Oddly, I couldn’t find a good color still of this. This seems like the old Sam Arkoff sort of thing, where they thought of a title and then made the movie around it. For all that, it’s pretty good. It really is a very traditional wolf man movie, with the guy (Kerwin Matthews, Harryhausen’s original Sinbad) being a pretty good fellow who ends up cursed through no fault of his own.
This tragic aspect is really worked; aside from the added desperation of the kid, who knows his dad is a werewolf but also doesn’t want to see him get hurt, there’s a scene where some hippie mystics quite nearly cure the guy, only to have him walk away before they can finish.
The killings are fairly brutal in a PG sort of way. All is all, a fairly rare example of a movie that you’d see in the drive-in and which pays off as well as you could reasonably hope. The film was directed by veteran helmer Nathan Juran. Juran directed Matthews in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, and also directed Deadly Mantis, 20 Million Miles to Earth and First Men on the Moon. Under his alias Nathan Hertz, meanwhile, he directed the far crappier *(if still beloved) Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman and The Brain from Planet Arous. He fittingly used the Juran moniker here.
This was Mr. Juran’s last picture.