company: Clover Productions
and Columbia Pictures
year: 1956
runtime: 79′
director: Fred F. Sears
cast: Steven Ritch, Don Megowan,
Joyce Holden, Eleanore Tanin,
Kim Chamey, Harry Lauter,
Larry J. Blake, Ken Christy
writer: Robert E. Kent
(also as James B. Gordon)
photography: Eddie Linden
producer: Sam Katzman
Order this film from Amazon.com
The Werewolf was released to DVD as part of the two-disc four-film Icons of Horror Collection: Sam Katzman in October of 2007, along with The Giant Claw, Creature With the Atom Brain and Zombies of Mora Tau. The collection is readily available (and at considerable discount) from Amazon.com
There’s a long history of directors who, though relegated to the gutter of B-cinema production, were able to transcend the often egregious financial and material limitations that came with that territory to create unique and impactful films all their own. Exemplary of such directors was Fred F. Sears, a former bit actor whose prominent position in the brutal and breakneck Katzman movie machine would literally prove the death of him. Sears would direct over fifty films for Katzman and distributor Columbia Pictures in just 8 years (from 1949 until his death in November of 1957, with eight of the films released posthumously), an impressive slate of successful genre programmers now long-since forgotten aside, perhaps, from his few diversions into science fiction and horror.
