Yeah, Michael Landon’s “troubled high school youth”, with a
hair trigger temper and anger control issues, too often in fights just because
others might pat him on the shoulder or maybe look at him the wrong way, is
inflicted with the lycan curse and gets the fur, mouth full of sharp teeth and
fangs, and ferocious ‘tude. When a concerned cop (Barney Phillips) confronts
him humanely and concerned about seeing a shrink, Landon doesn’t want to be
considered some “flip” (he tells his girl that Phillips “spread a little sugar
on it” in regards to how he presented the idea of seeking psych help). But his
quick-to-punch trigger puts him in the office of mad scientist Whit Bissell
(Frankenstein in “I Was a Teenage Frankenstein”), who has this crazed dream of
using chemistry cooked up in his lab to revert man back to his primitive self
so that the world could be “started over”. It is a load of hooey designed to
turn Landon into a werewolf. Bissell, though, convinces as this determined,
driven daffy doc, willing to use Landon, unknowingly correct in his initial
stance against seeing a shrink, as a guinea pig…in fact, because Landon is a “head
case”, Bissell doesn’t feel guilty about performing his experiment on the kid.
Eerily similar dialogue to Frankenstein,
Bissell informs his colleague who has been his assistant for some time that he’s
an accomplice (Dr. Karlton was told this by Bissell as Frankenstein). Bissell
is just a loon. He honestly believes that for progress to be achieved man must
return to their savage beginnings. I could only roll my eyes, to tell you the
truth. That night stroll in the woods where branches snap and bushes move,
noises of something in the dark, as a teenage friend of Landon’s finds himself
hunted…and doomed. Just kind of neat to see Phillips, who I know from Twilight Zone, and Guy Williams, so connected to Zorro and Lost in Space, as plains clothes and uniform cops respectively. The reasoning behind Bissell's handiwork is so ludicrous but I'm easily won over to its "pangs of youth" 50s teenage angst crossed with The Wolf Man. Landon is like a powder keg, so different than he'd be on Bonanza just two years later. Volatile and fated to suffer all the way to the end. Sadly he was motivated to go to Bissell by everyone. Yeah, that did him good, didn't it?
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