Take the initials for this movie and you get w.o.w. - a fitting coincidence considering that's just the reaction it inspires in 90% of the people you explain it to. The other 10% will just stare at you, saying nothing, jaw slack until they finally blow their own brains out all over your nice clean shirt. It's not a "wow" of excitement and intrigue, like you might say upon hearing that your friend has found a secret lesbian sex tape made by Linnea Quigley and Barbara Crampton back in 1984. No, it's a "wow" of shock and disbelief, like you might say upon hearing that your friend has found a secret lesbian sex tape made by your grandma and Janet Reno last week. Okay, maybe it's not that disturbing, but it should inspire a few good "Why the fuck would they do that?!" moments when you're telling your friends about it after reading this.

Note from Anubis: I know that the Woodstock festival actually took place in Bethel instead of Woodstock (I guess calling the whole thing "Bethel" just didn't have the ring to it that "Woodstock" does...), but the movie never refers to anything here having to do with Bethel. Even in the opening sequence it says "Woodstock, NY". As such, I'm just going to go along with it and say that everything happening here is in Woodstock to prevent confusion.

Whereas most Woodstock movies might start with a focus on the tumultuous times that lead up to the concert's creation, or the music that was played there, or the massive crowds of hippies that came to it, Werewolf of Woodstock opens with a focus on the free love festival's filthy aftermath. Get 500,000 people together who just wanna get wasted and fuck to some groovy tunes, and you know not one of them is going to be thinking about the impact they leave on Mother Earth when all is said and done and their trash has turned miles of green fields into something you'd see along a New Jersey highway. I'd be more concerned about all the drug-addled hippie seed and excrement spilled all over the place mixing with dropped tabs of brown acid and morphing into some kind of melting toxic shit demon like the Golgothan in Dogma! "Peace..... looooove..... braaaaaains!"

One person who isn't feeling the love left behind by the Summer of '69 is Woodstock resident and local curmudgeon Bert. Having finished off his nightly six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon ("1st prize in Drunkitude!") and with his alcohol soaked blood burning with anger sparked by a local newscast on the hippies' polluting ways, Bert takes his head of steam out into the night to see if he can find any flower child stragglers left behind so he can shove his "American Way" up their asses. In case you're not sure, that was indeed a thinly-veiled joke about Bert's redneck desire to engage in homoerotic rape fantasies only made excusable when they involve copious amounts of cheap beer and making yourself the "pitcher"... then dragging your victim to death at the end of a chain behind your pickup truck when your nut has been satisfactorily busted.

In a moment of beer hazed irony, Bert actually kicks over a full garbage can and adds to the pollution he's so riled up about. He also starts to dismantle one of the stages left behind by the festival, but picks the worst possible time to do so, as one of those movie frequenting "freak lightning storms" rolls into the area and Bert gets zorched by a downed power line. Saved by a conveniently placed guy from the electric company (don't get excited, it's not Morgan Freeman, Gene Wilder, or Mel Brooks), Bert wakes up back at home with his face and hands wrapped up like Claude Rains. Meanwhile, a wanna-be rock band makes a trip out to the Woodstock site to videotape themselves performing on one of the stages and record their demo too. All this so they can send their submission in to record labels under the title "Live from Woodstock" while technically not lying... though I'm sure the suits will at some point pick up on the glaring lack of an audience (whether half-a-million or even half-a-dozen) and toss the tapes anyway.

I never caught the name of the band (though I'm not even sure a name was given), but for a handful of hippies there's one guy, David, that's way too high strung and tight-assed to be a flower child. Despite his fringed leather jacket and long hair, he's a total prick. I can understand him bitching about how this Woodstock gimmick will never get them a recording contract, but what I don't get is his constant harassment of Becky, their bass player. If he's not yelling at her about her stupid spiritualist crap he's pissing and moaning about her dog Virgo, what with its four legs, tail, and the way it's always barking instead of just learning how to speak English like the rest of us. Listen you mutts of the world, either learn the language or get out of my country!... which is technically in no way my country, seeing as how half of my ancestors stole it from the various tribes who originally settled here for generations before the "savages" were raped, slaughtered, and diseased almost completely out of existence. Or, in cases like the other half of my personal heritage, some of us were married off to horny Europeans looking for something "exotic" for their bedrooms, leading to severely diluted bloodlines that have more mixed DNA in them than Paris Hilton's twat.

After Virgo runs off (thanks of course to Dickbag Dave), Becks tries to use her flower power to channel the pooch using meditation or the Force or Scanner powers or whatever supernatural mumbo-jumbo she's got going on. She does indeed tap into the flea bag though, and just in time to witness him getting mauled by... Bert... whom that jolt of errant electricity has turned into... a werewolf. Did somebody put lsd on my keyboard again?!

