User reviews

Interesting horror film about a man who becomes a werewolf because of science. A man is recovered from a car crash. A scientist injects him with a serum to fight radiation poison. A side effect causes him to (occasioanlly) turn into a werewolf. No full moon or silver bullets are involved here.

This might be the first horror film to have a person becoming a werewolf through scientific means! The performances are good (especially Steven Ritch as the werewolf), the scenery is beautiful, there are some nice directorial touches and the people talk and act like real people. The makeup is awful and I wasn't really scared, but I was never bored. Sadly, this isn't available on video. Well worth catching on TV.

In Mountaincrest, a stranger without memory arrives in a bar to have a drink. When he leaves the bar, a local tries to robber him but he turns into an animal and kills the attacker. Deputy Ben Clovey (Harry Lauter) hunts down the animal but is wounded by it. Sheriff Jack Haines (Don Megowan) organizes a party to find the beast. Meanwhile the nurse Amy Standish (Joyce Holden) and her father, the local doctor, receive a man called Duncan Marsh (Steven Ritch) that recalls that he had a car accident and two doctors have treated him. But he flees and Haines wants to hunt him down but Amy and her father wants to convince him to capture Duncan to see how they could treat him. When is wife Mrs. Helen Marsh (Eleanore Tanin) and her son Chris arrive in Mountaincrest, Sheriff Haines is convinced that shall capture the werewolf alive. But the doctors that conducted the experiment arrive in the town expecting to kill him.

"The Werewolf (1956)" is a film with the genre more drama than horror. The sad saga of the family man Duncan Marsh is heart breaking. The plot is interesting and the transformation is excellent for a 1956 movie. The performance of Steven Ritch is also great. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "O Lobisomem" ("The Werewolf")

The Basic Plot: The unraveling of the mystery of two scientists,a werewolf, and a missing man.

The Praise: Tense, quiet, and spare, it is frightening in an amount of moments with the werewolf. The western locations are great, and the werewolf is sympathetic,plus good acting by a cast of nobodies. Not a major production, it is probably low-budget because of the no-frills look of the film and the lack of any stars. Odd because in parts it looks, feels, and acts like a western. If you detached some scenes without the Werewolf it could pass as a western. The Flaws: Ridiculous makeup. P.S : Extremely rare, it has never been released on VHS, DVD, Laserdisc etc.. Only way to see it is through TV, and I taped it off the AMC Halloween festival, and the tape has become part of my library of rare horror films.

This film scared the pants off me as a kid (which I loved!) and when I finally found it again and watched it as an adult I was pleasantly surprised to find that I still enjoy it. And parts of it, namely the cave sequence and the fight in the dark alley, still give me the creeps. I found this werewolf much scarier than Chaney Jr.'s version. Steven Ritch's portrayal has a wildness and rawness to it that gives his lycanthrope that extra edge. Watch how he drools as he sinks his fangs into that hunk of bait in the woods, for instance. Oh, there are a few flaws... and I find the scene at the doctors' lab very long, talky and dull... but all in all I'd recommend this to any classic horror film buff. Well done. Hard to believe something of actual quality was produced by the same man responsible for "The Giant Claw"!

Never seen this film before and was pleasantly surprised to see this film had some Sci-Fi effects and it involved itself with two doctors who find a man Duncan Marsh, (Steven Ritch) who was in a car accident who has no memory and they inject him with a serum which has some strange effects on his body. Duncan Marsh is a married man and has a son and he escapes from these doctors and runs into a bar and has a few drinks and tries to seek help but as he leaves the bar he is approached by a man who wants to take his money and something happens to this man. Soon after this incident, the town believes there is a wild animal on the loose because they find a man killed by a sort of wolf or wild animal. This is a rather low budget film, but it has real live background on a California park and has a great deal of realism and horror. Enjoy.

This B horror picture from Columbia with a cast of familiar players is better than I thought it would be. At the heart of it is a truly tragic figure in Steven Ritch who is just your average guy with wife Eleanor Tanin and son Kim Charney. He gets involved in an automobile accident and unfortunately gets himself treated by a pair of deranged scientists S.John Launer and George Lynn who decide he'd make a good test subject for an experiment.

Without the aid of the full moon and other bits of werewolf lore, Ritch goes in and out of being a werewolf day or night and without warning. He's pretty invincible when he's in wolf mode.. Sheriff Don Megowan and deputy Harry Lauter are tracking him, good doctors Joyce Holden and Ken Christy want to treat him. The bad docs want to kill him as a coverup.

