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The animosities of adolescence, fur in new places, raw meat on the plate, a girlfriend uneasy about hormonal flares. "Do I have to draw you a diagram?" It opens mid-dogfight, the young hothead (Michael Landon) brawling in the dirt because "people bug me." His father (Malcolm Atterbury) is a helpless widower, his date (Yvonne Fedderson) begs him to seek help. "I say things. I do things. I don't know why," he moans. Back to "savage beginnings" with the psychiatrist (Whit Bissell), who straps the lad down and coaxes out the primordial beast. The upshot is the eruption of lycanthropy in Eisenhower's placid campus, a woolly joke that finds the moody juvenile metamorphosed into a fanged bison in varsity jacket, glimpsed at one point skulking toward the upside-down coed in the gymnasium in an echo of Nicholas Ray's own high-school fable. "Le loup criait sous les feuilles..." Vladimir Sokoloff as the janitor full of Old World warnings is from Val Lewton, Albert Bandura's aggression experiments are concurrent, Russell in Altered States sees a parable for the feral artist. Having edited for Lang and Fuller, Gene Fowler Jr. knows how to pull the whole megillah together into a potent little apocalypse, with anxious youth and corrupt adulthood both sprawled lifeless on the floor of the laboratory. "And you call yourself a scientist!" De Palma's Carrie picks up the line of thought and explodes it, Landis' Thriller video is an ample analysis. With Tony Marshall, Dawn Richard, Ken Miller, Robert Griffin, and Joseph Mell. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |