Ten Days of Terror!: I Was a Teenage Werewolf

Film: I Was a Teenage Werewolf
Format: Internet video on Fire!

The phrase “I was a teenage ________” has a long and storied history as the punchline of plenty of jokes. It started with I Was a Teenage Werewolf and its companion film I Was a Teenage Frankenstein in 1957. Werewolf was also the movie that launched the career of Michael Landon just before he hit it really big with “Bonanza.” It’s also a movie that was clearly watched over and over by Paddy Chayefsky before he wrote “Altered States.”

There’s not a lot of mystery about what is going to happen here, right? We’re going to have a teenager named Tony Rivers (Landon) who is going to turn into a werewolf. There are going to be a lot of connections to other films (there’s a lot of Rebel Without a Cause in this, for starters) and there’s a lot of werewolf lore that it stays true to the legends and especially to The Wolf Man.

Ten Days of Terror!: I Married a Monster from Outer Space

Film: I Married a Monster from Outer Space
Format: Internet video on Fire!

One of the great science fiction movies of all time is the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers. When a simple little B-movie like that generates some talk, there are bound to be copycats and wannabees. That’s exactly the case with a movie like I Married a Monster from Outers Space. It was as if a group of executives sat around a table and asked, “What if we did Body Snatchers, but with sex?”

Oh, not sex for real. Not in Eisenhower’s America, anyway. Even the married couple implied in the title have separate beds. But calling it “Invasion of the Body Snatchers with sex” isn’t that far off. It’s clearly influenced by the previous film and to some extent by Jack Finney’s original novel. But this has some Mars Needs Women in it to make it different from its obvious inspiration. Oh, there’s going to be a form of body snatching here, but it’s all with the intent to make little alien babies.