WEREWOLF (TV PILOT)
With vampires back in vogue werewolves have never had much representation beyond film. WEREWOLF was one of the few, an American TV series on the fittingly canid Fox Network in 1987-1988. I had heard of this series for a few years from scant mentions in TV Zone Magazine so it was an unexpected delight when my obsessive trawling of charity shops and market stalls turned up the pilot episode on battered VHS.
Eric Cord is a typically American 30 year old college student whose roommate Ted asks him to kill him after he becomes a werewolf. I doubt this was an intentional metaphor for house sharing but certainly puts the washing-up rota into perspective. After shooting Ted and becoming a werewolf he tries to cure himself by killing the originator of the curse which turned him, a one-eyed, horror cliche of a man called Janos Skorzeny.
Script wise this is actually pretty decent. It betrays its origins as a TV pilot script as it sets up the situation, characters, motive and format all in 80 minutes. It has a pacing to it most modern films can only dream of, with a brevity which reminds me of the very early Universal horror films. It is a cursed by his superpower man-on-the-run format similar to The Incredible Hulk. I suspect the rest of the series involved him drifting from town to town searching for Skorzeny while being chased by a bounty hunter he crosses paths with in the pilot. Unfortunately as he turns into a wolf it does make me think of it as a lychanthropic Littlest Hobo (There's a Moon, that keeps on calling me) which slightly robs it of dramatic tension.
The effects are better than some films but he design work is strange with the werewolves looking more like gorillas than either men or wolves. Skorzeny has a beautifully gross transformation when he literally pulls his skin off which is one of the few instances of that style I can think of. It looks like 90s TV series, all badly mastered film to video transfer and shonky graphics.
The greatest bit in this entire film is the music score. Clearly taking a nod from the Highlander TV series it is all heavy metal and rock noodling. I have never heard a score entirely composed of a guitar solo but I reveled in how ridiculous it sounds in some places. Axe grinding may be suitable when he turns into werewolf but it is less so when man wanders about a boat marina for a bit.
A nice idea slightly hamstrung by its need to begin a series of episodic adventures. Hopefully we might see a new werewolf series on TV one of these days perhaps merging it with reality TV as The Werewolf Whisperer.
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