Werewolf News

Witches and werewolves don’t often mix, but they did in two television projects aimed at younger audiences made seven years apart. First came the Canadian animated special Witch’s Night Out from 1978. The sequel to 1974’s The Gift of Winter, which features a pre-SNL Gilda Radner and Dan Aykroyd in its voice cast, Witch’s Night Out brought Radner back to play a Witch who’s peeved that she doesn’t get to enjoy Halloween like she used to. That changes when the people in her town decide to have a party in her allegedly haunted house, a bash spearheaded by the officious Goodly (co-writer/director John Leach). He’s the sort of guy who, when he decides to throw a party, immediately assigns jobs to all his friends and sits back and lets them do all the work.

Meanwhile, two children named Small and Tender (Tony Molesworth and Naomi Leach) are excited about dressing up as a werewolf and ghost for Halloween, but are dismayed that everybody knows who they are and aren’t scared of them. Before you know it, Small is wishing he was a real wolf man and Tender is wishing she was a real ghost, which is music to the Witch’s ears since she swoops in to grant their wishes. Their babysitter, Bazooey (Gerry Salsberg, another holdover from The Gift of Winter), is aghast, but the Witch assures him that it’s just “harmless amusement” and grants his wish to be the Frankenstein Monster for the night, ignoring the implication in her rhetorical question, “What can go wrong?” Plenty, it turns out.

Due to its brevity, Witch’s Night Out doesn’t give Small, Tender, and Bazooey much time to enjoy their monstrous forms before regret sets in and Small starts whining about wanting to go home. Meanwhile, the Witch’s magic wand winds up in the hands of Malicious and Rotten (Catherine O’Hara and Bob Church), who abuse its power, much like Goodly lets the power go to his head when Nicely (Fiona Reid) encourages him to take charge after they’ve been scared out of the Witch’s house. All is made right again when the Witch recovers her wand and is able to transform everybody in town into what they want to illustrate what Halloween is all about. “Every day we go about our lives in the same old way. But once a year we can be whatever and whoever we please.” Amen.

The transformation of an entire town into a variety of monsters is also the crux of The Midnight Hour, which aired on ABC on November 1, 1985, thus missing when it’s set by one day and for no discernible reason other than the 1st was a Friday. Anyway, the town of Pitchford Cove, Massachusetts, is all set to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the execution of witch Lucinda Cavender by Witchhunter General Nathaniel Grenville, whose descendant Phil (Lee Montgomery) gets caught up in some supernatural shenanigans when he and his high school friends (one of whom is Lucinda’s descendant Melissa, played by Shari Belafonte-Harper) steal some costumes from the local Witchcraft Museum along with a trunk containing a scroll which brings the dead back to life when it’s read in the graveyard. That includes a well-preserved Linda and an extremely shaggy werewolf. Before long, he’s putting the bite on the locals and making more werewolves, and she’s putting the bite on the students gathered at Melissa’s Halloween party, because I guess she came back as a vampire.

Anyway, The Midnight Hour is pretty strong for something that aired on network television 40 years ago. Its supporting cast also features some recognizable faces, including LeVar Burton as another one of Phil’s so-called friends, Kevin McCarthy as the town’s judge and father of one of his other friends, Dick Van Patten as Phil’s father (a dentist), Kurtwood Smith as a police captain whose first line of dialogue is a disdainful “Halloween, my favorite day of the year,” and the voice of Wolfman Jack as the radio DJ who plays Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour” every hour on the hour. Other seasonally appropriate songs on his playlist include Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising” (previously used in An American Werewolf in London), Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs’ “Little Red Riding Hood,” The Guess Who’s “Clap for the Wolfman,” and The Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now.” The movie stops dead in its tracks, though, for a “Thriller”-like dance number for the original song “Get Dead,” sung by Melissa. The most amusing moment in the film, though, comes when the whole town is in an uproar and the first werewolf actually tears a fire hydrant out of the ground. All things considered, he could have done something much worse to it.

