Michael Jackson’s epic 14-minute music video for “Thriller” sort of freaked me out when I was seven years old, so I wasn’t particularly thrilled at first to see a movie about another werewolf just a few years later.

Fortunately, Michael J. Fox’s transfiguring alter ego in Teen Wolf bore a closer resemblance to an elaborate Halloween costume than Jackson’s far more realistic shapeshifting predator. Hence my delicate grade school sensibilities were mercifully spared further trauma upon watching it for the first time when I was the new kid in Virginia Beach.

Naturally a movie like Teen Wolf wasn’t intended to impact pop culture like the more endearing cinema of the time and, as such, the plot isn’t exactly stacked with substance: a high school kid is bored, finds out he’s a werewolf, and lighthearted hilarity coupled with one banal moral dilemma after another ensue — it’s practically an afterschool special.

A supporting cast of stereotypical kids-next-door made the flick all the more amusing — silly clichés and a campy high school dance scene notwithstanding — which was typified by the dubious but likeable Stiles, the loyal and wholesome Boof (yes, Boof) and the enchanting Pamela, who somehow didn’t go on to become an award-winning national treasure.

The movie manages to be enjoyable, perhaps in a way that only an ’80s movie can, despite a succession of cringey spectacles (impromptu breakdancing in the school hallway comes to mind) which, nonetheless, didn’t take away from the era-specific vibe that invariably reminds the viewer of how a certain time in history once felt.

And it came with a little wisdom too…

“There are three rules that I live by: never get less than twelve hours sleep; never play cards with a guy who has the same first name as a city; and never get involved with a woman with a tattoo of a dagger on her body. Now you stick to that, and everything else is cream cheese.” — Coach Finstock

Give it a look if you have a chance. Sometimes a little retro escapism is exactly what we need.