(Streamed via Beta Max TV)
Dick Clark produced this inane mess, a TV movie that was broadcast as part of “The Wide World of Mystery”. If you’re expecting to see a werewolf attack the likes of Jimi Hendrix, The Grateful Dead, The Who, and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, forget it. There’s only about ten seconds of actual concert footage (which may or may not have been Woodstock) in the beginning. In fact, the Werewolf attacks the TOWN of Woodstock… and by “TOWN” I mean “the woods”.
After three days of peace, love, and music at Woodstock, everyone goes home, but nobody bothers to tear down the stage. The hippie-hating town drunk gets shitfaced after the festival, wanders onto the stage, and winds up getting electrocuted. The freak accident causes him to turn into a werewolf (!?!?!?!?!) and before long, he is stalking a rock band who have shown up to the abandoned stage just so they can say they “played at Woodstock”. After the wooly werewolf kidnaps their favorite groupie, the band agrees to help the cops lure the loathsome lycanthrope out into the open using the rock n’ roll music the monster despises so much.
The werewolf is shoddy as all get out. It looks just like a Halloween mask you’d see at a five and dime. I guess they tried to do something different with the accepted werewolf lore (he transforms whenever there is an electrical storm rather than a full moon), but the changes are just as dumb as the make-up.
Michael Parks brings his typical offbeat energy to the role of a detective, but honestly, he looks embarrassed to be there. (Can you blame him?) The only other names in the cast are Andrew Stevens as the hotheaded band member who acts like a prick to everybody and Belinda Balaski (who later faced off against werewolves in The Howling) is the groupie who has psychic premonitions.
I was tempted to give this One Star all the way through, but in the third act something so mind-bogglingly awesome happened that I just had to tack on an extra Star. It occurs when the werewolf is being pursued by the authorities and he steals a dune buggy and high tails it out of there. Ive seen a lot of shit in my time but I've never seen a werewolf in a dune buggy before. It doesn’t make up for the awful effects, lethargic pacing, and constant fade-in and fade-outs for TV commercials, but it does make it memorable.
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