When I started this column 14 years ago, I was admittedly a little cavalier when it came to how I went about it. True, most months I stuck to one film, but sometimes I wrote about three or four at once, grouping them thematically — like the time I wrote about the ’80s werewolf comedy boom. (Incidentally, if you’d like to read more detailed thoughts about Teen Wolf, which just marked its 40th anniversary, check out my Crooked Marquee article about it.) Similarly, when I first covered Spanish horror star Paul Naschy and his signature werewolf character, Polish count Waldemar Daninsky, I split up his filmography into The Best and The Rest, saving his more obscure titles for when I could get my paws on them.

Now, thanks to the efforts of boutique labels like Mondo Macabro, Scream Factory, and Vinegar Syndrome, Naschy’s films are getting higher profiles all the time — and released in deluxe editions the likes of which were unheard of when I first encountered them. As I’ve been dutifully acquiring them as they come out, it only makes sense for to double back and go into them in more depth. And first up is 1968’s Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror, which comes to us by way of Kino Lorber’s Kino Cult line.

Originally released as La Marca del Hombre Lobo (“Mark of the Wolf Man”) in Spain and given its nonsensical English title when imported by Sam Sherman’s Independent-International in 1971, Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror opens with two different narrators — one sinister, the other bombastic — who explain how it’s not a Frankenstein picture at all. (“Now, the most frightening Frankenstein story of all,” says the second, “as the ancient werewolf curse brands the family of monster makers as Wolfstein. Wolfstein, the inhuman clan of blood-hungry wolf monsters.”) In between, the titles boast that the film is in 70mm and 3-D, which is true in the sense that it was shot in those formats, but on its initial run it was presented “flat” and almost exclusively at drive-ins, which weren’t equipped to run 70mm prints.

Genre expert Tim Lucas lays out how Independent-International’s subsequent 3-D release was a botch job from the start in a supplement included on the Kino Cult Blu-ray. (He also contributes one of two new critical commentaries.) The upshot is the materials used to make it were already several generations removed from the camera negative, and their deterioration over the past five decades and change is such that the mastering job carried out by the 3-D Film Archive has those flaws baked in. (Sadly, while the 65mm negative is known to exist, it’s located at a film lab in Spain, and its owner won’t let it be scanned, so this is as good as we’re going to get for the foreseeable future.)

As for the film itself, while it served as a good jumping-off point for Naschy (who is surely in the Guinness Book of World Records for most times playing a werewolf in a feature film), he would improve upon the formula in later entries in the series. Most of the elements are already present, though: Waldemar, the reluctant werewolf who seeks an end to his torment. The use of other supernatural beings as antagonists. (In this case, they’re a pair of vampires who purport to have a cure for lycanthropy.) A love interest who throws themselves into Waldemar’s arms and must be the one to kill him so he can be put to rest. True, this is the only one that features gratuitous 3-D shots, but now it’s possible to see them the way they were intended.

Howling in shadows / Living in a lunar spell / He finds his heaven / Spewing from the mouth of Hell

Unlike his fellow hard rocker Alice Cooper, Ozzy Osbourne never starred or made a cameo in a werewolf movie — though he did make a memorable “special appearance” in 1986’s Trick or Treat as an evangelist and moral crusader being interviewed on TV about “rock pornography.” Still, the late singer’s place in the lycanthropic hall of fame is secure thanks to the cover of his 1983 album Bark at the Moon and the accompanying video for the title track, both of which feature Ozzy in shaggy werewolf makeup designed by Greg Cannom, who has his own place in the pantheon courtesy of his work on Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Van Helsing.

While I didn’t see the “Bark at the Moon” music video at the time (MTV never played it when I was watching, and I watched a lot of MTV), I was intrigued by the album cover when a school friend played me the cassette one day and enthusiastically copied it for me. Alas, when my mother heard me playing the tape at home and asked what I was listening to (because it clearly wasn’t “Weird Al” Yankovic or the Ghostbusters soundtrack), she made me erase it, because all she knew about Ozzy Osbourne was one of his songs had inspired one of his fans to commit suicide, and his latest tape was therefore unsuitable for my impressionable ears. It would be years before I heard its like again, by which time Osbourne had become a household name for a different reason.

In the wake of Osbourne’s passing last month, I called up Bark at the Moon on streaming and listened to it for the first time in four decades, and also watched the “Bark at the Moon” video — his first, directed by Mike Mansfield — so I could review it for this very site. Made the same year as Michael Jackson’s Thriller, for which Greg Cannon helped Rick Baker transform the King of Pop into a werecat, “Bark” had a fraction of the budget, but still tries to tell a complete story within the confines of the music-video format. Along with the requisite shots of Osbourne’s band — including guitarist Jake E. Lee and bassist Bob Dailey, who co-wrote the song with him — during the instrumental passages, the video opens with some gothic horror touches, including a repeated shot of a pale-faced man in a black cloak, a group of mourners, and a brief shot of a skull. This is all but a prelude to the star’s entrance, however.

Bursting into a room filled with bubbling liquids in beakers and flasks, Osbourne holds a beaker in one hand and a brain in the other, a maniacal grin on his face. After he downs the concoction, his convulsions frighten his wife, who has him committed to an asylum, where he arrives in a straitjacket on the arms of two orderlies. There he’s put in a padded cell and subjected to electroshock treatments, but they fail to suppress the feral side his formula has unleashed since he flashes his fangs at the camera. There are also cutaways to Osbourne in his full werewolf makeup, but as the video continues, its story gets a little confused.

The confusion starts with the shot of a horse-drawn hearse bearing a black coffin, which Osbourne’s character is revealed to be inside. Standing over the open casket, his veiled wife drops rose petals on his corpse, which instantly appears decayed. Next he’s seen in a hallway with brightly lit doorways he can’t enter, then he’s being pursued through a candlelit basement by the rampaging were-Ozzy. (Talk about your classic split personality.) Before he can be caught, the pale-faced man in the cloak appears, keeping the beast at bay, and before we know it, a formally attired Osbourne is being walked out of the asylum by his doctor, apparently a changed man. Rejoining his wife, Osbourse looks up at the balcony, where the werewolf crouches, howling at him or, to put it another way, barking at the moon. Freeze-frame, fade-out. Rest in beast, Ozzy.

Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête was not the first screen adaptation of Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s story — there are at least two from the silent era that are wholly or partially lost — but the 1946 film set the standard for most that came after. These include Disney’s animated feature and its pointless live-action remake, as well as the French version I covered in 2017. Some notable exceptions are one made in Czechoslovakia in 1978, in which the Beast has a decidedly avian look and a feral attitude to match, and one made in the good old USA in 1962, which boasts solid make-up effects by Jack Pierce, who designed the werewolves in Universal’s Werewolf of London and The Wolf Man a couple decades earlier.

Directed by Edward L. Cahn, best known for such low-budget creature features as Creature with the Atom Brain, The She-Creature, Invasion of the Saucer-Men, and It! The Terror from Beyond Space, 1962’s Beauty and the Beast was his only film in color — and Technicolor to boot. Instead of crediting Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, its screenplay was “suggested by the Ancient Legend,” which is fair considering writers George Bruce and Orville H. Hampton wildly deviate from the source material. In fact, its Beast is entirely blameless when it comes to the curse that causes him to shun his subjects every night from dusk until dawn, making him a subject of gossip since he has his castle cleared out on a nightly basis.

