I’ve been wanting to watch this movie since I first read about it in Stephen King’s Danse Macabre. Since I’m screening lots of horror movies for a club I hold at the day job (teaching) I decided to finally watch this early Michael Landon thriller for myself.
I wasn’t disappointed. I love seeing big stars like Landon in really early gigs (like Jamie Lee Curtis in her Scream Queen years), because they very clearly have that “something” which portends big things in their future.
It wasn’t hard to buy into his character’s role. An intelligent but slightly volatile hothead, who - when he accidentally hits his best girl while in a fight with another guy - becomes dreadfully fearful of his temper, and the potential consequences of it.
His father is a single dad who’s trying to pay the bills and do right by his son. He believes his son is a good boy who just doesn’t fit in well. There isn’t much made about the absence of Michael Landon’s mother and what affect that may’ve had on Landon’s character growing up, but for some reason, her absence loomed large in my mind early on.
Enter a psychologist who says he can help this young man. Except, what he really wants to do is perform psychological experiments on his unwitting patient (because psychology is SCARY!) to see if he can regress this moody teen all the way back to mankind’s earliest and most bestial stage (BECAUSE SCIENCE!).
What he unearths, however, is no mere caveman: It’s a ravening, hungry werewolf. And ya gotta love the costume design for this one. It’s The Wolfman Goes to the Sock Hop, and I love it.
The neat thing about this movie is its separation from werewolf myths. Michael Landon doesn’t need a full moon to transform, just fear or stress (or seeing a pretty gymnast in her leotard working out; include whatever subtext you’d like here), the cops don’t need silver bullets to kill him, and right from the get-go, everyone knows Michael Landon (the moody teenager all the fathers and mothers were half-afraid of already) is the beast, and the manhunt is on.
You could make much-to-do about how parents of daughters in the fifties feared the James Dean Archetype, and how that fear plays into this movie, or, you can just have some popcorn flick fun. In any case, I Was a Teenage Werewolf is readily available for free on Youtube.