The Werewolf of Washington (1973)

What are the chances that WOLFtober would end just 5 days before an American presidential election? I have just the thing: Dean Stockwell (Al from Quantum Leap) romping around Nixon-era D.C. as a werewolf with a taste for politicians! Literally cannot be bad, I dunno what this 3.9 IMDB score is about. Dean narrates the opening credits with some political backstory; "That it could happen… in America. That it could happen… now."

Dean inspects a silver wolf-headed cane, straight out of The Wolf Man (1941), in a horrendously edited opening scene. The horrible editing takes us into a car crash, somehow, and we see that Dean hasn't yet learned how to act. His crashed car won't start, he argues with the greek gypsies that he blames for his bad driving, and he gets stranded in the underexposed woods with his… translator?. He is uneventfully attacked by a puppy in a nicely blown-out white mist, and he reenacts beating it to death with a cane. The whole intro is a quick replay of The Wolf Man. The gypsy woman tells Dean that he released her son from the curse of the pentagram, and Dean says, "ahhhh, the Pentagon is behind all of this!" The gypsy woman continues, "remember: a werewolf can only be killed with a silver bullet, or a stick with a silver handle." I love that they explicitly call out the stick exception.

The film quality is pretty awful: soft, washed out, low saturation, 4:3 ratio, black level too high and blue-tinted. The corner vignetting is sometimes so bad that you can't make out the faces of people on the edge of the screen. Some shots suffer from color shift. A lot of it looks like digital/video flaws, so probably a shit transfer from film. The audio quality isn't exactly good, but it is better than I was expecting for low-budget 70s. It does completely cut out sometimes. The mixing is bad – background noise drowns out conversation – but as long as they're just talking you can clearly hear what they say. The music is like… I'm going to say telephone hold music.

Dean doesn't value gypsy woman advice at all, and flushes the magical amulet she gave him down the toilet. We meet a bunch of political people at a fancy D.C. party, and Dean's love interest, the president's daughter. The politicians are stacking the court to take control over the narrative in the media, and complaining about "Red China." It's all about Nixon and the Washington Post, but it might just as well be about today. The Washington Post is currently in hot water for collaborating with a Republican presidential candidate, again.

When a werewolf starts eating politicians, they blame it on the Black Panthers. This, despite eye witness reports blaming it on a werewolf. Dean tells the president that he thinks he's a werewolf, but nobody is buying it. Dean transitions before our eyes in a straight-on head shot blending between some 10-15 steps on increasing facial fur, which is, quite frankly, pulled off well enough. Movies with 100x the budget have done worse. Bipedal humanoid Dean alternates between acting human and acting like a panting puppy dog, which is a new take.

While bowling with the president in a There Will Be Blood-inspired scene, Dean's fingers wolf out and he gets stuck in the bowling ball. I think this is the only actual comedy scene in the movie. It's alright. Otherwise, comedy-wise, it's trying to be more like Dr. Strangelove and failing. Dean is no comedian, but he's trying his best.

Dean wolfs out in a meeting, and runs around the building until he finds a lab full of secret science experiments and a dwarf doctor who is very interested in his condition. Wolf-Dean swirls around and sniffs his butt like a dog, and becomes his pet. I couldn't really tell you why. He wakes up in a cemetery, confused, and immediately calls the local gunsmith and orders a set of silver bullets. Dean traces out the killings and predicts that the final one will happen near his apartment, at Watergate, forming a pentagram.

Dean convinces the politicians to chain him up on full moon night, but the president's daughter finds him all chained up and releases him against his will. So… he goes to a helicopter meeting with a delegate from China instead. The scene drags on while Dean slowly, slowly wolfs out, bites the president, and runs home to kill the president's daughter. She shoots him through the heart with a silver bullet in a badly edited and acted scene.

The concept is better than the budget allowed. Not the script though, it's boring as hell. With five times the cash, a writer, and more experienced filmmakers, this might have actually been something. It is not, however, something. The director, in an interview, said he was influenced by Fellini. "I was broke, in growing debt, unable to pay my rent. So, to the unanimous disapproval of my friends, I decided to make a werewolf movie." Just imagine how angry you would have been if you had paid to see this in theaters.