Wisecracking American college students David Kessler (David Naughton) and Jack Goodman (Griffin Dunne) backpack over the Yorkshire moors. The lads stop in a one-horse hamlet hoping for some food and a warm place to stay, but are advised to beware the moon and stay on the road. They manage neither, and Jack is ripped to pieces by a huge wolf.

David wakes up in a London hospital, where pretty nurse (Jenny Agutter) takes a special interest in him. He begins having dreams of the macabre and then, is visited by Jack’s corpse, who tells him they were attacked by a werewolf, and now he walks the earth in limbo until the last remaining werewolf – David – is destroyed.

Our hero moves in with the nurse upon his release and receives another annoying visit from the rapidly decaying Jack, who tells his friend he must kill himself before he transforms into a wolf and takes the life of others. David refuses to buy that, but with the coming of the full moon, endures one of the most vivid transformations in film history. Now a wolf prowls the streets of London.

Written and directed by John Landis, who completed the script in 1969, but was told that it was either too funny to be scary, or too scary to be funny. The box office receipts of National Lampoon’s Animal House and The Blues Brothers convinced Universal that maybe Landis knew what he was doing.

While indeed funny, An American Werewolf In London has a flakiness that too often ruins the potential impact of the story. Instead of focusing on David, Jack and the werewolf, Landis dispatches a doctor (John Woodvine) totally devoid of personality back to the hamlet to snoop around, a subplot that goes nowhere and adds nothing.

And some fetching nurse bringing a patient home who’s seeing visions of his dead friend doesn’t really wash either. A werewolf running riot in Piccadilly Circus is actually more believable than that. There’s a lot of fluff here – like David’s half-hearted attempt to get arrested – that plays like Otter and Pinto from Delta House concocted this thing as they hiked through Europe.

An American Werewolf In London is a classic because when it’s time for it to deliver, it does so with style and ingenuity. Because of this movie, the Academy added a Best Makeup category, and Rick Baker became the first special effects artist to win an Oscar. The effects that transform Naughton into a werewolf had never been attempted on camera before, and stand to this day as a marveling technical achievement.

By treating the story as realistically as possible, Landis balances the scares and the laughs better than a long line of imitators have been able to. Instead of venturing off into cartoon, the film feels real. Griffin Dunne has a lot to do with that, giving a smarmy, Joe College performance that is pitch perfect with the style Landis was going for.

David Naughton had made an impression on Landis by singing and dancing in Dr. Pepper commercials in the late ’70s, but this role was the highlight of his film career. He’s actually all right. The opening scenes on the moors are beautifully done, and along with Griffin Dunne’s performance and maestro Baker’s makeup, enable the movie to coast over its weaker sections.