Cinema: Shock Around the Clock

Far below the dizzying spires of cinematic art (musicals, adult westerns), lower even than the swarming, unswept streets of cinematic commerce (cops-and-robbers films, childish westerns), lies a dank catacomb, for years the lair of wound-up scientists, unwound mummies, vampires, hyperpituitary apes, cat men, spacemen and skirt-chasing tyrannosaurs. Here budgets are low, actors obscure (Bela Lugosi is dead and Boris Karloff has graduated to TV) and taglines visceral: The Man Who Turned to Stone (“Incredible revelations from the blackest annals of medicine!”), Zombies of Mora Tau (“A tide of terror!”), Half Human (“Half-man, half-beast, but ALL MONSTER!”).

Now, into this were-world has slouched a new sort of creature: the cave-chested, pout-lipped, black-jacketed hero of such pictures as Rock All Night (“Some have to dance . . . some have to kill!”), Reform School Girl (“Boy-hungry wildcats gone mad!”). The teen-spleen movies, following the monster epic’s formula of low-budget and low brain-wattage, are packing in the same audiences.

With the eat-’em-ups and the slash-’em-ups proving by good grosses that there is plenty of room at the bottom (said one flabbergasted distributor: “I don’t get it; I can’t even stand to look at the stills”), the next step in low, lowbrow cinema was a marriage of the undead with the underdone: I Was a Teenage Werewolf (Herman Cohen; American-International). Plot synopsis: a mad psychiatrist turns a sensitive adolescent into a hairy, ravening beast. Says 30-year-old Producer Cohen: “I heard that 62% of the movie audience was between 15 and 30, and I knew that the movies that were grossing well were horror or rock-‘n’-roll films. So I decided to combine them with an exploitation title. You don’t need big names.” You don’t need a big bankroll, either; Werewolf cost less than $150,000 to produce, by last week had taken in a monstrous $1,700,000. Another Cohen production, being rushed onto film before other mon-stermakers start blood-and-ducktail thrillers: I Was a Teenage Frankenstein.