REVIEW: Werewolf (TV Series)

Werewolves are pretty close to the top of the movie monster list in my head, clawing at the ground just a step or two behind zombies. I don't know why, but everyone else I know seems to really like vampires, while I've always thought that werewolves and wolf-men were way cooler. I chalk up my preference to three sources:

1. An episode of "Tales From the Crypt" where a vampire couple adopt a mysterious orphan boy in order to slowly drain his blood. At the end, when the kid finds out their secret, he quietly announces that he has a secret too, and his is better than theirs. Then he turns into a werewolf and mauls them.

2. 'Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein' was a huge favorite of mine when I was little, and I still love it. Seriously, Lon Chaney Jr's Wolf-Man was always way cooler than Bela Lugosi's Dracula.

3. In 'The Monster Squad,' -- which really needs to come out on DVD soon -- the kids in the movie all dismiss the Wolf-Man as being a crummy monster, because they figure that, aside from silver, pretty much anything that can kill a regular wolf (car crash, baseball bat, falling out of a plane) can kill a werewolf. Later on, when they blow the Wolf-Man up with dynamite, they find out just how wrong they are.

Werewolves haven't exactly been causing me nightmares since I was five (when I was certain that the Wolf-Man was just around the corner in my hallway), and they haven't even come close to scaring me in movies like the zombies do, but there's always the underlying metaphor about the kinds of primal instincts that everyone has just below their skin that I find striking about the werewolf mythos. I usually imagine that it would -- at least on some level -- feel really, really good to turn into a werewolf, where we could express all of our violent and uncontrollable urges in an animalistic and guilt-free way.

Now that I've got that out of the way, the 'Werewolf' television series isn't very good.

It debuted on the fledgling Fox Network (whatever happened to them, anyway?) back in 1986, with a two-hour pilot feature which "is not intended for younger viewers," as the voice tells us. In the pilot, young college student/orphan Eric Cord (John J. York) is living the good life with his girlfriend Kelly (the lustworthy Michelle Johnson) and his best friend Ted (some guy I've never seen before), enjoying the sunny summer days in California. As per standard in horror films, there have been mysterious and gruesome slayings in the area, and the show actually opens with one of them outside a nightclub where they play an awesome Mike & the Mechanics song, leading me to believe that the pilot had a decent budget. One night, of course, Ted confesses to Eric that he has a ... problem. Well, more specifically, a curse.

He's only a fiscal Republican, and he feels out of touch with a Reagan America. On top of that, he turns into a monster and kills people.

Eric laughs this off, because that's the kind of reaction you have if your best friend tells you that he's been murdering people as a man-beast. Ted eventually convinces Eric to at least tie him up, and sit with him until morning -- keeping the revolver and silver bullets on hand. Over the course of the next couple hours, Ted tells his story: The previous summer, he got a job on a ship working under a mysterious Captain Janos Skorzeny, a tall one-eyed man with a growl for a voice and questionable after-hours behavior. (And we're talking questionable even for a giant one-eyed pirate.) On a warm, moonlit night in the shipyards, Ted got attacked by some kind of beast, and barely managed to survive; by morning, though, most of his wounds had healed. Soon after, Skorzeny disappears, and Ted's career as a wolf-man began.

You can probably guess where this is headed: Ted turns Eric into a werewolf, Eric shoots the Ted-wolf, and now it's Eric's job to track down the evil Skorzeny so he can end the curse. If you guessed that much, you'd be correct. Of course, Eric gets into a little trouble with the authorities for shooting Ted, but jumps bail and heads out on his own to cut off the bloodline and end the werewolf curse. This means that he's got to dodge the police and other werewolves, as well as super-cool bounty hunter Alamo Joe Rogan (Lance DeGault), who isn't quite sure the world is the same as before he met Eric. That's basically the entire starting point for the entire (one-season) series, and if you're mentally tabbing comparisons to 'The Incredible Hulk,' you'd be right.

In fact, most reviews compare the show to the 'Hulk,' although for my money, this show makes more sense than the 'Hulk.' Maybe it's because I haven't seen it in a long, long time, but I can't remember why, exactly, Bruce Banner was on the run. Did the Hulk kill someone? Even so, I'd feel pretty safe as Banner, since most of the time I would not fit the police's description of a seven-foot-tall green body-builder. (Eric shot Ted as as Eric, not as a giant wolf.) I know he was searching for a cure for his condition, but it seems that the likelihood of finding numerous gamma-radiation research facilities along Route 66 would be pretty slim. At least in 'Werewolf,' Eric had broken the law by killing someone and jumping bail, and he had a legit reason to be followed by the cops, and to wander across the backwoods of the country since he was following Skorzeny. I don't know why I'm nit-picking about shows that feature men turning into either wolves or Lou Ferrignos; I guess I just like a semblance of plausability sometimes.

Anyway, 'Werewolf' was not a great show, and the episodes ranged from interesting to bad. (Although I think the pilot's pretty good, but that could be because of Michelle Johnson.) One of the things that I think really, really, really hurt the program was the half-hour format; I can barely believe that Fox shoved this into sitcom-length time slots. The stories rarely have the time to develop into anything remotely meaningful, which is especially harsh on a show that features new characters each and every week. Despite this, the show tries really hard to pack a lot of story into every 22 minutes, and it does occasionally succeed, but even in the best cases the viewer can't help but wish it were more fleshed out. On the other hand, the efficiency of the scripts lends the show a half-cartoonish element, which sometimes works in its favor.

