Werewolf Of London

Mariphasas Set To Stun

Werewolf Of London
USA 1935 Directed by Stuart Walker
Universal  Blu Ray Zone B

Continuing my re-watch of classic Universal Monster movies for my blog, I finally catch up to another of my favourites, Werewolf Of London.

Six years before they hit on a werewolf franchise that was a success for them, with the Lon Chaney Jr picture The Wolfman (which I reviewed along with its remake here), Universal attempted to jump start a werewolf franchise with this wonderful gem, Werewolf Of London. Alas, it was nowhere near as successful as their previous five monster movies... Dracula (reviewed here), Frankenstein (reviewed here), The Mummy (reviewed here), The Invisible Man (reviewed here) and Bride Of Frankenstein (reviewed here). It is one of the ones which is well worth a watch, though... and there are a number of reasons for this.

Number one being that this, like The Wolfman which came after it, pretty much reinvented the modern concept of legends surrounding the werewolf and influenced all that follow in much the same way that Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead helped refashion the zombie movie years later. So things like the titular creature changing at moonlight, which is essential to the plot in this one as the main protagonist/antagonist, Dr. Wilfred Glendon as played by Henry Hull, is involved in experiments with creating artificial moonlight which, in turn, brings him into contact with the other lycanthrope, Dr. Yogami, at the opening of the movie.

Another thing this film sorts out for future generations is the idea that werewolvery can be passed through a bite, such as an infection may pass from person to person. Both these elements were, of course, retained for The Wolfman in 1941 although, curiously, there is no shot of the moon in The Wolfman at all. Also, presumably due to a mixture of limitations of the makeup and perhaps the end result not looking scary enough, this might well have been (according to the IMDB, so take this one with a pinch of salt) the first werewolf tale to depict a man/wolf hybrid creature rather than a straight transformation into a wolf (such as Dracula might utilise).

Six years later and The Wolfman would add elements such as the now cinematically forgotten, it seems, idea of a werewolf seeing a pentagram on the palm of the hand of the next person to be his or her victim. It also added the idea that silver in the form of a weapon such as bullets or, in The Wolfman, the silver head of a cane, can be used to kill a werewolf. This last is an element definitely not set in place by Universal here yet as the titular character has as much to fear from the common lead bullet as any other projectile or weapon in the film.

What Werewolf Of London does have in its freshly created set of rules, which certainly didn’t travel to later productions, was the idea that a rare flower that grows only in Tibet and which only blooms in the moonlight can, when an infected human pricks himself with a fresh thorn, fend off the transformation for one night when the moon is full.

This flower is called the Mariphasa Lupina Lumina and it’s the very reason why Dr. Glendon finds himself in Tibet in the first place... so he can get a sample to bring home with him and prove to himself (and the scientific community at some point in the future) that his new invention is working. And it’s in Tibet that the movie starts.

That is to say... it’s in Tibet where the opening of the movie is supposed to take place. Anybody who loves the old, classic Star Trek show or even the Bill And Ted movies will tell you, of course, that the Tibet depicted here looks remarkably like the Vasquez rocks, famed for their appearance in the Star Trek episode Arena. There’s a wonderful dialogue moment near the start when Glendon is warned by a Tibetan wise man thusly... “You are foolish... but without fools there would be no wisdom”. It almost sounds like something Charlie Chan might say, talking of which...

It’s here in ‘Tibet’ that Dr. Yogami, played by Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu luminary Warner Oland, bites Glendon and curses him with the same affliction as himself. Not speaking in aphorisms... werewolvery. An affliction which causes Yogami to follow Glendon back to London and steal his samples of the Mariphasa Lupina Lumina to stunt his own, hairy murder sprees. Now it’s down to Glendon to try and resist the pull of the moon and stop himself from murdering the one he loves most, which in this case takes the form of his very young wife played by Bride Of Frankenstein’s Valeria Hobson.

In the case of Hull, this was one of the world famous and much in demand stage actor’s big attempts to break into movies... alas, he never did get much of a hold with cinema audiences and, when this was shot, he was 45 years old. Valerie Hobson was only 19 years still and was already playing the wife of 35 year old Colin Clive the same year in Bride Of Frankenstein. In these days of Twitter that’s seen as a big age gap but in those days, when love conquered all, well... what’s a few years between lovers?

A couple of other things worth watching this for... besides the fact that it’s completely entertaining... would be the transition scenes, one of which is both an eye opener and a disappointment at the same time.

