Dean Stockwell gives a deliciously droll and wired portrayal of Jack Whittier, a hotshot presidential press assistant who gets bitten by a werewolf while on assignment in Budapest, Hungary. Whittier comes back to the United States and begins terrorizing the nation's capitol, turning into a werewolf whenever there's a full moon and bumping off various folks in the immediate area. Writer/director Milton Moses Ginsberg concocts one hell of a strangely engaging and amusing eccentric blend of tacky horror and broad political satire, rather clumsily mixing the disparate elements together into a pretty messy, yet still funny and enjoyable synthesis. Technically, the film is very slipshod, with rough, grainy photography, ragged editing, generic spooky music and the laughably shoddy werewolf make-up leaving something to be desired, but still adding substantially to the picture's singularly screwy charm. Fortunately, the game cast come through with delightfully ripe performances: Biff McGuire as the smarmy Nixonesque president, Clifton James as an oily, huffy attorney general, Thayer David as a ramrod police inspector, June House as the president's desirable hottie daughter, Michael Dunn as quirky mad scientist Dr. Kiss, and James Tolkan as a shady fed in sunglasses are a total blast to watch. Best-ever scene: the werewolf attacks a screaming woman trapped in an overturned phone booth. An authentically offbeat curio.

I don't know specifically whether "The Werewolf of Washington" was intended as a political satire, but it sure comes across as such. It probably helped that the movie was released around the time of Watergate (and at one point, we even get a glimpse of that very building).

The opening voice-over monologue begins with something like "How could it happen here?", before White House press secretary Jack Whittier (Dean Stockwell) explains his predicament. I believe that Upton Sinclair wrote a book called "It Can Happen Here", about the possibility of fascism coming to America. Anyway, after Jack has an affair with the president's daughter, the prez sends him to Hungary - ah, a jab at the Cold War - where he gets bitten by a wolf. When someone warns Jack about the pentagram, he thinks that the person says Pentagon (what aren't those warmongers behind?).

When he arrives back in the states, the president is angry about how the media reports negatively on the current state of affairs, especially since it makes the nation's youth protest things so much; the prez's solution: martial law! If that isn't a rip at the Nixon administration, then I don't know what is! But sure enough, Jack starts seeing the pentagram in people's palms, and...well, you know what happens once there's a full moon.

So even if it was intended as a straightforward horror flick, this certainly elicits a sense of political satire. With comments about the Black Panthers and other stuff, it's just the sort of thing that we need nowadays. I totally recommend it.

This is a sometimes slow-moving, sometimes cheap-looking but always a what- the-HELL-am-I-watching?! kind of a film. Dean Stockwell, who seems to have walked onto the set of "The Wolfman" at films beginning, gets a silver headed walking stick, encounters some weird gypsy types and becomes cursed with lycanthropy. Part werewolf film, part Watergate satire, Stockwell looks pretty cool with his full wolf make-up on and shows a talent for physical comedy as well. The scene where he gets his hand stuck in a bowling ball, whilst the clueless President fails to notice, is hysterical. This really isn't meant to be a thrilling chiller, but the scene with a girl trapped by the werewolf inside of an overturned phone booth is rather tense and well done. Yes, it's cheap, the acting isn't that great (outside of Stockwell's performance) the sets are lousy and everything screams 70S!!! in all of its tacky hideousness (the flowered wallpaper in the heroine's bedroom is by far the scariest thing about this film) but it's not a total loss. Its a sharp, clever and sometimes very black comedy with some nice make-up effects. It's worth seeing for Stockwell's manic performance alone.