The Werewolf

Lensed by the same director of the bigger budgeted Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers and meant to be a companion for the lower half of the bill The Werewolf surprised everybody by being a taut face value chiller with more character emphasis than usual for this type of subject.

As other reviewers have stated the performances,locale,direction and lighting are much better should be for a story about kooky scientists turning a luckless schmoe into a hirsute mutant but it also has a film noir element that mixes in quite nicely amidst the western pines of Big Bear lake.

Unlike some other viewers I didn't have a problem with the make up. It was meant to scare kids and it did. A year later you can see similarities in the design for Michael Landon's beastly side in I Was A Teenage Werewolf.

After the late sixties this exhausted it's run on local Chiller theaters and became very hard to find until now.

For a reasonable price you can get a gorgeous widescreen DVD transfer of The Werewolf along with other B movie faves The Giant Claw,Zombies Of Mora Tau and Creature With The Atom Brain.

The name of the set is Icons Of Horror Sam Katzman. It comes with some great extras but one of them produced by the same Three Stooges dept. at Columbia has enough vile Asian stereotypes to make A Fu-Man-Chu movie look P.C.

Take a trip back to matinée-ville with this and enjoy.

Interesting horror film about a man who becomes a werewolf because of science. A man is recovered from a car crash. A scientist injects him with a serum to fight radiation poison. A side effect causes him to (occasioanlly) turn into a werewolf. No full moon or silver bullets are involved here.

This might be the first horror film to have a person becoming a werewolf through scientific means! The performances are good (especially Steven Ritch as the werewolf), the scenery is beautiful, there are some nice directorial touches and the people talk and act like real people. The makeup is awful and I wasn't really scared, but I was never bored. Sadly, this isn't available on video. Well worth catching on TV.

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.

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.

Never seen this film before and was pleasantly surprised to see this film had some Sci-Fi effects and it involved itself with two doctors who find a man Duncan Marsh, (Steven Ritch) who was in a car accident who has no memory and they inject him with a serum which has some strange effects on his body. Duncan Marsh is a married man and has a son and he escapes from these doctors and runs into a bar and has a few drinks and tries to seek help but as he leaves the bar he is approached by a man who wants to take his money and something happens to this man. Soon after this incident, the town believes there is a wild animal on the loose because they find a man killed by a sort of wolf or wild animal. This is a rather low budget film, but it has real live background on a California park and has a great deal of realism and horror. Enjoy.