Tony Rivers is a prick. Tremendous head of hair, yes, even as a tender high school student, but a prick nonetheless. The only child of a widower, he is every father’s worst nightmare: the sort of child you just know is going to bring a sheriff to your door, hat in hand, to let you know that your boy isn’t coming home. He’s short-tempered, humorless, rotten, and yet, even in 1957, the sort of asshole who is able to secure the hand of the town’s loveliest young lady. Sure, Tony’s interactions with his main squeeze consist of little more than shouts, accusations, and veiled threats, but he does have a letter jacket and, well, that’s enough to heal the sting of a beating we just know is right around the corner.
When we first meet Tony, he’s in a fistfight. Over what, we aren’t entirely certain, but it seems to be something about Tony not liking to be tapped on the shoulder. Still, Tony, in addition to his athletic prowess, gets good grades and all, so he’s never really in danger of being suspended. But there he is, always ready to pounce, taking everything too far and way too personally. We then see him at several parties, always wanting to play practical jokes on people. You see, he gets off making other people look stupid. Fair enough. But the moment a joke is played on him, he socks the poor sap in the jaw and half kills him. Can he be saved? Likely not, but in order to avoid prison or the gas chamber, therapy is a must. Cue Dr. Brandon.
Absent Tony, Dr. Brandon would easily be the town’s nuttiest nut; a doctor so steeped in the Hippocratic Oath that he thinks nothing of injecting patients with assorted potions without their consent. He’s got ambitions, this one, and he’s quite willing to kill Tony outright if it means he can make the scientific discovery of the age. The discovery, you ask? Not sure, but I think it involves using hypnosis and experimental drugs to reduce man to his primitive state and usher in the Age of the Werewolf. He realizes from the very first session that Tony will end up on a slab, but he needs hard evidence to advance his theories. Lab work will no longer suffice; he must have real world experience! Man at his worst. Fortunately, he has an insufferable bastard already halfway home.
So, after Tony gets three or four injections and a dash of Svengali-like couch work, he’s ready to be unleashed on an unsuspecting public. Within minutes, he’s running through the forest killing his classmates. Necks are slashed, dogs eviscerated, and during school hours, a hot gymnast is devoured like a Sunday meal.
Three murders in three days, and yet the cops know it’s a werewolf they’re after, mainly because the Latino janitor feels it in his bones. Tony makes the mistake of murdering the gymnast with his letter jacket on, so there’s little doubt left as to his fate. It’s a curious turn in the film that no one really regrets having to kill Tony, as he was so utterly loathed well before he started consuming human flesh.
After a good ten minutes of cop-versus-beast, Tony dies. So does the good doctor, for that matter, sparing us a sequel of his plan to generate an army of vampires. But few seem to care. The Tony covered in hair is no different than the clean-shaven Tony, after all, so where’s the tragedy? If anything, the werewolf transformation simply reflected the murderous madman within, and he met his destiny with teeth bared. And that unparalleled coiffe firmly intact.
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