While running through the neighborhood, Dog Bert (wakka wakka!) is almost run over by a police car. Providing us with one of the hallmarks of a truly bad bad movie, when the car's tires squeal uncontrollably as their rubber violently peels out across... here comes the best part... A DIRT ROAD! I've seen dirt roads somehow have the same affect on cars in movies a hundred times over and each time feels just like the first time - as if I'm passing a kidney stone. Not a large kidney stone mind you, just one big enough to cause more emotional scarring than physical. Anyway, in the hopes of getting to cornhole what they think is one last tripped out post-festival hippie, the pigs grab their flashlights and head out into the woods in search of Bert. Officer Charlie never makes it out alive. I guess that means his partner Officer Bob will have to take Mrs. Officer Charlie to the church's pancake supper now.

According to the police report Bob filed after the attack, he swears up and down that Charlie's killer was some whacked out weirdo with long hair and a beard. Based on the regular reports he apparently gets from the town barber (not my joke, it's actually in the movie!), police Lieutenant Martino says there's no one in the area that fits the "long hair and a beard" description. Hence, the killer must be a Woodstock holdover... possibly one of those hippies that tweaked from bad acid and ran off to live the rest of their psychotically deranged lives as local legends eating livestock and little kids that go truant from Sunday school! Lt. Martino's not on this case alone though, because he's got backup from officers Kendy and Moody: a pair of pigs visiting from the LAPD (neither of which are very receptive to Martino's offers of homemade chili) who were there for Woodstock to observe any "special youth" and better understand hippie music festivals in case any of them break out on their coast. You can believe they're from California too, because unlike the rest of the cast, people would actually want to fuck them.

Bert wakes up the next morning back in bad (somehow re-bandaged) and even more cranky and brimming with hippie hate than before. As for our wanna-be rockstars, they spent the night fixing up an abandoned farmhouse to squat in while in town, and being the only "non-residents" in town with excess hair, are immediately singled out by the Mayberry 5-0. When the fuzz realize that the same thing that killed Officer Charlie also killed Becky's dog, the hippies are immediately relieved of any suspicion of wrong-doing. In fact, later that same night, during the area's third freak lightning storm in a row, Becky's boyfriend/bandmate Tom is the next victim of Bert's wild side (whose feet look like they were taken directly from a bad gorilla costume). One of the funny things about this movie (just to add to the already swelling list) is the way it's almost like the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Not in that it's disturbing or grotesquely artistic in any way, but in that all of the brutality and gore are implied rather than shown... only in this case the graphic violence isn't so much implied as it is described after the fact. Why's this funny? In TCM, you only saw small hints of actual violence while your brain filled in the really bad stuff itself. In WoW, Bert just jumps on people and knocks them to the ground before running off, but the way his victims are described by Lt. Martino afterwards, you'd think they'd had too much moonshine and tried to fuck a running combine harvester. I don't care how much I try to lie to it, my brain refuses to believe that somebody jumping on another person would leave numerous broken bones and shredded vital organs that look like they'd been through a blender.

Being a lycanthrope but not a necrophiliac, Bert takes Becky back to his abandoned feed mill lair alive rather than turning her inside out with one of his "hyper-instant-exploding-death" jump attacks like he's done with everybody else so far. He may hate hippies, but Bert's canine side will never let him pass up a perfectly good humping leg! The dime store Chewbacca tries to tie Becky up, but her screaming and whimpering about her dead dog convince him otherwise. Elsewhere, it looks like Tom's innards don't explode upon the slightest impact like "the Human Yugo" Officer Charlie, so he wasn't killed when Dog Bert fell on him. He makes it back to their hippie shed and the guys break beatnik code, calling the cops in the hopes of saving the only member of the band keeping them from calling themselves "Sausage Party". Finding Bert's watch discarded in the woods not far from the the scene of his latest attack, Martino tries to have a sit down with the suspect, only to be told by the town doc that Bert hasn't been able to leave his room since the accident, much less go for a moonlit stroll through the woods. Of course Bert's not only considerate enough to quietly leave his bedroom via the window every night after he transforms (and changes out of his pajamas into some clean clothes), but he also doesn't make a sound when sneaking back in at four in the morning to re-bandage himself up and put his pjs back on before slipping into bed... Man, if this is how the physical manifestation of Bert's primal side acts, he's gotta be the most boring guy this side of a chartered accountants' convention.

