I was quite surprised to see the relatively low rating this movie receives here, and the only explanation I can come up with for that is the likelihood of unrealized expectations. The title leads one to believe that this is going to be a horror movie - I watched it myself as part of a collection of classic Universal werewolf movies (its inclusion in that collection leads to that expectation) and thought that the concept of a female werewolf (there really haven't been many that I can think of) would be an interesting twist to the usual werewolf stories. As it turns out, this isn't a werewolf movie. It's a psychological suspense/thriller type of story about a young woman (played by June Lockhart) who believes she's a werewolf and thinks she's responsible for a series of murders in a local park - and, frankly, if you can let go of the werewolf expectation and rate this movie on its own merits, it's really quite well done.
You do wonder throughout if there is a werewolf, and the identity of the killer was never really clear to me until it was brought out into the open near the end. There are a variety of possibilities; the only thing you can be sure of is that not everything is as clear as it seems to be.
There are a couple of plot holes to this. The police seemed to suggest that the killer would have had to had immense strength to have perpetrated the attacks. Frankly, Martha (Sara Haden) didn't seem to be overly strong. At her confession, Martha also seems to indicate that her killing spree began with the young boy, and yet there were killings before the boy was killed. Given the strange attacks that were happening in this park, it also seemed to me to be passing strange that so many people still hung out there at night! Plot holes aside, though, I thought this was very well done and deserves to be thought more highly of. 8/10
You do wonder throughout if there is a werewolf, and the identity of the killer was never really clear to me until it was brought out into the open near the end. There are a variety of possibilities; the only thing you can be sure of is that not everything is as clear as it seems to be.
There are a couple of plot holes to this. The police seemed to suggest that the killer would have had to had immense strength to have perpetrated the attacks. Frankly, Martha (Sara Haden) didn't seem to be overly strong. At her confession, Martha also seems to indicate that her killing spree began with the young boy, and yet there were killings before the boy was killed. Given the strange attacks that were happening in this park, it also seemed to me to be passing strange that so many people still hung out there at night! Plot holes aside, though, I thought this was very well done and deserves to be thought more highly of. 8/10