The future star of three hit TV series ("Bonanza", "Little House on the Prairie", "Highway to Heaven") needs an instant shave from his usual clean shaven self in this drive-in classic from the early days of American International. Michael Landon is a troubled teenager with an attitude who finds the wrong help in psychiatrist Whit Bissell who uses his private experiments to help Landon get revenge on those he believed have wronged him. Mysterious injections take the anger that is already there and make it beast like, turning the future Pa Ingalls into a distant cousin of Lon Chaney Jr.'s. Girlfriend Yvonne Lime notices strange changes in his personality, and so do her stuffy parents, and Landon's father (Malcolm Atterbury) realizes in horror (perhaps remembering what Claude Rains did in "The Wolf Man") what he must do.
This is a decent, if predictable, update of that 1941 Universal horror classic, and a few scenes seem like they've been taken from that film verbatum. There are some extremely tense moments, particularly the attack of a girl doing gymnastics who sees wolfie approaching her while her head faces him upside down. Another scene shows one of Landon's teen rivals walking through the countryside hearing strange voices and calling out in panic demanding to know who's there. The music is creepy and the atmosphere affecting, but sadly, there's little detail about Landon's character of Tony Rivers that explains why he's so troubled beyond getting into fights at school and seemingly being the schoolyard bully. Those who know Landon only from his heroic TV parts will be surprised to see him playing a basically unsympathetic kid. A rock musical number entitled "Eeny, Meeny, Miney, Mo" is enjoyably campy. For a co-feature, I recommend American International's "How to Make a Monster" which parodied the making of this film by including a poster of it, but having another actor stand in for Landon.
This is a decent, if predictable, update of that 1941 Universal horror classic, and a few scenes seem like they've been taken from that film verbatum. There are some extremely tense moments, particularly the attack of a girl doing gymnastics who sees wolfie approaching her while her head faces him upside down. Another scene shows one of Landon's teen rivals walking through the countryside hearing strange voices and calling out in panic demanding to know who's there. The music is creepy and the atmosphere affecting, but sadly, there's little detail about Landon's character of Tony Rivers that explains why he's so troubled beyond getting into fights at school and seemingly being the schoolyard bully. Those who know Landon only from his heroic TV parts will be surprised to see him playing a basically unsympathetic kid. A rock musical number entitled "Eeny, Meeny, Miney, Mo" is enjoyably campy. For a co-feature, I recommend American International's "How to Make a Monster" which parodied the making of this film by including a poster of it, but having another actor stand in for Landon.