BAD MOVIE: THE WEREWOLF OF WOODSTOCK (1972)

No, not The Werewolf Of Washington, which is a whole other movie, but The Werewolf of Woodstock, site of the famous multi-day music festival in 1969 New York. Enjoy this atrocious attempt at a rock’n’roll horror film.      And for more bad movie reviews click here: https://glitternight.com/bad-movies/

THE WEREWOLF OF WOODSTOCK (1972) – Category: Bad enough and with a classically weird premise but not fun-bad enough for my highest rating     

This made for tv movie presents the weirdest variation on the werewolf legend this side of Curse of the Queerwolf. The story begins the night after the conclusion of 1969′s Woodstock music festival when a grumpy old man who hates rock music and young people goes to the litter-strewn remnants of the outdoor concert looking for “hippies” to harass.

This act is even dumber than it first sounds when you consider that just a bit earlier he and another resident of Woodstock were discussing how all the concertgoers are “long gone”. While trashing some of the metal stage equipment (I have no idea why it’s still there) he gets struck by lightning, causing him to start turning into a werewolf during thunder storms … uh, yeah, makes perfect sense.

As part of the film’s on-again off-again attempt at a storyline it is sometimes implied that people playing rock  music provoke the werewolf to attack them, but other times that notion is conveniently forgotten. Two cops, played by Meredith Macrae and Michael Parks, begin to investigate the strange goings on, with Parks wearing a goofy knit cap that makes him look like Michael Nesmith from The Monkees. In fact this telefilm could pass for an overlong episode of The Monkees tv show if not for all the killings.

Other memorable bits of Bad Movie Heaven in this movie include:

a) the way all the cast members  wildly overact to a degree not seen since the days of silent movies,

b) the bizarre plan of an unknown rock band (one member of which is a very young Andrew Stevens) to make it big by taking pictures of themselves amid the ruins of the Woodstock event, thereby hoping to convince a record label that they actually performed there,

c) the way the rock’n’roll-crazed werewolf not only conveniently returns to the old curmudgeon’s bed after his nocturnal killing sprees, but obviously also wraps the bandages back around his own face before daybreak (the facial bandages are from the burns he suffered in the electrocution),

d) the usual monster movie cliche involving how the werewolf doesn’t kill the female groupie of the rock band, but instead stashes her away in an abandoned building,

e) said groupie’s incredibly annoying habit of changing her dog’s name every few days (oh, she’s soooooo whimsical),

f) the scene in which our supposedly mindless werewolf ties the groupie up to prevent her from escaping his lair,

g) the shamelessly prolonged driving scene that pads out the ending of the film … no dialogue, no cross-cuts back to the werewolf and his victim, just silent driving for what feels like forever,

and h) the goofy plot to use the lame, unknown rock band to perform on the leftover Woodstock stage to lure the rock-hating lycanthrope out of hiding so he can be contained in a crossfire of loud noises. That ingenious plan fails, and the old, reliable silver bullet method is used to bring the wolfman’s reign of terror to a close.

This whole disastrous attempt at a rock’n’roll-themed horror film was executive produced by none other than Dick Clark himself, proving that not everything the American Bandstand icon touched turned to gold.

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