I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF, before he goes full lycanthrope, and is just a snotty high school letterman, growls his version of the 1950s Angry Young Dean: “People bug me.”  Well, duh. This common sense admission wins over half the audience early on, so that when his era standard Brando pout is replaced by fangs and slobber we’re not totally unsympathetic; his shock-fuzzy coif seems ‘un-natural’ enough considering his hair-trigger temper was on display from scene one. ‘Rockdale High’s problem child ‘Tony Rivers’ is 20-year-old Michael Landon, making his debut. Tony’s outburst issues, with his ‘hep’ pals, patient girlfriend, pretty much everyone within jaw-flex range, will go into primeval overdrive when treated by ‘Dr. Brandon’, hypnotherapist and whackjob: “I’m going to TRANSFORM him, and unleash the savage instincts that lie hidden within… and then I’ll be judged the benefactor. Mankind is on the verge of destroying itself. The only hope for the human race is to hurl it back into its primitive norm, to start all over again. What’s one life compared to such a triumph?”

Indeed. The not-good doc is played by the omni-ubiquitous Whit Bissell, 47, who that year (1957) alone appeared in seven features and 14 different TV series. Directed by Gene Fowler Jr. (I Married A Monster From Outer Space), written by Herman Cohen and Aben Kandel, the 76-minute dip into angst-gone-animalistic was shot in one week for as little as $82,000. Considering it’s such a patently ridiculous scenario, some effective creepiness actually gets across. That’s thanks to Joseph LaShelle’s camerawork, Phillip Scheer’s wild makeup job and reasonably decent acting from Landon, Bissell and a few supporting players like Barney Phillips (concerned detective), Malcolm Atterbury (Tony’s sad dad), Guy Williams (a cop) and Vladimir Sokoloff (janitor ‘from Romania’, who grasps the whole werewolf link because he’s from ‘the Old Country’).

Yvonne Lime (High School Hellcats, Dragstrip Riot) plays Tony’s understandably distraught squeeze (what are a few mangled students between friends?) and Playboy Playmate of the Month (May ’57) Dawn Richard gets a slash of immortality as a gymnast who really should have gone home at 3:00 (21-year old Dawn soon married producer David L. Wolper).

Drive-in’s were flooded with neckers making time between Tony’s excesses: the pint-sized flick was a hit, making maybe as much as $2,000,000. It brought forth I Was A Teenage Frankenstein later in the year (Whit again) and the “teenage something” spin & spoof theme was branded into the cultural zeitgeist mixmaster of movies, TV and music, giving successive generations ‘defining’ tags they can mock, identify with, debate over and rip off because they have got you & me—all figured out.

We leave cold, hard science to the experts, Doctors Wagner and Brandon—–WAGNER: “But you’re sacrificing a human life!”   BRANDON: “Do you cry over a guinea pig? This boy is a freak police case. We’re probably saving him from the gas chamber.”   WAGNER:  “But the boy is so young, the transformation horrible -”  BRANDON: “And you call yourself a scientist! That’s why you’ve never been more than an assistant.”