This is the situation encountered by Lady Althea (Joyce Taylor) who’s traveling with her father, the Count of Sardi (Dayton Lummis), to be married to Duke Eduardo (Mark Damon), whose attempts to push her away only strengthen her ardor. Besides, he has other things on his mind, chiefly the suspicions of his uncle, Prince Bruno (Michael Pate), who’d like nothing more than to replace him on the throne. When Bruno’s spy Grimaldi (Walter Burke) starts digging up dirt on the Duke, he and his chancellor, Orsini (Eduard Franz), step up their efforts to find the chamber where the sorcerer who placed the curse on Eduardo was entombed alive. This, incidentally, only comes after Althea and her father are in the picture, a necessity considering she walked in on him in his beastly state her second night in the castle. (You’ve heard of love at first sight? Well, how about fright at first sight?)

Much like Eduardo tries to hide his affliction from the world, Cahn keeps his furry form under wraps at the start, only showing the effects of the transformation on his hands. The second night, Cahn starts on his hands again, but also shows Damon’s face as Pierce transforms him over the course of a handful of dissolves into the Beast, who looks like Lon Chaney Jr.’s shaggier cousin. Considering this came along one year after Oliver Reed’s Leon in The Curse of the Werewolf, it’s disappointing that Damon’s Eduardo is so subdued. He may in fact be the silver screen’s first depressed werewolf, spending all his Beast time in his own dungeon feeling sorry for himself instead of admiring his ample chest hair.

In the wake of the success of its first Beach Party movie, released in the summer of 1963, American International Pictures greenlit two sequels in quick succession, both also directed by William Asher. The reason they’re of interest to this site is because both feature random cameos by wolfmen that have no bearing whatsoever on their plots, but that’s par for the course with these movies, which exist solely to string together six to ten musical numbers and a handful of surfing montages. While the first movie starred Robert Cummings and Dorothy Malone (as a tweedy anthropologist and his secretary), the sequels were top-billed by Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, who play the surf-crazy Frankie and his long-suffering sweetheart Dee Dee, respectively.

Always surrounded by a gaggle of beach boys and girls (some of whom were fixtures of the series, like John Ashley and Jody McCrea), Frankie and Dee Dee are far from the most harmonious couple — she’s always pushing him to improve himself and think of the future, he’s content to keep living in the moment — but they’re the closest thing these movies have to a stable relationship. They also have to weather a variety of outside antagonists, most frequently contending with oafish biker Eric Von Zipper (Harvey Lembeck) and his gang, the Rat Pack. They’re nowhere to seen in 1964’s Muscle Beach Party, though, which is fine because Frankie, Dee Dee, and their gang have enough on their plates as it is.

First there’s a group of body builders managed by gym owner Jack Fanny (Don Rickles), who moves them into the beach house next door. Another wrinkle is the Italian contessa (whose long-suffering business manager is played by Buddy Hackett) who turns Frankie’s head and threatens to break up the happy couple for good. So where does the werewolf figure in, you ask? Well, Jack Fanny has a silent partner named Mr. Strangdour (played by Peter Lorre), and he has a secretary named Igor who lacks hair on his hands, but has enough enough fuzz on his face to get my attention for the scant seconds he’s onscreen. (Igor has no lines apart from some growling, and his one action is to pick up a ringing phone and pass it over to his boss, who proceeds to pulverize it because he’s the world’s strongest man.)

Following the precedent of its predecessor (which featured Vincent Price in a minor role), the end credits tease that Lorre was “soon to return in Bikini Beach,” but that was not to be since he died just four days after Muscle Beach Party‘s spring release. In his stead, fellow horror icon Boris Karloff stepped in to play an art dealer interested in the action paintings of Big Drag (Rickles again), who owns the hangout where the gang likes to hang out when they’re not catching waves, as well as the drag strip that is the focus of the action when Frankie finds himself in competition with an insufferable British pop star called the Potato Bug (an obvious swipe at the Beatles, also played by Avalon) for Dee Dee’s affections. He’s not the only impediment to their happiness, however, as local bigwig Harvey Huntington Honeywagon III (special guest star Keenan Wynn) aims to make a monkey out of the teenage contingent that has descended on his beach community with the assistance of his trained chimp Clyde. His editorials inspire the unwanted adoration of Eric Von Zipper, though, which gives Honeywagen his first inkling that he may be on the wrong side.