Kendy comes up with the theory that Bert is turning into a Bigfoot at night due to the severe traumatic electrocution his body went though, citing medical reports that lab rats subjected to the same type of conditions were shown to grow back cellular tissue at an accelerated and often deformed rate with repeated exposure to more electrical currents... much like the frequent night time lightning storms that have been hitting the Woodstock area since Bert's accident. Eventually, the rats in the study became permanently changed even after the electrical currents were stopped, leading us to believe that Bert's on his way to becoming a wolf man permanently. Meanwhile, our small town police lieutenant Martino and his pink shirt make spaghetti sauce... cuz that's what he does when he gets nervous about a case... and in a comical twist, it turns out Moody doesn't like his spaghetti sauce... somebody turn off the DVD before my sides become incurably split and my spleen falls out. Har har... har har...

The next night, Bert and his wife Cora have a domestic dispute when she confronts him about where he's been disappearing to the last few nights and he responds by letting his hairy side out, putting on a clean flannel, punching a hole through their bedroom door, and jumping out of a window. Instead of calling the police under the imminent risk of having her throat torn out or her clean carpets peed on, Cora calls their family physician Dr. Marlow (the poor man's Peter Graves) and he then calls the cops, all very calmly and with little more concern that a slight furrowing of his brow. Dr. M won't be able to meet to police at Bert and Cora's place though, because as soon as he gets off the phone with the piggies, Bert breaks through his office door and proceeds to kill the doc in a hilariously choreographed stunt fight that includes Marlow going head over heels over his desk when Bert throws a stretcher at him, and Bert getting his forehead scratched when Marlow lashes out in self defense with a scalpel. Moody shows up in time to check on Dr. M, then runs off before trying to help the old fart, while Bert heads back to his little feed mill love nest to get intimate with his captive love child. Instead of escaping while her kidnapper lies bleeding to death, Becky's ASPCA hippiness kicks in and she stays to tend to McGruff's flesh wound.

Whereas music is known for more often than not soothing the proverbial savage beast, Moody thinks that this particular beastie will lash out against it, given his hatred for hippies and groovy tunes and children's laughter and such. So, he gets Tom and Dave and their drummer who doesn't warrant his own name (he is a drummer after all) together to perform some of their generic rocking and rolling music at "the old Woodstock stage" to draw the Bert monster out into the open... hey Moody, the movie's supposed to be taking place in '69, shortly after the festival wrapped up. I don't think you can start calling it "the old Woodstock stage" until it's had some time to fall to at least some form of neglect, abandonment, and/or ill-repair. Also, with this scene alone, I'm convinced that the guy playing Moody, Mike Parks (who would later go on to play the character Earl McGraw in FOUR different Tarantino and Rodriguez movies), was doing coke in between shots of this scene. He starts doing "the ski trip nose stroke" every 3 seconds!

The clusterfuck that is this movie's plot has a seizure during the planning scene here too, as Kendy, who first concocted this theory that Bert is some abnormal feral mutation of freak science, suggests that they forge some silver bullets to take the monster down... NOTHING about Bert's condition has gelled with the gypsy legends of werewolves so far beyond Bert turning into a spokesman for Propecia™, and now Miss Scientific Theory thinks that silver bullets are going to be more useful than calling in the National Guard?! Does she really think this podunk pork pen has a big enough annual budget to support precious metal ballistics?! I don't think my hometown police department could even afford enough handcuffs for all of their uniformed officers! Some of them had to make their own homemade handcuffs out of friendship bracelets and those twisty-ties you find on loaves of bread.

The plan to trap Bert fails miserably, do in no small part to the Woodstock PD only having 3 cars and a jeep in their garage (only two of which are actual marked police cruisers), and their only weapon being a tranquilizer gun. The whole thing would be funny if it only involved watching Woodstock's finest fumbling over themselves and watching in stupidity while Bert runs off with ease, but part of the plan includes blaring their police sirens to confuse Bert's sensitive puppy ears. So all we can hear for a full minute and a half is the blaring "WOO! WOO! WOO! WOO!" that nobody likes to hear... well, except for personal injury lawyers. You're better off muting the TV for this part.

Leaving the band on stage without telling them anything about what to do next, the guys just look on as Moody, Martino and the rest drive off to where the lieutenant thinks Bert may have escaped to - Bert apparently used to hide out at the same place as a kid after fights with his dad, likely about how his dad didn't approve of Bert enrolling in ballet classes, or his childhood dream of one day being a lion tamer. Pulling a King Kong (or just using the girl as a human shield), Bert picks up Becks and makes a run for it. What follows is one of the most amazing things I've seen in movie history, as Wolfman Bert and his pet human Becky steal a guy's dune buggy, putting into motion their big chase scene finale as they're pursued by Moody and his Army surplus jeep. Yes, a car chase scene involving a werewolf in a dune buggy. Now this is one for the good "Wow!" column.

