Thu 29 Oct 2015
A Halloween Movie Review: I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF (1957).
Posted by Steve under Horror movies , Reviews[8] Comments
I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF. American International Pictures, 1957. Michael Landon, Yvonne Lime, Whit Bissell, Barney Phillips, Guy Williams. Director: Gene Fowler Jr.
I watched this movie last week — available only on collector-to-collector DVD — and I deliberately put off writing this review until now. I might have seen this movie back when I was in high school, but if I did, I found only the first five or ten minutes to be even remotely familiar. After that I remembered only nothing.
And I was disappointed. The movie made its makers millions of dollar on only pocket change, and it’s a cult classic right up there with the best of them. And I was disappointed. What’s all the fuss about, I wondered. The acting is straight out of high school drama productions, and the story is stalled in first gear for most of the first half.
The special effects are OK — i.e., the werewolf costume — but no better than that, and the story simply that of high school rebellion, if not incipient juvenile delinquency, both themes that were very common in second-rung movie theaters and drive-in’s of the day.
Maybe you had to have seen it back then, I thought, and there’s probably some truth to that.
But here it is a week later, and many of the scenes are still with me, vividly so — flashes of the movie here and there, even the parts that I thought were slow and unwieldy. The sudden outbursts of anger on the part Michael Landon as Tony Rivers, the teenager of the title. The smugness of Whit Bissell, as the town psychiatrist who thinks that Tony will make a good subject for his experiments in regressing patients to the past by means of a serum he has developed. The innocence and unwavering crush on Tony by Yvonne Lime as his high school sweetheart. The matter of factness of Barney Phillips as the police detective who handles the case in solid nuts-and-bolts Dragnet-style.
Filmed for peanuts and against all of the odds, the men and women who made this movie somehow managed to trap lightning in a jar. It took me a while, but now I’m convinced. This one’s a classic.
October 29th, 2015 at 10:32 pm
I know for sure I saw this one in the theater on its original release. I’ve seen it only once since then, and that was 40 years ago or so. Like you, I still remember bits of it vividly.
October 29th, 2015 at 11:05 pm
I’m certain I’ve never seen it and yet I still think I have.
October 30th, 2015 at 3:31 am
A few months later AIP released BLOOD OF DRACULA, with the same plot structure — a troubled teen exploited by a respected authority figure — and a comparison of the two shows how good WEREWOLF really is, in terms of mood, pace and just about everything else.
And howcum nobody mentions Guy Williams is in this film?
October 30th, 2015 at 8:36 am
You’re right, Dan. I should have, and I’ll add him to the credits right now. It wasn’t his first movie role, and it wasn’t a big part, but as the young police officer Chris Stanley, it was a distinctive one.
October 30th, 2015 at 2:11 pm
I now know when I saw the movie before, or at least the first five minutes. It was on AMC back when AMC was devoted to old movies. Classics, if you will. I was taping it at the same time, and I decided to wait to finish watching it later. I never did, till now.
October 30th, 2015 at 9:27 pm
I remember this one fairly vividly though I haven’t seen it since the nineties. Landon usually made fun of it, but he does well as the sincere heart throb werewolf.
Of course Whit Bissell has one of the best lines of all time in TEENAGE FRANKENSTEIN when he tells monster Gary Conway “I know you have a civil tongue on your head, I put it there.”
Nothing that good in this one in term of lines, but its a memorable piece of iconic fifties schlock, good schlock, but schlock.
October 30th, 2015 at 10:15 pm
I am certain I never saw TEENAGE WEREWOLF, but I heard enough about it from other people that I felt there was no point in actually watching the movie.
December 10th, 2017 at 11:04 am
Finally saw this movie last night and was pleasantly surprised at how much fun it was – my favorite kind of B movie.