The acting, too, is hit-or-miss for the most part, even from some of the leads. John J. York played Eric with a lot of innocent, wide-eyed naiveté, which is exactly what the character should be; sometimes, though, the part required a bit more aggression, which kind of faltered. A case could be made, I suppose, for the fumbling of the lines as part of Eric's inherent good nature, but there's something about them that makes me think it was the actor and not the writer. For the most part, though, York acquits himself well, and it becomes clear that Eric's good nature is the thing that's preventing him from killing anyone as a wolf.

The opposite of good nature, Chuck Connors played Skorzeny as a wolf who masquerades as man. Being a veteran of the small screen (as well as a former pro basketball and pro baseball player), Connors breathes 'evil asshole' as the one-eyed seaman. Maybe it's just a smoker's voice, but Connors knows how to growl, and exudes menace even if he's just standing around. It's too bad that he was only in a handful of episodes before he quit the show, replaced as the villain by Brian Thompson, patron saint of small villain parts in horror and sci-fi. I don't think I'm giving away too many spoilers by saying that (and look away now if you don't want to know what happens, although if you can't figure it out on your own anyway you're probably some kind of moron) Eric kills Skorzeny, and realizes that he wasn't really the start of the bloodline. Skorzeny himself was turned by a guy named Nicholas Remy, a 2,000-year-old Frenchman (who was based on a real person involved in the Inquisition.)

While he was only in (I think) two episodes, Thompson is awful. Like, really bad. I've seen him in about fifty other movies, and he's been completely passable, but it's almost as if he and the director had no idea what to do with the character. He's got one of those 'now you hear it, now you don't' accents that rivals Carrie Fisher's 'Star Wars' accent for Most Out of Place Until it Mysteriously Disappears. Plus, the character himself didn't really thrill me. It's another one of those mysteriously super-wise, 'sophisticated' villains that just come off as really, well...comic-booky. I hate to use that analogy, but it's the kind of approach frequently used in comics when a writer wants to make a villain powerful, but doesn't have the brains or the balls to come up with anything interesting, or even halfway specific; everything about the character is made up of lazy allusions to knowledge and power, but there's nothing behind it. Skorzeny had simple motivations, perhaps, but at least he was interesting because we knew what drove him -- at least to an extent -- and we wanted to see it in action. There just wasn't anything behind Remy's facade, and the presentation wasn't interesting enough to make the audience look harder.

The best actor on the show, by far, was Lance DeGault as Alamo Joe, and most of the acting was of the Eastwood style of 'grizzled.' Alamo Joe Rogan was a Brooklynite turned cowboy, although he had a very distinct southern drawl, which is a paradox only acceptable on shows about werewolves. Rogan's character had the advantage of an actual character arc over the course of the show, as he changed from a skeptic into a believer, whereas Eric and Skorzeny had the unenviable positions of staying exactly who they were at the beginning. The basic point of Eric's character was to try and not change from lycanthropy, and Skorzeny was always more of an objective than a real dramatic persona. Plus, DeGault was named "Alamo Joe," which kicks ass in a very manly-man cowboy way.

The episodes themselves were no dramatic works of art, but a lot of them were fun. Getting back to the 'Hulk' comparisons, I was always bored to tears with the Hulk because he was a big superheroic comic book character that did nothing more superheroic than bend metal on the show. Every damn episode, Bill Bixby would turn into the Hulk, and then break some wood and maybe throw some stuff, which is about the most dull manner in which I could imagine the show going about it. There were never any other Hulks on the show, nor supervillains or superheroes (until the TV-movies began), and I think the closest the Hulk got to a challenge was fighting a bear or trying to grunt the alphabet in order or something. 'Werewolf,' on the other hand, shines in this department, because about half the episodes have big climactic battles with other werewolves. One episode has a disfigured man living in a supposedly haunted house, and another has a witch. They may have been short, they may have been flat, but I was rarely outright bored by them. I even put up with the numerous 'was it all a dream?' episodes.

One key component that I've negected to talk about is the make-up. When this debuted, one of the leading bits of the promotional campaign was that the werewolf effects were designed by Rick Baker, who was (I think) the very first man to win an Academy Award for visual effects. What were those Oscar-winning effects for? A werewolf transformation in "An American Werewolf in London." Naturally, of course, Fox got the best, and for the most part the effects are pretty top-notch. The transformations are rarely seen -- because that's way out of TV budget -- but the actual full wolf suits are really nice, and over the course of the show I'm surprised how much they put them through. Honestly, if I were the producer of the show, and the writers wanted to throw the super-expensive werewolf costumes through walls of fire, roll them down muddy hills and into dirty lakes, I'd say 'no.' Luckily for the real show, the producers had no qualms about getting these things messed up and we're all treated to some really nifty stunts. If nothing else, Fox got some nice practical effects for their money.

The verdict, overall?

I really like this show. I know, objectively, that it's not really good; I just happen to really enjoy the characters, or at least what the characters were able to suggest in their 22 minutes a week. I would love to see someone like Chris Carter resurrect Eric, Skorzeny, and Alamo Joe for a weekly hourlong, because I think the idea of it has a lot of potential. It's an interesting story, but for whatever reason -- be it budget, time, resources -- it didn't come together, and that's a shame. Unfortunately, there's about a .000001% chance of seeing a remake unless I do it myself, so I guess I'll have to content myself with watching these bootlegs. It's too bad that the 'Buffy' boom is over, because if it was ever going to get resurrected, that would've been the time.

Oh, well. Until the next full moon, I leave you with:

ooow-WOOOOOOOOOOOOOwoowooWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!