Cast: Michael Landon, Yvonne Lime, Whit Bissell, Tony Marshall Dawn Richard
This is the superior twin production meant to exploit Hollywood's discovery in the fifties that there was a market for movies about teenagers.
There are a couple of things to be said in the film's favor. One of them is that it has one truly memorable scene set in a school gymnasium in which we see Tony, the highschooler who is afflicted with the werewolf disease, provoked into turning into a beast by the sight of the tights-clad and lissome Theresa doing stunts on the parallel bars. The other, related to this scene, is that, unlike I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, I Was a Teenage Werewolf, has some psychological validity in its favor.
The unwelcome transformation of human into wolf that is embodied in the image of the werewolf is well understood by the developing adolescent whose own body is going through surprising new changes which, often enough, can feel monstrous.
In any case, I Was a Teenage Werewolf, with its vaguely antiscience theme, deserves an audience for two reasons. It is indispensable for students of film werewolf lore and it is something of a time capsule in which we can find persuasive glimpses of how young people experienced the vapid fifties.
Curse of the Werewolf
1960 (Color) Great Britain 91 minutes
Hammer Films
Director: Terence Fisher
Producer: Anthony Hinds
Screenplay: John Elder (Anthony Hinds)
Photography: Arthur Grant
Another of Hammer Films' colorful revitalizations of the horror images Universal Pictures introduced to the world in the thirties. This one, however, is not directly based on Universal's The Wolf Man. Instead, its source is Guy Endore's novel The Werewolf of Paris, whose main theme is that no cruelty committed by a werewolf can match man's inhumanity to man.
The story, spanning generations, begins with an injustice committed by a Spanish marquis who imprisons a beggar and has him fed on raw meat which, presumably, brutalizes him. When, some years later, a servant girl who has spurned the marquis's advances is pushed into the beggar's cell, he rapes her. The child begotten by this rape is born on ! Christmas Eve—ironically the birth date of Christ and of werewolves— i and becomes the werewolf of the film's title. For a time, his werewolf instincts are kept under control by the care he receives from his adoptive parents, but a trip to a whore house unleashes his sexual and his werewolf instincts. Though the love of a good woman calms him for a while, the beast in him bursts out when his father forcibly keeps him from seeing her. Again, as in The Wolf Man, it is a father who kills a son afflicted with the werewolf curse. This time the weapon, instead of
being a silver-headed walking stick, is a gun that shoots a bullet made from a silver crucifix.
As with Hammer films generally, production values here are high. Oliver Reed in the title role manages, despite makeup that gives him a nearly cuddly look, to be both frightening and dignified. Fisher, as he has in his previous ventures, respects the folklore materials on which his film is based. The result is a first-rate, but by no means great film.
The Howling
1981 (Color) U.S.A. 91 minutes Avco Embassy Director: Joe Dante
Producers: Michael Finnell, Jack Conrad Screenplay: John Sayles, Terence H. Winkless Photography: John Hora Special Effects: Rob Bottin, Rick Baker
Cast: Dee Wallace, Patrick Macnee, Dennis Dugan, Christopher Stone, Belinda Balaski, Kevin McCarthy, John Carradine, Slim Pickens, Elizabeth Brooks
1980 was a great year for special effects. It was then that David Cronenberg's Scanners stunned its audiences with scenes in which one could literally see someone's skin crawl (or at least bubble) and in which a man's head is seen to explode on camera. Like Scanners, The Howling's first claim to our attention is its special effects.
This film version of Gary Brandner's pulp novel has a young woman TV reporter, Karen Beatty, walking the streets as a decoy, hoping to make news by attracting the attention of a sex maniac who has been terrorizing Los Angeles women. Her efforts are successful. The maniac attacks and she is raped. To recuperate from the ghastly experience she and her husband Roy, on the advice of a psychiatrist, join a psychotherapeutic colony somewhere in the northwest.
There, the second nightmare begins as we learn that the psychiatrist and the members of his colony are all werewolves. From here on the film becomes more and more graphic about the sex life of werewolves. We are treated to one scene in which Roy and Marcia, a nymphomani- cal member of the colony, begin their lovemaking as people but, as their passion moves toward orgasm, they turn into snarling, snapping werewolves.
A strange film, that on several occasions crosses the line that separates the erotic from the obscene. Much of the obscenity, strangely enough, derives from the special effects which, as they allow us to watch the transformation of human into beast, make both humans and beasts look like the kinds of caricatures adolescents encounter in pornographic booklets passed around in locker rooms and at slumber parties.
The film is graced by the presence of John Carradine howling a little bemusedly along with the other werewolves.
An American Werewolf in London
1981 (Color) Great Britain 97 minutes
Poly Gram Pictures-Lycanthropy Films/Universal
Director: John Landis
Producer: George Folsey
Screenplay: John Landis
Photography: Robert Paynter
Special Effects: Rick Baker
Cast: David Naughton, Jenny Aguter, Griffin Dunne, Brian Glover, John Woodvine
Sometimes touching, sometimes terrifying, sometimes very funny, An American Werewolf in London is a sophisticated film that stands head and shoulders above the werewolf films that preceded it. The Wolf Man might be an honorable exception to that generalization, though atmosphere, not psychological truth, is its strong point.
An American Werewolf in London begins with a beautifully photographed scene in which we see a couple of young Americans making | their way across a countryside on a walking tour through England. When they encounter a werewolf, one of the youths, Jack Goodman, is killed. His companion, David Kessler, is bitten and is of course infected with the taint of the werewolf.
The rest of the film neatly, poignantly and sometimes powerfully interweaves the primordial werewolf stuff with David's waning human life in modern London. In one unforgettable moment we see David trying to reach his American family via a London public telephone. For David, the phone call is sort of a death-bed farewell. His problem is that he gets his wise-cracking kid sister on the line. It is a scene at once tender, hilarious, and anguished.
The special effects for this film won Rick Baker, who also worked on The Howling, a well-deserved Oscar.
* * *
[1] This review of "Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man" appears also in the volume The Ultimate Frankenstein.
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