I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957)

Working class teen Tony Rivers (Michael Landon) doesn’t quite fit into his surroundings. He may have a lovely girlfriend in Arlene (Yvonne Lime) and do well academically, but he also demonstrates a twitchy, very violent temper, using his fists in moments when most people wouldn’t even need to shrug the problem off. Eventually, pressed by a well-meaning policeman (Barney Phillips) and Arlene, and taking a long good look at himself after he’s gone berserk for basically no reason, Tony goes to a friendly high class psychologist who is offering his services to the community for free.

That sort of thing is always a bad sign in a 50s movie, so you won’t be surprised to hear that Dr Brandon (Whit Bissell) is indeed a mad scientist. In Tony, he believes to have found exactly the subject he has been looking for, physically healthy yet emotionally out of whack enough to be drugged and hypnotized into regressing back into humanity’s natural state. It’s all for the good of humanity, of course, for our only chance of survival as a species, as Brandon explains, is to start the way to civilization right at the beginning again. And if that means a teenager regresses into a werewolf (a helpful eastern European or perhaps Mexican American police janitor played by Vladimir Sokoloff explains what that is, don’t you worry) whenever he hears loud noises and murders a handful of people, than that’s the price of SCIENCE!

There are a surprising number of joys to be found in Gene “I Married a Monster from Outer Space” Fowler Jr.’s Teenage Werewolf, and not just the still pretty great title. For one, there’s the film’s zippy pacing for an AIP production of its time, where little suggests a filmmaker playing for time to get the film up to length, and nearly all scenes seem to have actual utility for the film. Well, you could argue the early party scene is going on too long, but it’s actually useful to build up Tony being normal (or as “normal” as teenagers in a 50s movie get) before  he has his most decisive anger issue; the otherwise useless musical number on the other hand is just too horrific not to include in a horror movie.

Then there’s the surprisingly thoughtful (and yes, of course also silly and cheesy and peculiar) script, that actually attempts to smuggle in a wee bit of class commentary that’s easy to miss, with Tony being the half-orphaned son of a mechanic where all of his peers seem to come from “perfect” middle class households. And let’s not forget the stifling 50s idea of conformity he has to cope with; though there, I’m not sure if the film actually sees it, or just portrays it as part of the world as it knows and thus accepts it. On the other hand, this is a film whose main character’s fatal mistake is to do what everyone tells him to by submitting to authority, so perhaps Fowler knows exactly what he’s got here.

Why, you might think Tony’s rage has something to do with all of that, and less with any natural atavism.

But returning to the “fun” in the script, there’s a lot to be said for Dr Brandon’s whacked out theories and dialogue – generally spoken to his less crazy assistant who is one of those guys who like to talk about mad science being a bad idea but never does anything to actually help its victims. The most classic line is of course uttered when assistant Hugo seems a bit disturbed by the whole idea of experimenting on an unwitting teenager: “And you call yourself a scientist! That’s why you’ve never been more than an assistant”.

Bissell’s line reading and whole comportment as our mad scientist is rather wonderful, full of overblown arrogance and what appears as sheer delight in his own, idiot theories. Landon actually gets a bit of mileage out of poor Tony, too, portraying the kind of angry for reasons he can’t understand himself young man that wasn’t the cliché it is today with some dignity and making him sympathetic. And as a werewolf in the wolfman tradition, he’s really enthusiastic about the wild eyes and the snarling. Paul Naschy probably took notes.

So in my book, I Was a Teenage Werewolf ends up being one of those 50s AIP productions without Corman involvement (but that of Herman Cohen) that are much better and more interesting than you’d expect going in, as well as cleverer than the really needed to be to simply fill their drive-in spot.