"The word 'lycanthropy' is defined a human being having the power of becoming a wolf, or of having the power of turning another human into a wolf. Some say lycanthropy stems from nothing but myth and superstition, yet the belief that a human can turn into a wolf has persisted since the Dark Ages to this very day. It is a universal belief. The ancient Romans and Greeks wrote of the phenomenon. There are tales of such happenings in Borneo, Turkey, South America. Everywhere. The American Navaho Indians and other tribes tell stories about wolf-men. The legends have persisted since the beginnings of Man's memory of Time. Why? Why haven't these tales died? The tales that say wolf-men roam the Earth...?
From prolific cheapie producer 'Jungle' Sam Katzman (he of everything from the seemingly endless Dead End Kids/East Side Kids/Bowery Boys series of alleged comedies [actually, that's unfair: 1943's Ghosts on the Loose, co-starring Bela Lugosi and Ava Gardner - now there's a potent cocktail! - was a bit of a laugh] to horror B's to musicals to the Johnny Weissmuller starring Jungle Jim flicks) and director Fred F. Sears (helmer of the Bill Haley and His Comets vehicle Rock Around the Clock [1955] and well as genre fare such as the Ray Harryhausen-tastic Earth vs the Flying Saucers [1956] and the Mara Corday-tastic turkey The Giant Claw [1957]) comes this interesting SF twist on the well-worn werewolf genre.
From out out of the wilderness there stumbles a stranger (Steven Ritch - usually a competent journeyman actor in Westerns and thrillers, but also the co-screenwriter of the 1959 sci-noir City of Fear) into the small resort town of Mountaincrest. This lone figure, a man without a memory, stumbles into the local bar to fortify himself and try to ascertain whether any of the locals know who he might be. After he unthinkingly flashes his cash buying a drink before leaving, a local hoodlum named Joe (Charles Horvath) follows him outside with the intent of extorting money with menaces. Dragging the stranger into an alley, his attempted assault ends with the mugger looking a right mug as the victim turns predator and the attacker having his neck nibbled to the sound of animalistic snarling, bringing the deputy sheriff Ben Clovey (Harry Lauter, It Came from Beneath the Sea [Robert Gordon, 1955], Superbeast [George Schenck, 1972]) running to the scene.
"Only an animal could do that to a man's throat!"
Heading in pursuit of the culprit, Clovey and two of the townsfolk arm themselves and head into the snowy mountains surrounding this ski-skate town that they forgot to close down to find a trail of footprints in the tundra that they follow only to find that at one point the human footprints end only to be replaced by the paw prints of an animal: an animal who walks on two legs.
These events of of course a concern to the town's sheriff Jack Haines (Don Megowan, who had already played the icon Black Lagoon resident the Gill Man earlier that year in John Sherwood's The Creature Walks Among Us and would go on to play the Frankenstein Monster in 1958's Tales of Frankenstein [review here ] as well as star in 1962's The Creation of the Humanoids) who has to spearhead the manhunt for the man-imal, torn between his instinct to shoot to kill and the advice of town doctor Jonas Gilchrist (Ken Christy) and his own fiance, Gilchrist's niece Amy (Joyce Holden, Terror from the Year 5000 [Robert J. Gurney Jr., 1958) to treat the fugitive as a sick man rather than a wild beast and bring him in warm rather than cold.
"Well do the best we can. Doctors try to save people. The law doesn't always have a choice."
As the truth gradually begins to emerge we discover that our lupine loner is Duncan Marsh, family man; husband to Helen (Eleanore Tanin) and father to Chris (Kim Charney) who was involved in a car crash and found and treated by unscrupulous doctors. This mad scientist due consists of Dr Morgan Chambers (George M. Lynn, who had featured twelve years earlier in Universal's monster mash House of Frankenstein [Erle C. Kenton, 1944]) and Dr Emory Forrest (S. John Launer, who'd tangle with another lycan a year later in Gene Fowler Jr.'s I Was a Teenage Werewolf). Dr Chambers' mad scheme involved using the wounded Marsh as a guinea pig for his theory of injecting humans with the irradiated blood of a wolf to create a canis lupus sapiens (a similar theory to that of George Zucco's Dr Cameron in The Mad Monster [here]) to survive his projected holocaust of WWIII. As he tells his rueful associate Forrest:
"Radiation creates mutants - who who become monsters, no longer human. They'll make the hydrogen bomb more powerful, then more powerful again. Enough to change every person on the face of the Earth into a crawling inhuman thing through fall-out radiation."
As Marsh's wife and son make their way to Mountaincrest in search of him, and the shady medics responsible for his predicament also close in with the intent to kill him before his memory returns and he can implicate them, Duncan finds himself torn between his humanity and his inner beast. Interestingly, his transformations are triggered not by the light of the full moon but by his animal instincts: fear and anger cause the change whether it be day or night. I found myself wondering if Stan Lee saw this at the time, and thought, "The Incredible Wolf? Y'know, with a tweak this could work. Excelsior!" The wolfman make-up is by Clay Campbell, and pretty much exactly the same as the job he did on Matt Willis in 1943's Return of the Vampire (clearly Duncan Marsh and Andreas Obry were both of the same strain of lycanthrophobia).
Released in the US in 1956 as the lower B-half of a double bill with Sears' Earth vs the Flying Saucers and in the UK as the upper half of a twin-spin with Edward L Cahn's Creature with the Atom Brain (starring Richard Denning, whose other half Evelyn Ankers knew about a lycanthropic trick or two having starred as Gwen in George Waggner's 1941 classic The Wolf Man), The Werewolf received a poor notice in Variety but a favourable one in the MFB (how I wish that were still a going concern as a publication as well as Sight & Sound). Featuring a fine performance from Steven Ritch as the hunted and haunted Duncan Marsh fighting for his life and his own sense of self, The Werewolf stands as a curious collision of 1950s radiation-charged sci-fi and the classic horror of the previous decades.
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