Werewolf Reviews

The best one can say about this abysmal horror flick is that its title is concise and to the point--very much unlike the movie itself. In the desert outside Flagstaff, Arizona, an archaeological team under the direction of Professor Noel (Richard Lynch) unearths the skeleton of a "skinwalker," an ancient Native American creature similar to a werewolf. One of the team, Tommy (Jules Desjarlais), cuts himself on the bones and soon transforms into a lycanthropic creature that is ultimately shot dead. While visiting writer Paul Niles (Fred Cavalli) begins romancing Noel's assistant Natalie Burke (Adrianna Miles), Noel's unscrupulous associate Yuri (George Rivero) doses a security guard (Tony Zarindast) with a sample taken from the skeleton, and the guard also becomes a monster, only to die in a fiery car crash. Paul gets into a fight with Yuri in the lab, and winds up scratched by the skeleton. He too transforms into a werewolf, as Yuri reveals to Natalie that he and Noel plan to exhibit and study Paul as a scientific breakthrough. Natalie and Yuri follow the rampaging Paul back to the rooming house where he's staying. Now fully transformed, Paul kills Yuri and converts Natalie into another werewolf. From an opening fight scene, in which it's obvious that the punches aren't connecting, to the badly miscalculated ending, WEREWOLF is a model of genre filmmaking incompetence. The story is poorly plotted, with nominal hero Paul not introduced until nearly a half-hour into the movie, the dialogue is laughable and long-winded, and the acting is largely awful. Producer-director-co-writer Tony Zarindast pads out the already tedious story with plenty of unnecessary establishing shots, and his direction of the horror and action scenes is unworthy of a high-school class project. Not helping matters are occasional continuity slipups (a victim-to-be's clothes are already muddied before she falls into a puddle, etc.) which point up the amateurishness of the whole enterprise. WEREWOLF is so bad, in fact, that when one startling stunt, involving a character falling down a stairwell, does pop up, it seems to have sneaked in from another movie. (Graphic violence, sexual situations, extreme profanity.)