the computer keeping track of when the next lunar eclipse will occur.
The effects are great, but alas this movie shares something in common with another werewolf movie. I’m talking about Silver Bullet (1985), which came out recently on blu-ray from Australia’s Umbrella Entertainment (read my review here). The downside to that movie was the final reveal of the werewolf was disappointing in that it looked more like a werebear, but as I’ve stated in that review I’ve gotten used to it. Full Eclipse’s final werewolf also kind of looks more werebear-ish than werewolf, but it didn’t disappoint me as much as Silver Bullet did when I first saw it. And just like the director of Silver Bullet, who was not a fan of the werewolf either, Anthony Hickox also felt let down by his final effect too. You can read more about what he thought of Full Eclipse in this retrospective on The Schlock Pit’s website. As for gore: you get a close-up of a bullet being removed from a skull in a morgue, a blood gushing tracheotomy executed by Garou that’s more gush than wound; copious bloody bullet wounds; and character who gets a limb, or something pulled off, or pulled apart after Garou shifts into his final form. It’s a quick shot of carnage that made me feel it was edited, which is why I can never tell what’s happening in that shot.
There are six films Hickox made that I remember Fangoria covering: Waxwork (1988), Sundown: The Vampire In Retreat (1989), Waxwork II: Lost In Time (1992), Hellraiser III: Hell On Earth (1992), Warlock: The Armageddon (1993) and Full Eclipse (1993). I’ve seen all of them except for Waxwork II, and Full Eclipse is my favorite of all of them, which is why it pains me to say it’s never gotten a blu-ray release. It got a DVD release back in 2001 and then re-released in 2004 through HBO Home Video (which is owned by Time Warner), and a DVD-R release in 2012. The original 2001 snapper case release I reviewed here is long out of print.
VIDEO/AUDIO/SUBTITLES: 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen—English Dolby Digital Surround, Spanish Dolby Digital Stereo—English, French, Spanish subs
EXTRAS INCLUDED . . .
- Cast & Crew Bios
MEMORY MOVIES 