President Wolfman (Wild Eye Releasing, NR)

This is the kind of film that would be lots more fun in the company of a bunch of tripping friends.

 

 

President Wolfman, written and directed by Mike Davis, takes the concept of the found footage film to a new level. Instead of shooting original film and constructing a backstory about how it came into his possession, Davis made an entire feature film out of bits and pieces of films in the public domain, stock footage, and the like (and the opening disclaimer is not kidding when is warns that the original films were “of varying quality”). So President Wolfman was literally made in the editing suite, with new dialogue superimposed on the patchwork of recycled visuals to create a story about a U.S. president who suffers from lycanthropy.

If that sounds a lot like Woody Allen’s 1966 What’s Up Tiger Lily?, it is. The key difference is that Allen dubbed over an existing film (the parody Japanese spy film International Secret Police: Key of Keys), whereas Davis cut together a number of existing films (112 of them, according to publicity materials), as well as wrote new dialogue to help carry the story.

The backbone of the film, so to speak, is the truly awful The Werewolf of Washington, which involves a Washington, D.C., reporter (Dean Stockwell) who turns into a werewolf; in President Wolfman, Stockwell’s character becomes the president (upping the ante, so to speak). There’s a second plot about the U.S. contemplating a novel solution to the debt crisis: merging with China. Several other types of stock footage make frequent appearances, including a scary driver’s ed film and a teen beauty pageant; in the film’s primary false note, there’s also a totally gratuitous scene of childbirth, which hearkens back to the days of edusploitation films and fourwalling.

While I admire the cleverness of President Wolfman, I didn’t enjoy watching it all that much, mainly because the jokes did not land nearly as often as they should have. This may be my punishment for watching it stone cold sober, as this is the kind of film that would be lots more fun in the company of a bunch of tripping friends. In fact, I have yet to see a bad movie that can’t be improved by viewing under those circumstances. That’s the secret of the Mystery Science Theatre franchise: Under the right circumstances, a film that is objectively bad becomes subjectively humorous, and what might otherwise be a tedious viewing experience becomes an occasion for bonding, as well as a lot of fun.

So if President Wolfman sounds like something you would enjoy, I would recommend watching it in the company of a group of friends who enjoy bad movies and mind-altering substances. If it’s late on a Friday or Saturday night, so much the better.

Extras on the DVD including a director’s commentary, seven short film and a collections of outtakes a music video (really a sort of trailer), a four-minute “highlight reel,” and trailers. | Sarah Boslaugh