Tim Sullivan | I Was a Teenage Werebear / 2011

when love bites you on the ass

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tim Sullivan (screenwriter and director), Patrick Copeland (music) I Was a Teenage Werebear / 2011 [30 minutes]

 

Poor cute boy Ricky O’Reily (Sean Paul Lockhart) is being chased by Peggy Lou (Gabrielle West) and can’t quite escape her attentions. This spoof begins with a rocking SUV in which Ricky in his

red tighties is being almost literally attacked by the octopi-like grabbing Peggy Lou, bra and panties, trying to get fully under covers and into the sexual paradise.

      They’re interrupted by his father and little brother, the father delighted with his son’s seeming sexual activities, particularly since he’s been previously so reluctant. Ricky assures the leering parent, however, that “nothing happened.” And as far as Peggy Lou’s concerned, that’s just the problem. Every time they’re together, she observes her boyfriend looking at the other boys playing on the beach, and sings a ballad to help cure him: “Don’t Look Away.” But Ricky sings in response:

 

“Baby give me some time

  So I can make up my mind

  Just know that it isn’t you

  These feelings make me so blue.

 

  I’m trying real hard to find

  The one that makes me feel right

  Til then I guess that it’s you

  That’s just the best I can do.

 

  So I’ll look away, baby

  Guess, I’ll look away.”

      Clearly he’s got mixed feelings.

     And just at the moment his eyes are looking quite away from his supposed girlfriend as Talon and his twin duo show up. Talon takes Ricky’s hand and pulls him away at the very moment that Butch (Adam Robitel) speeds into the scene, running down Peggy Lou, her brains, what she had of them, splattered half way across her face. Butch is not at all sympathetic to either Peggy Lou or Ricky, who accuses the latter of playing with the boy’s balls instead playing ball with the boys. Butch threatens to see Ricky in class.

      Ricky turns to see if he can help Peggy Lou as Talon and his friends, Dan (Chris Staviski) and Den (John McCormick) walk off.

      So begins the quite hilarious Tim Sullivan drive-in movie horror tale spoof, I Was a Teenage Wearbear, one of the short cinema delights of LGBTQ films in the second decade of the 21st century.

      A kind of gypsy nurse, Nurse Maleva (Lin Shaye) suddenly appears to care for Peggy Lou, the gypsy assuring him she’ll be okay, but Ricky’s look away has suddenly focused on something else as he sees Talon and imagines himself and his new love suddenly romping on the beach, the gypsy cursing and shooing away the very object of Ricky’s desires. She recognizes him as a beast!

      At the local teen cheerleading rally and beach wrestling competition, meanwhile, Ricky pins Butch, and Talon appears to take on Ricky, in the process biting him the butt, which, of course, turns him soon thereafter into a fellow werebear.

      This tale certainly has it right, the werewolves of many a horror film were most definitely code for the outsider gays of the stories as I have made clear in the late 1940s and 1950s volumes. Here it’s made quite apparent that a werebear is a gay boy, Ricky now having fallen completely under the sway of leatherboy Talon.

      And already, as Ricky sings, he’s got a feeling that he’s going explode, wondering just much longer does he have hold on to his load. “OOOOh what do I do? I really gotta purge this urge.” “The time is comin’,” he continues, “when I gotta choose. There’s no more hidin,’ no more playin’ by the boss man’s rules.” Now only in his jockstrap, Ricky dances out his recognition that he’s got to “purge the urge.”

      Coach Tuffman (Tim Sullivan) has overheard Ricky’s plea, and takes him into his office for a discussion. Ricky explains that he’s been told to be true to himself, and he tries to be, but sometimes he gets these urges, some of them seemingly “the wrong kind” of urges. Tuffman confesses that he too gets these urges as he watches the boys showering, and suddenly the coach is between Ricky’s thighs ready to do something for him, he promises, that his wife will never do. It’s at that moment, however, when Ricky realizes his new found strength, squashing coach’s head between his legs, blood spurting everywhere, eyeballs popping. Ricky is now a murderer.

      Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending upon how you see it—Talon and his boys show up to help him clean up Coach Tuffman, Ricky realizing suddenly that his new-found powers have to do with Talon’s bite in the ass.

    But just when they’re finished, the Coach, Butch and his gang appear and seeing the two boys together he is out to prove a lesson to the pansy boys. Butch pulls down his pants presumably to fuck Talon.

    We know immediately where this will end. Talon turns into a true werebear and he and his duo turn the room into a blood bath.

      But this time Ricky doesn’t join in, and he doesn’t turn into a werebear. “I’m not like any of you,” he insists. Poor Ricky, between a rock and a hard place surely. In only his jock, Ricky runs to Nurse Maleya to beg for her help, telling her that Talon and the twins are not “just different,” she interrupts him “they’re werebears.” She explains: “Where I come from there is an old saying. Even a boy who thinks he’s straight, but shaves his balls by night, may become a werebear in the hormone’s rage and the latent urge takes flight.”

      Where can Ricky turn? Peggy Lou is now a drooling idiot (just as perhaps she has long been inside). When Ricky gets a hard-on for a picture of a muscle-man that Maleya produces, he knows that he is truly now a werebear, even though Peggy Lou is convinced he’s just a homo.

       Ricky hurries back to his van, where he finds Talon waiting, ready for sex. But Ricky refuses, saying Talon has done this to him, Talon insisting it is beast in himself, and sings “Love Bit Me on the ass” with the twins as backups, finally our cutey Ricky joining in:

 

                  Love, love bit me on the ass,

                  Bit me deep down too.

                  Love bit on the ass,

                  But I’m in no way like you.

 

                  I may be quite different,

                  But I am not a beast.

                  I just want to cuddle

                  And you just want a piece.

 

    Nonetheless, the lovely Ricky also turns into a flabby, hairy-faced monster just like Talon. Talon tells him to meet him down at the luau where they plan a bloodbath for all the slights they’ve received. But even now Ricky refuses to join in, arguing that’s now the way you gain acceptance. Talon knocks him out.

     At the luau the lead singer performs “Sexy Waves.” But the next up in Talon and his gang, who sing “Do the Werebear,” the entire remainder of the class dancing agreeably along.

     Ricky shows up just in time, masturbates until he too turns into a werebear again and challenges Talon, but fails. Maleva knows just what to do. With the metal bat Ricky has brought she jabs it up the asses of the twins which immediately turns them back into dead human beings. She hands the baton to Ricky he jambs it up Talon’s but three times, falling him, Talon admitting there should have been more like him, as Rich holds him in a position that can only remind one of James Dean’s Jim Stark held Sal Mineo’s Plato at the end of Rebel without a Cause.

    Ricky sings a song just for Talon, a pean to gay life that Talon and his duo weren’t able to realize: “There’s Room for All.”

 

     “I dig bananas, and you dig pears.”

       Just because we’re different, there should no squares.

 

      Grab girl or grab your buddy, whichever way you play.

      Come on let’s face it, everybody’s gay.”

 

    In the end, accordingly—at least California—love is open to everybody. But what about the venom left in Ricky’s system by Talon’s bite? Next time he gets aroused by a passing lad, will he safely remain in his cute red tighties or jock strap or go wild in a leather strap.

 

Los Angeles, January 13, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).