Also on the wrong side, at least based on the company he keeps, is The Teenage Werewolf Monster, who appears 68 minutes in and hangs out in the background at the Rat Pack’s hangout while Von Zipper shoots pool with South Dakota Slim (Timothy Carey, who returned as the character in Beach Blanket Bingo). Decked out in a black leather jacket, having apparently graduated from high school, this Teenage Werewolf Monster even clutches a glass of milk in his paw (an oblique reference to the original), but doesn’t drink from it. And he’s conspicuously absent when the requisite brawl breaks out at Big Drag’s. Must be why he wasn’t asked to come back for the sequel.

This month’s Full Moon Feature again comes courtesy of Rifftrax, which decided one half-assed Rob Roy werewolf movie wasn’t enough for them, which I suppose is the same reasoning Roy had for following 2006’s Lycan Colony with the search-engine-challenging American Werewolf last year. Now, I understand why Roy would hold An American Werewolf in London in such high esteem — it is, after all, my favorite werewolf film and one of my favorite films, period — but borrowing part of its title for your no-budget, barely feature-length effort isn’t just asking for trouble, it’s demanding it at gunpoint with silver bullets in the chamber.

Like An American Werewolf in London, American Werewolf attempts to be a horror comedy, but unlike An American Werewolf in London, it fails miserably on both counts. Its anemic story is centered on Sam Anderson (Russell Sage Patrick), sheriff of Pengrove, Virginia (or Pinegrove — the film uses both spellings), which has been plagued by reports of mysterious animal attacks, the latest of which causes him to break his tenth anniversary dinner date with his wife, who upon getting the bad news is immediately set upon by the mysterious animal herself. Cut to ten years later, and Sam is celebrating his fourth consecutive election in spite of his failure to do anything about the animal attacks, which have continued unabated and all appear to be linked to him directly. Even his dim-witted deputy, James (Aaron Crocker), who has been dutifully covering for his frequent blackouts, has started finding it suspicious that they always seem to coincide with the attacks.

Following the murder of a community theater actress that Sam was apparently sweet on based on the one scene they have together, he and James round up “The Unusual Suspects” for a series of painfully unfunny interrogations. The first subject, a self-described “Karen,” gives an eyewitness statement that is less than helpful. (“It was dark,” she says. “It was fugly.”) The second is a nine-fingered man whose prints have been found at multiple murder scenes, which is not as damning as Sam and James make it out to be since he’s a window installer. (Later on, we get to see a commercial for his company — Indawindow Dave’s — which boasts of their “Well Hung Window Installations.” Har har.) Last up is paranormal investigator Raven Nevermore (Dale Coleman), whose “Raven’s Eye” video blog on werewolves will hardly be revelatory to anybody who’s watched more than one werewolf movie. (Roy even contradicts his own expert by having Raven state emphatically that werewolves don’t only transform during a full moon, then jumping forward 30 days to the next one for the final confrontation with the monster.)

There are other characters, including FBI agent Jordan Brewster (Whitney Richardson), who rolls into town to take over the investigation since Sam has made little headway in the decade he’s been in charge of it. She does no better when she confronts the werewolf, is bitten by it, becomes one herself, and is decapitated, which make one wonder how Sam explained that her superiors. There’s also pesky news reporter Nadia Mandy Rivera (Mandy Rivera), who is part of the spate of poorly filmed attacks that allows Roy to thin out the cast in the run-up to the denouement. (And if you think “denouement” is a bit of a highfalutin word to associate with the plot pile-up that closes American Werewolf, I won’t contradict you.) At least by the time the last few victims are being picked off, Roy has actually started showing off the werewolf suit created and worn by Chris Johnson, who also doubles as Rivera’s cameraman for whatever that’s worth.

