EDITOR’S NOTE: Teen Wolf was on USA Up All Night so many times: January 28 and September 8, 1995 and June 29, 1996.

After the surprising success of Valley Girl, the producers of this film realized that they could make an easy-to-shoot and cheap-to-make movie. As fate would happen, Michael J. Fox’s Family Ties co-star Meredith Baxter-Birney was pregnant and the show went on hiatus, so he was available. They got with Jeph Loeb — who went on to make Commando and write comics — and hired director Rod Daniel (Beethoven’s 2nd, Home Alone 4) to make this movie happen.

It’s so exciting that one of the extras gets so into it that they pull out their penis and begins to furiously masturbate at the conclusion of the film’s basketball game.

Scott Howard (Michael J. Fox) is an unremarkable high school basketball played who wishes he had the love of Pamela Wells (Lorie Griffin), who is instead dating his bully on the court, Mick (Mark Arnold). He should really be paying attention to his best friend, the nerdy girl Boof (Susan Ursitti, Funland,  Zapped!) but you know how 80s teen comedies are.

At a party, Scott and Boof are forced into a closet in one of those teen makeout games. He loses it and starts clawing her up because, well, if you didn’t know by the title of this movie, Scott is a werewolf, just like his father Harold (James Hampton). Unlike every other movie ever made about lycanthropy, everyone just accepts that Scott can turn into a wolf and they even allow him to play basketball. His friend Stiles (Jerry Levine) even makes money off it, selling merch that Scott doesn’t know about until it’s already for sale. Also: Coach Finstock (Jay Tarses) is the worst coach whose entire strategy is “pass it to the wolf.”

This is the kind of movie that has a school administrator urinate all over himself in fear and ends with the stuck up girl being told to drop dead and we all laughed. How we laughed. And we learned nothing, except that if you make this movie about boxing and switch out Michael J. Fox for Jason Bateman, I will watch it again.

Beyond that sequel, there was a cartoon and a planned female version that would star Alyssa Milano. There was a second female version planned that was eventually turned into Teen Witch. And then, of course, there was the MTV series that got six seasons and a movie.