Shortly after the end of the famous Woodstock music festival, a hippie-hating local (Tige Andrews) goes out to the now-deserted festival grounds and attempts to destroy the stage. Since the stage is still attached to the power lines, he ends up getting electrocuted. He survives, but now, whenever there’s an electrical storm, he turns into a hippie-hating werewolf. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately, depending on how you look at it), the world’s most clean-cut hippie band has shown up in town so that they can say they performed at Woodstock.
The plot of The Werewolf of Woodstock sounds like a comedy, but the movie takes itself fairly seriously. Most of the film’s campiness appears to be unintentional. Producer Dick Clark was able to rope a fairly respectable cast into appearing in this short film. Along with Tige Andrews as the werewolf, Andrew Stevens appears as a member of the band, while Belinda Balaski plays a groupie who gets kidnapped by the werewolf. Michael Parks and Meredith MacRae show up as two big-city cops who are called in to deal with the town’s werewolf problem. I believed that Tige Andrews really did hate the hippies with every fiber of his being, but otherwise, no one seems that invested in their roles.
Is the movie worth watching? It is, just because it’s short and there’s a scene where the werewolf steals a dune buggy. I watched it on a Russian site, though it wasn’t a very good upload. It doesn’t appear that it’s even been released on DVD or Blu-ray. I’m surprised. I would think some company would have released it just for the title alone.
Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Mondays, I will be reviewing CHiPs, which ran on NBC from 1977 to 1983. The entire show is currently streaming on Prime!
This week, a supporting character steps into the spotlight.
Episode 5.17 “Alarmed”
(Dir by Phil Bondelli, originally aired on February 14th, 1982)
While chasing a stolen sports car, Officer Bonnie Clark (Randi Oakes) finds herself stuck behind a van that will simply not stop blocking her pursuit. When the van stops for a red light, Bonnie jumps out of her patrol car to tell the driver of the van to get out of the way. The driver of the van turns out to be Toni (Christina Hart), an old classmate from the Academy. A visibly nervous Toni tells Bonnie that she’s working undercover and then speeds off. Bonnie, suspicious of her former friend, makes some calls and discovers that Toni is no longer with the Highway Patrol. Bonnie thinks that Toni is a part of a car theft ring. Bonnie becomes obsessed with putting Toni in prison.
And when I say obsessed, I mean that Bonnie seems to be positively unhinged about proving that Toni is now a criminal. The way that Bonnie grins while telling her plans to Getraer really makes you wonder if maybe there’s something more to this story than just Bonnie wanting to capture a cop-turned-crook. I mean, I dislike a lot of people who I went to school with but I wouldn’t ever call the cops on them. It bothered me that Bonnie wasn’t even curious as to why Toni had become a criminal. And CHiPs, as a show, wasn’t that interested in it either. To me, though, that’s really the only interesting thing about Toni.
Bonnie joined the Highway Patrol at the start of the third season. This is the first episode in which she’s really had the spotlight and, as I watched, I could kind of understand why it took so long. While she certainly wasn’t helped by the show’s writers, there was still absolutely nothing convincing about Randi Oakes’s performance. She delivered her lines in an excited rush and she seemed to be oddly giddy at times. I would not want Bonnie carrying a gun.
This episode also featured cranky old Simon Oakland as a car security specialist who was trying to create a car that couldn’t be stolen. He was upset that his daughter (Elizabeth Daily) wanted to go into the family business. Ponch helped him see the error of his ways.
Finally, there was an odd scene where Baker and Ponch took two dates to a mud wrestling match. Bonnie tagged along with her date. Bonnie was disgusted by the mud wrestling, calling it degrading. Of course, when Bonnie later arrested Toni, the two of them ended up fighting in a muddy puddle.
“Degrading!” Ponch said before Bonnie pulled both him and Baker into the mud. As Toni was led away in handcuffs, Bonnie laughed and laughed.
The highlight of this episode? Ponch’s bike got damaged and burst into flames while he was pursuing Toni. Luckily, there was a lake nearby. Ponch’s plunge into the water was filmed in slow motion. By the standards of CHiPs, it was actually pretty cool.
As for the rest of the episode, it featured what one would probably want from the show. There were a lot of car chases and not a lot of plot. Hopefully, this was not only the first Bonnie-centric episode but also the last one as well.