Not content to ride An American Werewolf in London‘s coattails, Roy also apes The Howling by including a scene where Sam eats Wolf Brand Chili out of a can. And he even incorporates the Ub Iwerks cartoon The Big Bad Wolf from 1936 to eat up some of the running time. The same goes for the extended closing credits, during which Roy not only takes credit for writing and directing American Werewolf, but also the production design/art direction (which means he’s responsible for trying to pass off a private home as the sheriff’s office), cinematography, editing, sound, fight direction and choreography, visual effects, production coordination, script supervision, wardrobe, animal wrangling, and location direction (whatever that means). If wearing all those hats (and I’ve actually left a few out) results in a film like this, perhaps Roy should consider delegating a few jobs next time.

For this month’s Full Moon Feature, I’m heading to Brazil for the 2015 horror anthology As Fábulas Negras, which translates to Dark Fables or The Black Fables (the title it appears under on Tubi). The work of four directors who tackled different facets of Brazilian folklore, its most high-profile participant is José Mojica Marins, creator of the macabre character Coffin Joe, but not the director of the lone werewolf segment. That was Petter Baiestorf, but since his story comes second, we’ll circle back to it.

The overall premise is that four kids in costumes are playing in the woods, pelting each other with water balloons, until they decide to call it a day. There’s plenty of time on their trek back home to trade scary stories, though, some of which the tellers insist are based on true events. That’s the case with opener “Monster of the Sewer,” which doubles as a critique of buck-passing civil servants, none of which are willing to take responsibility for cleaning up a sewage spill that only appears to be affecting one house in an entire neighborhood. Needless to say, this one is highly scatological, but it features the film’s first monster, which looks reasonably impressive.

The same goes for the werewolf in “Pampa Feroz,” although the story it appears in is less than riveting. When one of the underlings of a character known only as The Colonel is found mutilated, the speculation is that it must be the work of a werewolf because “no human could have done this,” a claim the non-superstitious Colonel dismisses. “Whatever it is, we’re going to solve it with bullets.” When suspicion falls on a local voodoo priest, one of his men dons a ridiculous homemade suit of armor to confront the old man and winds up killing him. That doesn’t stop the werewolf attacks, though. In fact, one of the Colonel’s other men is killed that very night, which leads to reprisals and a very messy reveal of who the werewolf is. (If you guess who it is the first time the character appears, you will probably be right.)

Next up is “The Saci,” which was the nearly 80-year-old Marins’s follow-up to 2008’s Embodiment of Evil, his revival of the long-dormant Coffin Joe. Its focus is on a girl whose parents don’t believe her when she has an encounter in a bamboo grove with a Saci, which is played by a puppet. The scene where it sneaks up on a hunter is one for the ages, as is the exorcism performed by a priest played by none other than Marins. As for the last two segments, “Bloody Blonde” and “Iara’s House,” there’s not much that can be said for them, although the latter does feature a cameo by Satan, who’s played by the same actor who was the sewer monster and the werewolf. Versatile guy.

When one reaches a movie-watching milestone, one hopes the movie in question will be worthy of being memorialized in such a fashion. Well, I just watched my 200th werewolf movie and it was 2006’s no-budget shot-on-video shitfest Lycan Colony, so as Hans Landa would say, that’s a Bingo!

The work of single-minded multi-hyphenate Rob Roy — who also wrote and directed last year’s barely feature-length American Werewolf — Lycan Colony must qualify as a passion project for Roy since, according to the closing credits, he was the director of photography and makeup/creature designer, did the special effects and production design, produced the film, wrote the story/screenplay, and directed and edited it, in addition to composing three of the songs, which were performed by the Rob Roy Band, and providing additional music. So if there’s one pair of shoulders on which to lay the blame for how lousy it turned out, it’s his. And yet, remarkably, Lycan Colony is not the worst werewolf movie I have ever seen, which is the kind of perspective one can only gain by watching 200 of them.

