Also known in Brazil by the rather wonderful Portuguese title of A Verdadeira Historia do Lobisomem, or The True Story of the Werewolf, this little gem of obscurity is another that I learned of years back thanks to Stephen Jones' Illustrated Werewolf Movie Guide (a real boon of a book - along with its Vampire compatriot - for those of us interested in delving deeply into the vast cinematic archives of the famous monsters of filmland).
Tool salesman turned actor/producer/mogul Earl Owensby (known as 'Dixie DeMille' and 'Redneck Roger Corman') did what many a cineaste kid years to do and established his own production facility in Shelby, North Carolina. Spending most of the 1970s and '80s churning out low-tier grindhouse fare for the drive-in circuit that would rarely play north of the Mason-Dixon line, Owensby was a sort of Southern-fried Don Dohler - his films always making back their outlay and being profitable for him though rarely impinging upon the wider public consciousness. That said, looking up his oeuvre (stop giggling at the back - that's not a euphemism) I realised that I had seen at least one of his films: 1983's Rottweiler: the Dogs of Hell.
Here, Earl has cast himself in the leading role of the hilariously-monikered Colin Glasgow (it somehow just doesn't have the same resplendent redolence of other lycanthropic legends as Leon Carrido, Lawrence Talbot and Waldemar Daninsky), scion of a Southern family who finds himself called back to his ancestral abode after spending years travelling the world - globetrotting which has done nothing to blunt his Aw-shucks accent. Colin (which at least the cast pronounce correctly: i'd shuddered slightly in apprehension that we were going to be treated to a surfeit of "Coe-lin"s, a la a certain Mr Powell) makes his way back to stately Glasgow Manor - which sounds like the turf of a Gorbals gangster - too late to see his elderly father Edwin (Julian Morton, who like many other members of the cast has only one other acting credit to his name: another Owensby production) who is sped on his way when he is stabbed on his deathbed with a silver dagger wielded by the evil and sorcerous Reverend Leonard (Ed Grady, pretty much the only member of this ensemble to have any real kind of acting career, following the the footsteps of the screen's most evil churchmen such as Claude Frollo, Gregory Trask and Jack Hackett).
The diabolical deacon has dispatched daddy in order to ensure that the hereditary Glasgow curse (which I always thought was heroin addiction) passes down unto the latest generation, i.e.: Colin. And so our befuddled hero's homecoming is to the bad news that his father is indeed
Whilst by no means at all a remake of Curt Siodmak's classic script for 1941's The Wolf Man - the turn of the century Southern setting alone a world away from the fog-shrouded Euro-Gothic elseworld of Larry Talbot's Llanwelly - there are a few points of similarity: Colin's encounter with his love interest, the divorcee Lynn Harris Randolph (Kristina Reynolds, giving one of the movie's more competent performances) occurring in Harris's Curios & Notions, the shop belonging to her father much like Evelyn Ankers' Gwen in Conliffe's Antiques in the earlier film.
Obviously, Colin eventually succumbs to his cure and transforms via the magic of poor time-lapse into a furry-faced monster. Being in the post-Universal, post-Hammer hinterland just before the modern horror boom of the Nineteen-Haties with such stuff as The Howling and American Werewolf, this feels slightly out of time. The time is out of (Alf) joint. It really feels like Dark Shadows meets Hammer, with a sub-Carpenter synth score. If that idea warms your cockles like it does mine, then check it out. It's on Youtube.
My name is Earl.
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