The Argentinian Martin Donovan is a filmmaker, but he should not be confused with American actor Martin Donovan. The former Argentinian donned some arthouse fame in his thriller Apartment Zero (1988) which features Hart Bochner, who plays an ambiguous stranger who seduces his way through an apartment building. Mad at the Moon was Donovan’s second film but bombed on release. Since the mid-160s, Donovan worked as a writer for US television, but he later co-wrote Robert Zemeckis’ Death Becomes Her (1992) among others. Since then, Donovan has only directed a sporadic handful of works.
Mad at the Moon is widely regarded as awful. As soon as it opened, I was wondering if it is perhaps a film that needs a serious re-evaluation. While movie soundtracks, generally, are lackluster and cliched, and thus boring beyond endurance, the soundtrack playing during the opening credits instantly made me want to check if they had a score. The first scene features a summoned crowd visiting a tent waiting for an opera singer to come. She’s astonishingly beautiful.
Now we shift to Mary Stuart Masterson’s scene where she is surprised by a visit from Stephen Blake, who has come to propose. Even though she secretly wants to say no, she knows she needs to handle the situation with gentle care. After this, she goes to the local saloon to meet up with Hart Bochner, who is fully in his bad-boy character. These scenes have a gentle elegance, and a love for the finer details of characters speaking dialogue while emotions seem to mutter unspoken words under the surface. This is where I started to think that Martin Donovan has done something great and that Mad at the Moon values careful consideration.
The story builds in a way that reminds one of the Moonstruck segment of the anthology film Kaos (1984) where a newly married woman fatally discovers on her wedding night that her husband is a werewolf and it is a full moon. Such elements have tremendous appeal in a Western setting a remote frontier ranch wife fearfully waiting indoors, while outside her husband transforms into a wolf. But just like all good movies, Mad at the Moon has a climax and a truly great opening, but it stops Mad at the Moon out of nowhere from where the film offers itself on the premise.
To be honest, I think Martin Donovan would rather write about a woman who finds herself ensnared in an unwanted marriage than actually make a Werewolf Film. The film features Mary Stuart Masterson’s perplexing predicament with her situation and then amusingly turns things around so that she picks Hart Bochner as her chaperone for the next full moon. There is some promise in the almost seduction scene and the very appealing notion of a love triangle between the werewolf husband, the wife, and her protector, Bochner, who only chooses to be with her on the nights of the full moon. This seems brimming with dramatic potential.
Only Martin Donovan appears indifferent to pursuing this any further. The werewolf is presented, but has absolutely no menace throughout and does not even turn into a ravening beast one expects in a typical werewolf film. Indeed, the resolution of the film seems to be Hart Bochner meeting face to face with Stephen Blake, who is transformed outside, where he tells him to pull himself together but where you get the impression that any lycanthropy is all psychological. Likewise, Donovan is not interested in the love triangle, or anything related to the relationship between Mary Stuart and Hart, and so Hart simply walks off immediately after the above scene leaving the film uncomfortably unresolved with no dramatic conclusion.
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