I had the option of taking in the unedited version on Tubi or the slightly abbreviated Rifftrax cut on their YouTube channel, and opted for the latter because I knew I would need the 15 minutes I saved to pick my jaw up off the floor. Suffice it to say, this is inept in every way imaginable, and it totally justifies the following exchange:

Sandy: He’s gonna find out eventually anyway. May as well tell him.
Stewart: Tell him what?
Michael J. Nelson: Son, you’re in a movie that’s somehow worse than A Talking Cat?!?

What Sandy wants Stewart’s father, Dr. Dan, to tell him is that they had to move from Massachusetts to the small town of Canisborough, NH, because he had an oopsie in the operating room one day and was on the verge of being drummed out of the medical profession. Also, his AA sponsor Dave lives there, and the town apparently needs an unreliable surgeon on call because it’s full of werewolves, as Stewart discovers when he’s seduced by a neighbor girl who puts the bite on him in a moment of passion, thus passing on the curse of lycanthropy. How this manifests itself on Stewart is a vaguely wolfish mask, with tufts of extra fur on his back and shoulders. It is not a werewolf design that inspires much confidence, but it’s one Rob Roy wanted to take credit for, so I’m fully prepared to let him have it.

Further plot developments revolve around a brother/sister pair who come to town in search of their father, a hunter who was after some big game and became the hunted instead, but to go into much more detail runs the risk of making this sound too coherent. “So, you wanna hear about our sleepy, creepy little town, do ya?” local witch Athena asks the sister, and the expository flashback she launches into doesn’t clear up a blessed thing. As Bill Corbett says at one point, “This is like if an edible took a bong hit.” It’s also a film where Stewart is given a sedative to calm him down and Kevin Murphy quips, “Decent chance this kid’s a bad enough actor that they actually had to drug him.” Considering he shares the same last name as his director, I’d say the lack of talent runs in the family.

As we look forward to Valentine’s Day this weekend (or Horny Werewolf Day for those of us who prefer to celebrate Lupercalia), I am reminded that Joe Johnston’s The Wolfman was released on this day (in France, Belgium, Sweden, and the French-speaking region of Switzerland) in 2010. Consequently, I find myself again questioning the wisdom of the bean-counters at Universal who decided to release Leigh Whannell’s Wolf Man the weekend after last month’s Wolf Moon, which means it will be limping out of theaters by the time you’re reading this. (As it is, Wolf Man came in third its opening weekend, behind Mufasa: The Lion King in its fifth weekend and One of Them Days, the other new wide release.)

Whannell’s second crack at re-imagining one of Universal’s classic monsters after 2020’s The Invisible Man (which put a high-tech spin on the concept), Wolf Man swaps out one domestic abuse story-line for another. This time, instead of a woman being targeted by her vindictive ex, the focus is on a man who was traumatized by his survivalist father as a child and has mixed emotions when the old man is officially declared dead decades later. Whannell opens the film in 1995 with a fairly intense sequence of father and son going hunting in the Oregon woods and running afoul of a mysterious beast that goes about on two legs, but isn’t Bigfoot. The captions at the beginning make plain that this a missing hiker who has caught “Hills Fever” and has taken on what the indigenous people refer to as the “Face of the Wolf,” but Whannell skips forward 30 years before revealing just how their hunting trip panned out.

Now living in New York City with a child of his own, the grown-up Blake Lovell (Christopher Abbott) has clear anger-management issues that he hasn’t worked through since his hair-trigger temper causes him to snap at his daughter Ginger (Maltilda Firth) and be short with his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) while cooking them dinner. (He’s a writer who’s between gigs, so as a working journalist she’s the breadwinner in the family and has to hustle for good assignments from her editor.) Naturally, Blake’s solution is for the three of them to drop everything and relocate to the Beaver State for the summer so he can wind down his father’s affairs and they can bond as a family. Of course, as anybody who has seen the Wolf Man trailer can tell you, they get into an accident on the way there and Blake sustains an injury that makes him sick. In fact, one of might even say he develops a fever of sorts, which puts his family at risk. So no. No bonding this trip.

