The Werewolf

The Basic Plot: The unraveling of the mystery of two scientists,a werewolf, and a missing man.

The Praise: Tense, quiet, and spare, it is frightening in an amount of moments with the werewolf. The western locations are great, and the werewolf is sympathetic,plus good acting by a cast of nobodies. Not a major production, it is probably low-budget because of the no-frills look of the film and the lack of any stars. Odd because in parts it looks, feels, and acts like a western. If you detached some scenes without the Werewolf it could pass as a western. The Flaws: Ridiculous makeup. P.S : Extremely rare, it has never been released on VHS, DVD, Laserdisc etc.. Only way to see it is through TV, and I taped it off the AMC Halloween festival, and the tape has become part of my library of rare horror films.

In Mountaincrest, a stranger without memory arrives in a bar to have a drink. When he leaves the bar, a local tries to robber him but he turns into an animal and kills the attacker. Deputy Ben Clovey (Harry Lauter) hunts down the animal but is wounded by it. Sheriff Jack Haines (Don Megowan) organizes a party to find the beast. Meanwhile the nurse Amy Standish (Joyce Holden) and her father, the local doctor, receive a man called Duncan Marsh (Steven Ritch) that recalls that he had a car accident and two doctors have treated him. But he flees and Haines wants to hunt him down but Amy and her father wants to convince him to capture Duncan to see how they could treat him. When is wife Mrs. Helen Marsh (Eleanore Tanin) and her son Chris arrive in Mountaincrest, Sheriff Haines is convinced that shall capture the werewolf alive. But the doctors that conducted the experiment arrive in the town expecting to kill him.

"The Werewolf (1956)" is a film with the genre more drama than horror. The sad saga of the family man Duncan Marsh is heart breaking. The plot is interesting and the transformation is excellent for a 1956 movie. The performance of Steven Ritch is also great. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "O Lobisomem" ("The Werewolf")

This film scared the pants off me as a kid (which I loved!) and when I finally found it again and watched it as an adult I was pleasantly surprised to find that I still enjoy it. And parts of it, namely the cave sequence and the fight in the dark alley, still give me the creeps. I found this werewolf much scarier than Chaney Jr.'s version. Steven Ritch's portrayal has a wildness and rawness to it that gives his lycanthrope that extra edge. Watch how he drools as he sinks his fangs into that hunk of bait in the woods, for instance. Oh, there are a few flaws... and I find the scene at the doctors' lab very long, talky and dull... but all in all I'd recommend this to any classic horror film buff. Well done. Hard to believe something of actual quality was produced by the same man responsible for "The Giant Claw"!

An old monster gets a new touch in this movie from the late 1950's.

Back when it was popular to blame radiation for everything this movie offers a pair of dedicated but very misguided scientists who want to show the world what hideous mutations atomic radiation can create. They could just have gone to the movies any Saturday and seen all manner of mutants but no, these guys take a car crash victim Duncan Marsh (Steven Ritch, taking a break from the westerns he usually appeared in) and inject him with a serum derived from the blood of a radioactive wolf. (If that sounds familiar it's because the same plot, minus the radiation angle, was used in PRC's 1942 thriller THE MAD MONSTER.) The crash has given Duncan traumatic amnesia and thanks to the serum when he gets angry or frightened he turns into a . . .well you saw the title.

Stopping at a small mountain town, Duncan is tracked there by the scientists who suddenly aren't too anxious to have the world see what they have done (now if they had thought about that 3 reels earlier we wouldn't have had a movie!). The sheriff of the town is Don Megowan who played the Creature from the Black Lagoon in THE CREATURE WALKS AMONG US. The town doctor wants to save Duncan but the sheriff knows the beast has to be stopped one way or the other before the body count gets any higher.

Okay so the end of the movie is pretty much inevitable but director Fred F. Sears, who also gave the world THE GIANT CLAW and EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS, gives us a very atypical scene where Duncan is allowed to see his wife and child before he . . . well you'll see what I mean.

I love this movie for many reasons, one of which is that I also had a Super8mm 11 minute digest of it when I was a kid. Now I have the whole thing on video.

This B horror picture from Columbia with a cast of familiar players is better than I thought it would be. At the heart of it is a truly tragic figure in Steven Ritch who is just your average guy with wife Eleanor Tanin and son Kim Charney. He gets involved in an automobile accident and unfortunately gets himself treated by a pair of deranged scientists S.John Launer and George Lynn who decide he'd make a good test subject for an experiment.

Without the aid of the full moon and other bits of werewolf lore, Ritch goes in and out of being a werewolf day or night and without warning. He's pretty invincible when he's in wolf mode.. Sheriff Don Megowan and deputy Harry Lauter are tracking him, good doctors Joyce Holden and Ken Christy want to treat him. The bad docs want to kill him as a coverup.

Horror movie fans would do well to check this one out.