In the late '50s, director Nathan Juran gave fantasy film fans a series of less-than-impressive B-movies: The Deadly Mantis (dull), 20 Million Miles to Earth (great effects, lame story), The Brain From Planet Arous (unintentionally funny), and Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (great title, terrible film).
Juran finally found his movie-making mojo in 1958, directing the rollicking fantasy adventure The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, followed by Jack the Giant Killer in 1962, and First Men in the Moon in 1964.
But all good things must come to an end, as the saying goes, and 1965-1970 saw Juran working in TV, which goes to explain why The Boy Who Cried Werewolf - the director's final film - feels and looks so much like a made-for-TV movie. Of course, the dreadful monster and virtually non-existent special effects also mark this movie as a poverty stricken swan song from a film-maker whose best days were well behind him.
Kerwin Mathews (Sinbad and Jack in the aforementioned movies) plays Robert Bridgestone, who takes his boy Richie for a weekend in a remote cabin, only for father and son to be attacked in the woods by a werewolf. Robert kills the beast, but not before he is bitten on the arm - and we all know what that means...
As the film's title suggests, no-one believes Richie when he says that his father was attacked by a werewolf: not his mother (drop dead gorgeous Elaine Devry), not the local sheriff (Robert J. Wilke), not even his own dad, who seems to have forgotten that the man who he threw off a cliff had a really hairy face and fangs. Not even when Robert transforms and goes on the prowl during the full moon!
The kid's continuous protestations that his old man is a lycanthrope gets really tiresome, and the pointless inclusion of a group of God-fearing hippies (to appeal to the 'free love' generation) only adds to the irritation. Things might have been a bit more bearable had the werewolf shenanigans been any good, but watching Mathews lope around in a really bad rubber mask (through which we can clearly see the actor's mouth) is not exactly scary stuff. His transformation scenes are also laughable, with a time-lapse method similar to that used way back in the 1940s. Only worse.
Horribly dated, and an embarrassment for all involved, I'm amazed that the film has a reasonable rating and generally positive comments here on IMDb. Not from me, though: 3/10.
Juran finally found his movie-making mojo in 1958, directing the rollicking fantasy adventure The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, followed by Jack the Giant Killer in 1962, and First Men in the Moon in 1964.
But all good things must come to an end, as the saying goes, and 1965-1970 saw Juran working in TV, which goes to explain why The Boy Who Cried Werewolf - the director's final film - feels and looks so much like a made-for-TV movie. Of course, the dreadful monster and virtually non-existent special effects also mark this movie as a poverty stricken swan song from a film-maker whose best days were well behind him.
Kerwin Mathews (Sinbad and Jack in the aforementioned movies) plays Robert Bridgestone, who takes his boy Richie for a weekend in a remote cabin, only for father and son to be attacked in the woods by a werewolf. Robert kills the beast, but not before he is bitten on the arm - and we all know what that means...
As the film's title suggests, no-one believes Richie when he says that his father was attacked by a werewolf: not his mother (drop dead gorgeous Elaine Devry), not the local sheriff (Robert J. Wilke), not even his own dad, who seems to have forgotten that the man who he threw off a cliff had a really hairy face and fangs. Not even when Robert transforms and goes on the prowl during the full moon!
The kid's continuous protestations that his old man is a lycanthrope gets really tiresome, and the pointless inclusion of a group of God-fearing hippies (to appeal to the 'free love' generation) only adds to the irritation. Things might have been a bit more bearable had the werewolf shenanigans been any good, but watching Mathews lope around in a really bad rubber mask (through which we can clearly see the actor's mouth) is not exactly scary stuff. His transformation scenes are also laughable, with a time-lapse method similar to that used way back in the 1940s. Only worse.
Horribly dated, and an embarrassment for all involved, I'm amazed that the film has a reasonable rating and generally positive comments here on IMDb. Not from me, though: 3/10.