Werewolf News

Three years before famed Mexican wrestlers Santo and Blue Demon tangled with Dracula and the Wolf Man, they teamed up to fight a whole array of supernatural creatures. In 1970’s Santo el enmascarado de plata y Blue Demon contra los monstruos, they not only have to contend with El Vampiro (a generic one) and El Hombre Lobo, but also La Momia, El Ciclope, and Franquestain (yes, that’s how they spell it). All are under the sway of mad scientist Dr. Bruno Halder (Carlos Ancira, who gets the “special appearance by” credit), who died as a result of his previous run-in with the meddling masked duo, but is brought back to life by his hunchback assistant Waldo so he can take his revenge on them and his brother Otto (Jorge Rado), a more respectable scientist, and his niece Gloria (Hedy Blue), who so happens to be Santo’s main squeeze. With all this backstory, it seems like this movie should be a sequel to an earlier one, but while it was Santo and Blue Demon’s second screen collaboration (the first was 1966’s Blue Demon vs. el poder satánico, in which Santo has a brief cameo), it has no continuity with either of their respective filmographies.

And that’s just as well with a film like this, where the emphasis is intended to be on the action as opposed to how it fits into a grander narrative. It even opens with back-to-back tag-team matches, neither of which has any bearing on the plot, but at least the second one involves Blue Demon and his partner. (The first is a women’s wrestling match, which includes awkward inserts of Santo supposedly observing it with interest.) Next comes Dr. Halder’s funeral, which is witnessed by Waldo and a quarter of green-faced zombies, who immediately make off with the body. Then Blue Demon takes off on a vacation, but before he can get far in his red convertible, he sees Waldo and the zombies (all bearing torches, so I guess they’re not afraid of them, although later they are) transporting a body by cart and follows them to Dr. Halder’s castle, where his secret laboratory is located. While Waldo sets about reviving his master, a little alien guy with an exposed brain saunters in, a bit of unexplained weirdness that remains inexplicable.

Anyway, Blue Demon arrives on the scene just in time to witness Dr. Halder’s resurrection, but lets a zombie sneak up on him and knock him out, leaving him at the doctor’s mercy. “We meet again, Demon,” he gloats. “Saint and you destroyed by life. But the day I died I swore I would get my revenge.” To accomplish this, he makes an evil duplicate of Blue Demon and sends him out to kill Santo, who happens to be in the area, cruising in his silver convertible with Gloria, who is abducted when they’re ambushed. Luckily, Santo turns the tables and the car Blue Demon and the zombies are in goes over a cliff and explodes, but Blue Demon crawls from the wreckage, on fire but somehow unscathed. (Seems he and the zombies are invulnerable.) It’s at this point that the mad doc brings out the big guns, collecting monsters so they can be placed under his control and the promised monsters melees can commence in earnest. But first, some random mayhem!

El Hombre Lobo is the first out of the gate, invading the home of a villager and his wife and ripping their throats out, then chasing their son, played by Raúl Martínez Solares Jr., whose prominent billing in spite of his nothing role can be attributed to the fact that the film’s director is Gilberto Martínez Solares, and its cinematographer, his brother Raúl, is the boy’s father. Meanwhile, El Ciclope (who is treated like he’s an ersatz gill man) kills a fisherman, Franquestain murders a necking couple and stomps on the boy’s face for good measure, and El Vampiro puts the bite on the first of his two brides-to-be. The balance of the film is spent with Santo dealing with the monster menaces while protecting Otto and Gloria to the best of his abilities. This includes accepting a challenge from El Vampiro, who masks up for their bout, which prevents him from utilizing his signature move of going for his opponent’s throat. There’s also a lengthy sequence where Santo takes Otto and Gloria out to dinner, where they witness a four-and-a-half-minute dance number, followed by a musical number mercifully cut short by the sudden arrival of Blue Demon and his posse, which clears the joint out in a hurry and demonstrates Santo’s ineffectiveness as a bodyguard. What’s left, then, is for Santo to tail them back to Dr. Halder’s castle, awaken the real Blue Demon, and destroy the evildoers. All in a day’s work for the man in the silver mask.

Considering Charles Band named his production company Full Moon, it’s curious that he has largely shied away from making werewolf movies. One of the few exceptions (along with 1990’s Meridian, which he directed himself) is 1998’s Werewolf Reborn!, produced as part of Full Moon’s abortive “Filmonsters!” series. Slated to appear alongside stories about Dracula and the Mummy, Werewolf Reborn! and Frankenstein Reborn! were the only two to make it across the finish line, and since they run about 45 minutes each, Band cut his losses and packaged them together as Frankenstein & the Werewolf Reborn! We are only concerned with the latter rebirth, though.

Werewolf Reborn! has an evocative opening, culminating in a backlit wolf man howling at the moon, but it gets bogged down in the travails of a teenage girl sent to a backwards town in Eastern Europe (the country isn’t specified, but the film was short in Romania) to stay with her uncle while her parents are tied up with diplomatic duties in Geneva. Put out when she isn’t met at the train station, Eleanore (Ashley Tesoro) gets a frosty reception from the clerk and, given no other options, has to walk five miles to her uncle’s crumbling mansion, outside of which she is accosted by a gypsy boy and his grandmother, who give her a message for her uncle. Uncle Peter (Robin Downes, who gets the “introducing” credit) immediately tries to send her away, but opts for locking her in her room while he waits for the full moon to rise and the change to come over him.