Horror movie fans would do well to check this one out.

Steven Ritch plays a stranger who arrives in the small California town of Mountaincrest, with no memory of who he is or how he got there. He also has the unfortunate tendency to sprout hair, claws, and fangs at any old time, and the townsfolk attempt to catch Ritch in his wolfish form. Then two doctors (S. John Launer, George Lynn) follow Ritch there, knowing full well that they're the ones who put him in his predicament, and try to cover up their actions.

"The Werewolf" is a well acted, modest production that gets great mileage out of its Big Bear Lake locations, as well as fine atmosphere. It also puts a fresh spin on the standard werewolf story, taking it into the Atomic Age and giving us a lycanthrope born of not myth and legend but of scientific meddling. Of course, like many a good werewolf story, it's also a tragedy, with a main character who does earn our sympathies. People like Dr. Gilcrist (Ken Christy) and his niece Amy Standish (Joyce Holden) work at convincing the law, represented by Don Megowan as the sheriff and Harry Lauter as his deputy, to please try to take Ritch alive, if possible, knowing that he is a basically good man who cannot control what is happening to him.

The werewolf makeup by Clay Campbell is decent, the stock music appropriated serves its purpose, and there is some very crisp black & white photography by Edward Linden. The performances are fine, with Megowan as a sturdy, jut jawed (if not that expressive) hero; Eleanore Tanin and Kim Charney are appealing as Ritchs' distraught wife and son.

Good entertainment, with a striking finale done in long shot at a dam.

Seven out of 10.

This is the first time in Hollywood where a werewolf is created by radiation! Yes, scientists in an attempt to cure a man, turn him into a werewolf. Unlike regular ones... well that would be telling. As usual with most werewolves, he does garner a lot of audience sympathy. After all, he didn't want to become a werewolf!

Scientific advancement has always been fraught with risk and danger. In The Werewolf, a pair of unscrupulous doctors test their treatment for radiation sickness on an unwilling guinea pig - automobile accident victim Duncan Marsh (Steven Ritch) - with unexpected and disastrous side effects: their experiment turns the man into a bloodthirsty werewolf. Doh!

With such a silly reason for a case of lycanthropy, this one sounds like it should be a hugely enjoyable slice of 50's B-movie schlock horror, but it's not nearly bonkers enough to qualify as such. Once the werewolf has been introduced, running amok in the small town of Mountaincrest, the plot goes nowhere, the majority of the film consisting of the hunt for the lycanthrope by local police, which doesn't prove very riveting.

Furry-faced with sharp teeth and claws, but wearing a suit, the monster is more likely to elicit laughter than scares - and the transformation effects - old-school dissolves between the different stages in make-up - are also good for a few giggles, but with such a predictable script (the nasty scientists get what's coming to them and it doesn't end well for Marsh, shot down by a torch-wielding mob), this is a disappointingly weak werewolf movie.

An old monster gets a new touch in this movie from the late 1950's.

Back when it was popular to blame radiation for everything this movie offers a pair of dedicated but very misguided scientists who want to show the world what hideous mutations atomic radiation can create. They could just have gone to the movies any Saturday and seen all manner of mutants but no, these guys take a car crash victim Duncan Marsh (Steven Ritch, taking a break from the westerns he usually appeared in) and inject him with a serum derived from the blood of a radioactive wolf. (If that sounds familiar it's because the same plot, minus the radiation angle, was used in PRC's 1942 thriller THE MAD MONSTER.) The crash has given Duncan traumatic amnesia and thanks to the serum when he gets angry or frightened he turns into a . . .well you saw the title.

Stopping at a small mountain town, Duncan is tracked there by the scientists who suddenly aren't too anxious to have the world see what they have done (now if they had thought about that 3 reels earlier we wouldn't have had a movie!). The sheriff of the town is Don Megowan who played the Creature from the Black Lagoon in THE CREATURE WALKS AMONG US. The town doctor wants to save Duncan but the sheriff knows the beast has to be stopped one way or the other before the body count gets any higher.

Okay so the end of the movie is pretty much inevitable but director Fred F. Sears, who also gave the world THE GIANT CLAW and EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS, gives us a very atypical scene where Duncan is allowed to see his wife and child before he . . . well you'll see what I mean.

I love this movie for many reasons, one of which is that I also had a Super8mm 11 minute digest of it when I was a kid. Now I have the whole thing on video.

