Mary Smith (Mary McNeeran), an inhabitant of a progressive reform school, is murdered in a most vicious way. Although the facts indicate some members of the local wolf population as the killers, Mary's best friend Priscilla (Barbara Lass) begins to snoop around for a very human perpetrator and his (or her?) motives.
There certainly is no shortage of suspects. From sado-masochist Sir Alfred (Maurice Marsac) to new teacher in town Julian Alcott (Carl Schell), every man in the school seems to have some very dark secrets.
One of them might even be a werewolf.
Werewolf... reminds me very much of the German Edgar Wallace krimis, a series of movies that started in 1959 and were an important influence on the Italian Giallo. Both tend to combine some Gothic trappings with an often quite illogical mystery plot. The biggest difference here is that no German film at the time would have dared to use an actual supernatural entity (even if like here explained in semi-scientific terms) instead of someone using local superstition for his own ends. Effectively this makes no great deal of difference to the movie, since the werewolf kills very deliberately and planned.
But this isn't the only thing the krimi and Werewolf... have in common. They also share the tendency to waste their relatively high budget and very talented artists in front of and behind the camera on slow and conservative scripts.
Everything is just a little too cautious and a little too inoffensive to be worth watching.
At least Werewolf... is interesting as an early connection between the krimi and Italian filmmaking. I can't recommend it to less historically minded viewers, though.
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