SCREAM OF THE WOLF (1974)

One night a guy runs out of gas on a deserted stretch of highway and is attacked and killed by some kind of beast (we don't see it but we hear it, and see its claws rip through the convertible roof). After other similar attacks, the police assume the culprit is a wolf or some other wild animal, but the weird thing is that the tracks in the dirt at each attack are those of a four-legged wolf, but then become two-legged human, then vanish. The sheriff calls in Peter Graves, a writer and outdoorsy kind of guy, to help investigate. He, in turn, goes to his old friend Clint Walker, a retired big-game hunter, for added help. Their relationship is odd—they used to be good friends, but somewhere along the line, Walker became a kind of wild nature fanatic loner, thinking that society had softened up men too much. For him, hunting is like a religion, though he makes a rather creepy spokesperson for that argument with his unchanging unfriendly grimace and his absolutely humorless stance. Graves still thinks he'd be a helpful ally, but Walker turns him down, even though Graves continues to chat him up on the subject. Graves' girlfriend (Jo Ann Pflug, pictured with Graves) suspects Walker is the killer, and soon she nearly becomes the next victim. It's pretty clear early on that the werewolf aspect of the plot is a red herring, and given the paucity of characters, at least ones that don't get killed off right away, it's too easy to finger the killer. The only pleasure in this film from the classic TV-movie era is Walker's eccentric performance. His character is so weird, you can't imagine that he could really be the killer, but who else is there? I enjoyed seeing Pflug, a 70s B-actress best known as Lt. Dish in the MASH movie, who is surprisingly good here. Otherwise, this is a fairly drab production which builds to a decent if predictable ending. [Amazon Prime]