Thanks to Lovefilm.com's on demand streaming service I was finally able to check it out this week via Xbox Live.
The movie was a bit of an anti climax after all these years of wanting to see it after seeing photos of Oliver Reed in Lycanthrope form in various books and magazines over the years.
The plot of the movie to cut it short (which really does need doing as the story moves at an alarmingly slow pace) is the story of an unwanted baby boy who is born on Christmas Day and for some strange reason this makes you become a Werewolf?
The boy is brought up by a local rich couple as their own son but when local goats start getting all kinds of fucked up they decide its for the best they should put bars on the windows.
Then the boy grows up (into Oliver Reed maybe one of the coolest hardest drinking men to ever walk the Earth) and they send him packing. Now if your adopted son who you know for a fact is a Werewolf and not to forget this same man is Oliver Reed (who once said he wanted to drink every pub dry and shag every woman alive and meant it) surely letting him loose to the nearby community might be a bit of a bad idea? Oh well fuck em!
Anyway within a few days of meeting the love of his life Reedy metamorphosis's into a Werewolf and starts killing people and throwing doors at them etc.
Now most of the interesting bits of this movie you don't get to see like for instance most death scenes just involve a hairy hand coming out from the side and grabbing someone. When Oliver Reed finally transforms into the beast he just runs around a few rooftops growling and snarling at the people below until he is ultimately shot by his adopted father with a silver bullet.
This movie was a major disappointment but it is not the fault of the actors who all gave convincing enough performances, nor the special effects crew which make a decent effort for the time that the movie was made. Its the script that lets this movie down the most in my opinion. The movie focuses too much with events at the start which in all fairness could have been explained in 20 seconds by a narrator at the beginning instead of the good 40 minutes it took.
30 minutes through this movie I had to double check if I was watching a movie about Werewolves or some shit period drama about a load of non events and rich people bullying poor ones by locking them in Dungeons.
Although the image of Oliver Reed portraying the Wolf will always be an enduring one and will forever be immortalized by action figures and posters, the movie it self will always be a let down no matter who views it. A few years later Hammer made a much better effort with The Legend of the Werewolf which I would recommend instead of this one if you fancy watching a Hammer Werewolf movie.
Laters and beware the moon...