Lensed by the same director of the bigger budgeted Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers and meant to be a companion for the lower half of the bill The Werewolf surprised everybody by being a taut face value chiller with more character emphasis than usual for this type of subject.

As other reviewers have stated the performances,locale,direction and lighting are much better should be for a story about kooky scientists turning a luckless schmoe into a hirsute mutant but it also has a film noir element that mixes in quite nicely amidst the western pines of Big Bear lake.

Unlike some other viewers I didn't have a problem with the make up. It was meant to scare kids and it did. A year later you can see similarities in the design for Michael Landon's beastly side in I Was A Teenage Werewolf.

After the late sixties this exhausted it's run on local Chiller theaters and became very hard to find until now.

For a reasonable price you can get a gorgeous widescreen DVD transfer of The Werewolf along with other B movie faves The Giant Claw,Zombies Of Mora Tau and Creature With The Atom Brain.

The name of the set is Icons Of Horror Sam Katzman. It comes with some great extras but one of them produced by the same Three Stooges dept. at Columbia has enough vile Asian stereotypes to make A Fu-Man-Chu movie look P.C.

Take a trip back to matinée-ville with this and enjoy.

I'd be the first one to admit that this isn't the greatest werewolf movie that's ever been made. In a lot of ways, it's pretty standard, B- movie stuff. In the action and the chills there really isn't much here that you won't see in other werewolf movies from the era. The cast isn't especially well known (it is a low-budget, B-movie after all, so it doesn't have anyone even approaching the status of a "star") although the performances are fine. The "transformation" scenes are pretty standard for the era; the makeup is OK. What really made this work, though, was the premise. The relatively mundane title suggests a lack of creativity; in fact, this was a rather unique way of approaching the genre.

It's a pretty good way of blending a 1940's "horror" type theme (werewolves) with a 1950's theme (radiation, and the fear of nuclear war and the fallout from it.) Essentially, the werewolf in this is an even more sympathetic figure than usual. After suffering a minor injury in a car accident, Duncan (Steven Ritch) is experimented on by two doctors who want to find out what would happen if people were exposed to large doses of radiation, so that they can be prepared to deal with (and survive) the aftermath of an atomic war. What they discover is that the radiation turns Duncan into a bloodthirsty, werewolf-type beast who goes on a killing spree in a small town and in the woods surrounding it. So there's no full moon in this, no animal bite. The guy is just the victim of the experiments of a couple of unsavoury scientists.

It fits perfectly with the 1950's, Cold War era. People were afraid of nuclear war; they were afraid of radiation and what it might do as the weapons got progressively more and more powerful. So this, as a horror movie, would have managed to do what any decent horror movie tries to do - it would have played on the very real fears of every day people; a point the movie itself makes toward the end, in a scene when it's mentioned that people are afraid because now that they know it can happen to anyone, they also know there's a chance it could happen to them. This is a decent movie. (6/10)

This film begins with a man named "Duncan Marsh" (Steven Ritch) wandering into a bar late at night to have a drink. Once finished he aimlessly walks out onto the sidewalk only to be accosted by another man from that same bar. A scuffle soon breaks out during which the second man is killed. It's during this time that a woman comes along and upon seeing what appears to be a man standing over a dead body, looks directly into a face that doesn't resemble anything human. Horrified at what she has just seen, she immediately lets out a loud scream which results in several men streaming out of the bar and giving chase to the fleeting figure on its way to the nearby woods. Although most men eventually give up the chase, one particularly determined law enforcement official named "Deputy Ben Clovey" (Harry Lauter) decides to pursue it on his own. Unfortunately, for his efforts, he is attacked by something resembling a wolf and quickly returns back to the town to seek medical attention. Yet, it's only after consulting with his superior "Sheriff Jack Haines" (Don Megowan) that he realizes that whatever attacked him is something more horrifying than anything he could ever imagine. Now, rather than reveal any more, I will just say that this turned out to be a unique type of "werewolf movie" in that the werewolf wasn't created in the usual manner but rather through the efforts of a mad scientist in a laboratory. As a result, the usual traditions and rules didn't apply. Be that as it may, although it was somewhat dated and I would have liked to have seen a bit more horror, this film still managed to pass the time fairly well and I have rated it accordingly. Average.

A stranger walks into a small mountain town bar. When he leaves, he is harassed by a robber. He fights back turning into a werewolf and killing the robber. Deputy Ben Clovey tries to track down the killer but loses him in the woods. The tracks turn into wolf tracks despite there are no wolves in the area. Clovey gets mauled and Sheriff Jack Haines takes him to Dr. Gilcrist.

