When people are savagely killed by an unidentifiable wolf-like animal, Sheriff Bell (Philip Carey) asks John Wetherby (Peter Graves) for help. Unable to catch the beast, Wetherby tries to get his old friend and hunting companion, Byron Douglas (Clint Walker), involved, but Walker is only interested in Wetherby, not in helping on the case.
Producer/director Dan Curtis was responsible for a string of uninspired, genre TV movies (and the laughable theatrical release, Burnt Offerings). The mediocre The Night Stalker was his masterpiece. Scream of the Wolf was not.
Simplistically filmed, and covered in machine-generated fog, the film at least has Peter Graves, who is at least slightly better than everyone else. It also has a story that suggests one outcome early on, and then strolls directly toward it.
However, as an artifact of hidden homosexual filmmaking in the 1970s, it is amusing. Wetherby used to spend a lot of time alone with Douglas, “hunting.” At Douglas’s urging, they also enjoyed arm wrestling. However, Weatherby has turned from his hunting ways, and begun dating a girl. She is nervous around Douglas and doesn’t want Wetherby spending time with him. Douglas has a live-in employee that he met in a bar and then hired after some arm wrestling, but he really wants Wetherby to take up hunting again, and go off with him to South America. He tells Wetherby that he’ll help him track the creature, but only if he arm wrestles him for over a minute, asking him, “Can’t you even hold me for a minute now?”
Presented as straight cinema to a straight world, I wonder who even noticed what is so obvious now.