The Werewolf

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.

Steven Ritch plays a stranger who arrives in the small California town of Mountaincrest, with no memory of who he is or how he got there. He also has the unfortunate tendency to sprout hair, claws, and fangs at any old time, and the townsfolk attempt to catch Ritch in his wolfish form. Then two doctors (S. John Launer, George Lynn) follow Ritch there, knowing full well that they're the ones who put him in his predicament, and try to cover up their actions.

"The Werewolf" is a well acted, modest production that gets great mileage out of its Big Bear Lake locations, as well as fine atmosphere. It also puts a fresh spin on the standard werewolf story, taking it into the Atomic Age and giving us a lycanthrope born of not myth and legend but of scientific meddling. Of course, like many a good werewolf story, it's also a tragedy, with a main character who does earn our sympathies. People like Dr. Gilcrist (Ken Christy) and his niece Amy Standish (Joyce Holden) work at convincing the law, represented by Don Megowan as the sheriff and Harry Lauter as his deputy, to please try to take Ritch alive, if possible, knowing that he is a basically good man who cannot control what is happening to him.

The werewolf makeup by Clay Campbell is decent, the stock music appropriated serves its purpose, and there is some very crisp black & white photography by Edward Linden. The performances are fine, with Megowan as a sturdy, jut jawed (if not that expressive) hero; Eleanore Tanin and Kim Charney are appealing as Ritchs' distraught wife and son.

Good entertainment, with a striking finale done in long shot at a dam.

Seven out of 10.

This is quite a good low budget film with a new twist to the werewolf story. There is nothing supernatural here. Forget the wolfbane and the silver bullets. Steven Ritch has the lead role and does a splendid job, making the monster even more sympathetic than the long suffering Larry Talbot of the Universal Wolfman flicks. His character, Duncan Marsh, appears in a mountain town having no memory of who he is or how he got there. Leaving a tavern, he is followed by a man who intends to rob him. The man pulls him into an alley and the werewolf claims his first victim. The story plays well the rest of the way. We find out that Duncan Marsh's condition is brought on by two doctors who use him as a test subject while treating him for injuries sustained in a car accident. A supporting cast of unknowns do a decent job of being believable. Elenore Tanin is especially effective as Duncan Marsh's wife. The Big Bear Lake locations give the film a lot of help.

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.

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.