The stranger should be kept more mysterious and never to be seen again in this town. He should be a boogeyman or a ghost. There is no need to dig into his origins. All that with the mad scientist is a waste of time. This should be a movie about Clovey turning into a werewolf and killing his friends. As for the transformation, it's a straight-on shot on his face being superimpose one image after another with him having more and more werewolf makeup. It's a good visual for a quick and dirty effect. It's not the most compelling but it'll do the trick. The makeup is fine for this early attempt. On the other hand, the story is simply wrongheaded.

Fred F. Sears directed this better-than-expected science fiction horror tale that stars Steven Ritch as an auto-accident survivor who is rescued by two scientists who inject him with an experimental serum intended to cure nuclear fallout, but instead has the unfortunate side-effect of turning him into a werewolf, which proceeds to terrorize the local mountain community, with his concerned wife and son in pursuit.

Not bad thriller dispenses with supernatural clichés to present a scientific explanation for the werewolf, an innovative touch. Steven Ritch is excellent, making you care about his tragic plight. Other performances are good, with effective location filming. Memorable bridge climax is fine(if a bit too abrupt). Has some obvious flaws, but otherwise a reasonably tense thriller.

A not very scary horror movie. The familiar plot takes a lot away from the film. The music and scenery out shines the acting in this black and white tale of a fellow that sporadically turns into a wolf. Unfortunate Duncan Marsh is treated with an experimental serum following a car accident. Not only does he wander around with amnesia; when he feels threatened, he turns into a werewolf.

Steven Ritch plays Marsh. Harry Lauter is the Deputy, just one of the many gun toting folks trying to catch the wolf man. Also appearing are Joyce Holden and Don Megowan. Not exactly a BOMB, but far from a great horror thrill.

This is quite a good low budget film with a new twist to the werewolf story. There is nothing supernatural here. Forget the wolfbane and the silver bullets. Steven Ritch has the lead role and does a splendid job, making the monster even more sympathetic than the long suffering Larry Talbot of the Universal Wolfman flicks. His character, Duncan Marsh, appears in a mountain town having no memory of who he is or how he got there. Leaving a tavern, he is followed by a man who intends to rob him. The man pulls him into an alley and the werewolf claims his first victim. The story plays well the rest of the way. We find out that Duncan Marsh's condition is brought on by two doctors who use him as a test subject while treating him for injuries sustained in a car accident. A supporting cast of unknowns do a decent job of being believable. Elenore Tanin is especially effective as Duncan Marsh's wife. The Big Bear Lake locations give the film a lot of help.

This modest but nifty horror oldie from the mid-fifties brings forward a rather interesting and progressive premise, namely a wolf man/monster created by weird science instead of by gypsy curses, bites from rabid wolves or whatever else. A very confused and nervous man stumbles into a bar in the little town of Mountaincrest, California. A rather unfriendly encounter with a local quickly establishes that this man – Duncan Marsh – is a werewolf, but he suffers from amnesia and certainly doesn't have the intention to turn the town into a bloodbath. For you see, Duncan was made into what he is by two scientists, one crazy and rather evil and the other docile and cowardly. They took Duncan's unconscious body from a car accident and injected him with an experimental serum. Why? Apparently because the evil scientist guy firmly believes that all men will eventually kill each other and thus he started fabricating a serum that would make a selected few undefeatable. Why don't you try it on yourself then, you coward? How dare you call yourself a scientist! The hunt for the beast brings a lot of people – whether or not carrying torches – to Mountaincrest, including Duncan Marsh's poor wife and young son who still hope he can be rescued. Since Duncan is a very atypical werewolf, the film naturally also doesn't feature any full moons, silver bullets or supernatural stuff of any kind. He transforms whenever subjected to heavy emotions, like anger or anxiety. By consequence "The Werewolf" isn't a full-blood horror movie like the contemporary Hammer monster movies that were being released on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, but more of a family drama with a monstrous touch. Still, there's tension throughout the search for Duncan and the opening sequences are mysterious and atmospheric. The werewolf transformations as well as the facial make-up effects are surprisingly great for a low-budgeted 50's flick. Fred F. Sears directs solidly and provided the film with typically moody & ominous voice-over introduction. This guy, who also directed "Earth Vs the Flying Saucers" and "The Giant Claw" definitely died before his time