Once Blake starts undergoing his change, which happens gradually rather than all at once and does not require the presence of the full moon to progress, he develops the usual heightened senses. Whannell and co-writer Corbett Tuck change things up by periodically having the camera shift to Blake’s perspective to show how much his vision is enhanced and how little he understands human speech. As for his physical changes, those are handled by prosthetics and special make-up effects designer Arjen Tuiten, a veteran of the Stan Winston Studio. Unfortunately, Blake isn’t given time to let his hair grow out, so he’s a decidedly un-shaggy wolf man. A few fleeting glimpses of body horror aside (Blake loses his teeth and fingernails like Seth Brundle in The Fly), his final form pales in comparison with his lycanthropic forefathers’. We deserve better.

When Something Weird Video released House on Bare Mountain on DVD in 2001 as part of a “Monster Nudie Double Feature” with 1964’s Kiss Me Quick! (which features Frankenstein’s Monster, Dracula, and the Mummy), it came with the following warning: “This program contains nudity and really bad jokes.” (Also included: an archival short subject entitled Werewolf Bongo Party, which doesn’t even have an IMDb entry, so it may as well not exist.) While I was expecting the nudity — and not to be aroused by it in the slightest — the “jokes” in Bare Mountain are truly atrocious, with most delivered by “Lovable Bob Cresse” in voice-over like he’s tossing off the most clever bon mots imaginable.

The Lovable One was also one of Bare Mountain‘s producers (credited as David Andrew) along with Wes Bishop, who likewise used a pseudonym (Wes Don) and was the film’s original director until he blew the entire budget on the first day of shooting and was replaced by Lee Frost (credited as R.L. Frost), who chalked up an extensive CV in the exploitation arena, culminating in taking the reins of AIP’s The Thing with Two Heads, starring Ray Milland, one decade later. How much calling the shots on House on Bare Mountain prepared him for directing an Academy Award winner in the twilight of his career is debatable, but Frost keeps things moving as best he can and gets enthusiastic performances out of most of the, uhh, performers. (To call them actors would be a stretch.)

The lead, for better or worse, is Cresse as Granny Good, who runs Granny Good’s School for Good Girls, who mostly demonstrate their goodness by doffing their clothing at every opportunity and letting the camera leer at their boobs and bare behinds. That, however, is not why Granny’s narrating the film from a jail cell. (“It’s a horrible, terrifying story,” she says, overstating the case to a large degree.) Rather, it’s the illegal still in her cellar, which is operated by her faithful handyman Krakow, that has Granny Good in dutch with the authorities, who are closing in on her operation right from the start.

As for Krakow, he’s the film’s resident Wolfman, who prowls around the grounds at night, peeking in at the scantily clad girls and howling at the moon. Played by the 7’3″ William Engesser (credited as Abe Greyhound), Krakow is such an imposing figure that Granny Good has to get up on a stepladder to dress him down, threatening him with expulsion from the safe harbor she offers. “You remember the outside world, huh, sweetheart? That’s right. Silver bullets, people chasing you all over the place, stakes in the heart. It was a real bad scene, wasn’t it, sweetheart?”

There’s a worse scene to come, though, when the action shifts to the school’s annual costume ball, which is attended by Frankenstein (played by “Percy Frankenstein”) and Dracula (played by “Doris Dracula”), both of whom spike the punch. In fact, everybody gets in on spiking the punch to such an extent that the end result is more spike than punch. There’s even a guy dressed up as the Wolfman who isn’t Krakow, for maximum confusion. Granny Good gets the surprise of her life, though, when she’s cornered by a representative of the UWA (United Werewolves of America) and detained for her exploitive labor practices. Sure, Cresse and Frost give her the last laugh — an inexplicable outcome on all fronts — but anybody expecting a rational ending to a film called House on Bare Mountain is barking up the wrong tree.