I Was a Teenage Werewolf

Back in the day, when bobbysoxers went to sock hops and everybody was cool, cruising around in their ’56 ragtop muscle cars with customized flamin’ paint jobs while their girls, adorned in safe, conservative sweaters, hung out the side waving to the audience, Michael Landon—as well as Peter Parker just a few years later—walked around Chumley Street with a fiery hot pot of social angst and a lot of teenaged turbulence burbling beneath their letterman jackets.

Hidey-ho up there in Palookaville. Or rather, down there.

Michael Landon, decades shy of evolving into the redoubtable, good-natured, wise, and all-around wholesome prairie hero dad of the iconic "Little House on the Prairie," not to mention his later stint as an actual angel in the equally iconic and quintessentially Eighties "Highway to Heaven" (and who could forget him as sagebrush hunkenstein “Little Joe” Cartwright on "Bonanza"?), plays a tempestuous teen hoodlum from the wrong side of the tracks who starts the picture off in a straight-up fisticuff with a fellow overgrown adolescent before being lectured on his hot temper by a cop or somebody (Barney Phillips).

Landon is a bad-tempered guy who just barely keeps the Wolf Inside at bay. He lives with his vaguely stereotypical immigrant father (Malcolm Atterbury), some “Old Country” type, and the fact that Landon himself was Jewish, came from a troubled family whose matriarchal anchor reportedly attempted suicide more than once, dealt with bedwetting as a child, and faced the antisemitism of the era marks him as oddly perfect casting for a brooding outsider simmering with resentment.

Tony/Landon feels displaced, under siege, and one wrong word away from punching the lights out of whoever antagonizes him. But he can also be a vicious sonofagun. At a party, he organizes a prank where the sort of runty comic-relief guy, "Vic" (Kenny Miller, who plays the bongos, dad) gets a bucket of water dumped on his head while walking through a doorway. Okay, larf-larf. But then Tony punches the poor slob out when he mouths off afterward. The nerve of that guy.

Enter the bald, ungainly, middle-aged mad scientist nightmare known as Whit Bissell, as "Dr. Alfred Brandon." You may remember him from such classic sub-par cinematic horrors as I Was a Teenage Frankenstein and How to Make a Monster (which, as the late, great Lux Interior of The Cramps so prudently advised, you’d better ask his momma about), and who here plays a proper researcher in roughly the same vein as the hypnotist from The Undead.

Bissell gets Landon in there for a proper hypnotic regression, but holy frijole, Batman—the regression regresses him all the way back to the throwback phase of human evolution. That’s assuming, of course, we all evolved up from wolves.

In his essay in the seminal countercultural anthology Apocalypse Culture (1988), “Lycanthropy: Battling for the Soul of Feral Man,” author Adam Parfrey gives examples of youths supposedly raised by wolves who regressed into feral states, their “resurgent atavism” bringing forth children who ate, crawled, drooled, snorted, and stank “like wolves.”

Landon’s Tony wasn’t raised by wolves, but he might as well have been. He hears that old-fashioned school bell ring and—boyo! —out come the fur and fangs, while the shit “that looks like Burma Shave” (to quote Stephen King in Danse Macabre) drools from his hairy, snarling snout. His hands curl into claws, and suddenly he’s sporting that iconic proto-Teen Wolf look: a werewolf in a letterman jacket just waiting to pounce on some unsuspecting school gymnast.

This is pure, high-camp cult monster movie nonsense from the era of poodle skirts and Rocket 88s. Tune in, turn on, drop dead.

Michael Landon doesn’t make out so good in the end. Like Larry Talbot, he bites the big silver and takes a nosedive.

Dig that hep cat. He’s real gone.

To the dogs.

I mean wolves.

HOWL!

Written by Herman Cohen and Aben Kandel. Directed by Gene Fowler, Jr. From American International, natch.

I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) Michael Landon, Teen Wolf! Cult Horror Classic!

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