The resourceful Eleanore takes the door off its hinges so she can snoop around and read the note from the gypsies (which is naturally in rhyme), but misses her uncle as he’s out in the woods being hunted by the villagers, one of whom falls prey to his blood lust, and one of whom shoots him. The next morning, when he limps home, Eleanore is stunned by his fast-healing wounds and listens to his story of the time he was bitten three months earlier by what the gypsies call “the wolf that walks like a man.” Overheard by the official Inspector Krol (Len Lesser, by far the most experienced actor in the cast), Peter is arrested and locked up, but his pleas fall on deaf ears. “Bars will hold you, bullets will kill you, and the rope with hang you,” Krol boasts, but we know better.

To make a long story short — or a short story even shorter — Eleanore is given a gun loaded with silver bullets by the gypsies and Peter breaks out of jail when night falls, shrugging off the ordinary bullets Krol and his men pelt him with. When he confronts his niece at the mansion, Tesoro does some of the worst “scared” acting I’ve ever seen, and Eleanore eventually shoots her uncle, who undergoes a bad morphing effect to return to human form in time to deliver his parting words. “This was my destiny,” he says. “To be a figure of wonder and terror, and to die. Do not cry. Do not be said for me.” No one is.

According to its opening title screen, 1985’s Vampire Hunter D “takes place in the distant future where mutants and demons slither through a world of darkness.” It is a time ruled over by the Nobility, a race of vampires descended from Dracula himself, though he is never named outright. (Most often he is referred to as their “Sacred Ancestor.”) In addition to the mutants they hold sway over, the Nobility also keeps werewolves at their beck and call, but apart from two blink-and-you’ll-miss-them moments, they aren’t called on to do much here, which is a shame because they look and behave quite ferocious.

The plot of Vampire Hunter D, culled from the first of a series of novels by Hideyuki Kikuchi, concerns a human named Doris Lang who is targeted by the local vampire Noble. She seems capable enough since she’s introduced hunting and killing a dinosaur with her laser rifle, but then she’s beset by a werewolf who removes the cross hanging around her neck (and then makes off with her cybernetic horse in its maw) so she can be bitten by its master, the 10,000-year-old Count Magnus Lee, who has decided to claim her as his latest bride. As the daughter of a Werewolf Hunter (deceased), Doris can handle herself well enough — and she has a way with a whip — but she’ll require outside help to escape the Count’s clutches.

Enter the title character, who appears riding through a post-apocalyptic wasteland on his own mechanical steed, identified as a DL4 model cyborg by Doris’s younger brother Dan. A man of few words who lets his actions speak for him, D agrees to protect Doris, but doesn’t immediately let on that he’s a dhampir, meaning he’s the product of a vampire father and human mother. This explains his quick-healing powers when he goes up against the Count’s haughty daughter Larmica and her pet mutant Rei. Their approach to Doris and Dan’s farmhouse is preceded by a werewolf tearing a protective cross out of the ground and destroying it, but unfortunately it disappears right after performing this act. We are even denied the spectacle of D facing off with it, which is decidedly a missed opportunity.

The balance of the film finds Doris being kidnapped and rescued, Dan being kidnapped and rescued, and Doris being kidnapped and rescued again. All the while, D fights a golem, a phantom jaguar, and the infamous Midwich Medusas, along with his own vampiric instincts. As expected from a Japanese animated film of this vintage, there is blood and viscera galore, as well as a gratuitous shower scene, and a talking hand that taunts D every step of the way for good measure. (Naturally, it is his left.) Fifteen years after riding off into the sunset, D returned to movie screens in 2000’s Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, which also has a werewolf in it, apparently. I haven’t seen that since it showed up in US cinemas the following year, though, so I guess I’m due for a refresher.

This month’s Full Moon Feature is one I’m not going to dwell too long on because the wolfman content is minimal — and ultimately toothless. A product of the post-Roger Corman New World Pictures, 1985’s Transylvania 6-5000 is of a piece with the company’s previous PG-rated horror comedies The Private Eyes (1980) and Saturday the 14th (1981), which were similarly anemic in the horror and comedy departments. It is also reminiscent of the following year’s Haunted Honeymoon, which features its own werewolf, but is more competently put together by co-writer/director Gene Wilder.

In the case of Transylvania 6-5000, the principal architect is writer/director Rudy De Luca, also a frequent collaborator of Mel Brooks, making his feature directing debut and swan song simultaneously. The basic premise is reasonably solid — two mismatched tabloid reporters are dispatched to the title locale to investigate the possible return of Frankenstein’s Monster — but the execution is lacking, as if De Luca shot his first draft and hoped the actors would breathe life into it. And with actors like Jeff Goldblum, Ed Begley Jr., Joseph Bologna, Geena Davis, Norman Fell, Jeffrey Jones, Carol Kane, and Michael Richards on hand, he may have thought that would work. As it stands, though, they can only do so much, and some wind up doing too much to compensate for the threadbare script. (Richards’s physical schtick wears out its welcome the fastest, but he has plenty of competition for the film’s most grating performance.)

Then there’s the matter of the film’s wolfman, the son of a gypsy who tells Goldblum and Begley of a “creature that walks as a man by day, but as the full moon rises, he becomes a wolf. He’s a werewolf.” He also goes by the name Lawrence Malbot Jr. (har har) and is played by Donald Gibb between stints as hulking frat brute Ogre in the Revenge of the Nerds movies. While he’s certainly hairy enough, Lawrence Jr. takes forever to show his furry face, and the mundane explanation for his condition — hypertrichosis as opposed to lycanthropy — is the definition of anticlimactic. When Goldblum moans that he’s wasting his talents (“This is my contribution to journalism. Waiting for a werewolf.”), it’s remarkably easy to sympathize.

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.