Sadly, what should have become an epic automotive game of cat and mouse/cop and wolf instead gets quickly castrated when the screen fades to black for a commercial break, only to come back to a scene of Bert dragging Becky through a local power plant similar to the place they ended The Incredible Melting Man with. For a brief moment there my rating for this flick shot up to a 5 star cacophony of crazy, until the celluloid cock tease showed its true colors and buried my boner head first into the soft soil. Boo. At the electric plant, it looks like Bert's last stand is less King Kong and more Donkey Kong as he makes a brief stop in his ascent so he can throw a random barrel at his pursuers. While Moody plays hero and continues after Bert on foot with the tranq gun in tow, Martino stays ground level and tries to run a diversion... with his siren. Again with the sirens?! What is the old guy's obsession with the fucking sirens?!

Just when you think that the actress playing her might have abandoned the production early to save her career, Kendy shows up at the last minute with her lauded silver bullet. Bert separates Moody from his tranquilizer rifle, then chases him around some exposed girders until Martino snipers the furball with the world's most expensive ammunition this side of Christopher Lee's golden gun. Becky mourns the passing of her new pet, Bert reverts to human form after he hits the pavement (as movie wolfmen and wolfwomen are oft to do), and Cora's now free to start swapping spaghetti sauce recipes with Lt. Martino, the same man who shot her dog/husband. And so ends whatever the Hell it is I just got done watching.

And what a long strange trip it's been. Werewolf of Woodstock was produced by none other than Dick "the walking dead" Clark as an episode for a TV movie series called 'Wide World Mystery'. Beyond the obvious questions of "How could they think this was a good idea?!" or "Where can I get some of the acid the writers were on when they came up with this?!", I fail to see what the mystery is here. Unlike Mr. Clark's rocking new years, the only rock here is the rocks of crack being passed around the set between takes. But hey, that's okay with me! The movie's too stupid to take seriously, but too goofy to really despise. I'm torn between whether I hated this movie for being technically inept and moronic, or whether I loved it for making no damn sense at all and giving us a werewolf that's not only born of something as absurd as an electrocuted redneck, but also has a penchant for throwing barrels at people, changing his clothes before he goes out for a night of marauding, running from the cops in a stolen dune buggy, and giving in to the Beauty and the Beast stereotype of falling in love with Belinda Balaski - who would later go on to be in a flagship flick of the 'wolf subgenre, The Howling. Beyond Bert and his shabby wolfman costume, you've got your throwaway characters (Cora, Dr. Marlow, the nameless drummer), but you've also got Dickhead Dave - who steals his scenes by being a seething a-hole for no reason until he feels bad about Beck's dead dog and just fades into the background for the rest of the movie; Martino and his oddly intriguing "kooky authority figure with a quirky compulsive cooking complex" personality; Becky doing her Fay Wray "inter-species Stockholm Syndrome" thing; and Moody and Kendy - the outsider professionals who are going to solve this wacko case for the backwoods police department before going back to their beat in sunny, civilized, California. Despite most not being what you'd call "fully developed", at least most of the characters had some kind of dimension to them... if not all 3... hyuck hyuck *blart*.

Trust me, I'm as shocked as anybody else that I'm actually touting the characterization in a movie like this. I'm either slipping in my old age, or I'm sailing on the buzz from the Klontinis I had for dinner (that's a Martini made with pureed Klondike bars), but either way this friggin' movie charms the pants off of me the longer I talk about it!

The soundtrack consists almost entirely of generic acid rock music that's actually effective to the scenes it appears in, either in setting the action or just as a wackiness enhancer. Unfortunately, the audio balancing it such shit most of the time that it's drown out by foreground sounds and thus barely audible.

Director John Moffitt didn't do much else in the way of feature length flicks. Most of his career since WoW has revolved around directing stand-up comedy specials, episodes of 'Mr. Show', and last year's Cheech & Chong roast. Good for him. Since much of WoW was shot in the very static and over-used soap opera style, he's better off not trying to make real movies. As much as this flick has implanted itself under my toenails like the little yellow fungus gremlins from the Lamisil ads, it's been for all the wrong reasons. It's a perfect storm of low budgets, nonsensical writing, ham acting, lazy camera work, and undeniably absurd charm. For the longest time you think that it has to be one of the stupidest things you've ever seen, until the dune buggy chase solidifies it: it's been one big joke from the beginning! Either way, it's a once-in-a-lifetime lucky mistake that Moffitt's been better off not trying to replicate.