There’s a wonderful moment at the end of the Tibetan sequence, where Henry Hull has been fighting the Dr. Yogami incarnation of a werewolf and he’s beaten it off but he’s been bitten on the arm and, for a 1930s movie, there’s quite a lot of visible blood (when you’d expect to see none). As we see a close up of his bloodied arm reaching out for the flower he came for, we transition to the same arm, scarred but not bloody, reaching out for the same flower in his laboratory in London... which is nice stuff.

Now the other transition which I was primarily thinking of is the first time we see Hull transform into a wolfman. These sequences are not nearly done as well as the later ones in The Wolfman even but the first of these is interesting because it’s using what I can only refer to as a travelling matte. Remember, this is 1935 and it may be my own ignorance but I didn’t think they were as adept in those days as we are now at this kind of thing. This involves Hull walking along in mid shot from left to right with the camera moving along with him. However, he passes three columns in the foreground of the shot and, of course, each time he reappears from the right hand side of a column, he has fuller werewolf transformation makeup on his face, courtesy of Jack Pierce. Okay, so it’s clumsy in concept but the moving camera and everything else must surely have made it a stand out shot of it’s era, I suspect.

The other big pull for me in this movie, asides from the wonderful comic relief of the two old landladies in the local pub, Mrs. Moncaster (Zeffie Tilbury) and Mrs. Whack (Ethel Griffies), who each punch the other into unconsciousness when the mood takes them... is the soundtrack by Karl Hajos. It’s never been released commercially, more's the pity, but the whole score was pretty much recycled for the first of the three big budget Universal Flash Gordon serials the following year (with the second and third serials using a lot of the Bride Of Frankenstein score in their musical DNA). And it’s grand hearing anything with this music playing alongside the on screen action... this is just brilliant stuff.

And there you have it. A werewolf movie with a, it has to be said, fairly emotionless actor in the title role but which has a monster who actually welcomes death, wears a flat cap and apologises at the end. It’s not for everyone but Werewolf Of London is certainly my all time favourite werewolf movie and it’s always something I’d recommend to fellow cinema enthusiasts. An essential piece of classic monster cinema, despite the lack of extras on even the latest Blu Ray release.

Penny Dreadful Series 3

Lady And The Vamp

Penny Dreadful Series 3
2016 USA Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Some spoilers.

And so I finally got around to watching Series 3 of Penny Dreadful and I’m happy to say that this third trip, with the surviving characters, is a lot more interesting than I thought it was going to be. At the end of the last season I expressed concerns that the continuation of the show would not be up to the high standards of the previous incarnations due to all the characters splitting up and going their separate ways. However, rather than giving us stand alone episodes of each one, as I’d expected, the majority of the series has each set of characters in scenes all crosscut in the same episodes.

So, as each character has their own adventures we can start to join the dots and see how one part of the story affects another and get a taste of how, when the inevitable reunion of characters happens (to some extent), the people are still very much caught up in one single minded cause. That cause, in this one, being the advent of the ‘end of days’ ushered in by Vanessa Ives (Eva Green) herself. And, I have to say that, beyond my expectations, this one really works well and I enjoyed this third series almost as much as I did the first.

We also have a bevvy of new characters, four of which... Dr. Jekyll, Dracula, Renfield and Dr. Seward... are ripped from the pages of British, gothic literature and a few others who... well, who are not. We have Perdita Weeks as the extremely cool ‘hunter warrioress’ character Catriona Hartdegen... although she’s introduced rather late in the story, almost like the writers are making her ready to become a regular in a fourth series although, as it turns out, a fourth season was not on the cards. We also have Dr. Seward, who has been recast as a lady and who is played by Patti LuPone. She is a problematic character in that she is played by the same actress who played Miss Ives’ witch friend/instructor in Series 2 and, to get around this, the writers have made that former character an ancestor of Dr. Seward. Which means the Vanessa Ives character is obviously a lot older than I’d thought... possibly hundreds of years. I don’t think I realised this when I watched the second season to be honest and, frankly, I'm still not sure how that timeline would work given her relationship with Sir Malcolm. And we have Jessica Barden playing a ‘waif with teeth’ who is rescued from a Victorian ‘torture/snuff’ club by both Billie Piper’s Lily (the Bride of Frankenstein character) and Reeve Carny’s Dorian Grey.

So, yeah, we start off with the various groups split. We have Sir Malcolm, as played by Timothy Dalton, who is about to be brought from his big game hunting in Africa by an Apache who claims to be the spiritual father of Ethan Chandler (aka Lawrence Talbot, the Wolfman)... in an effort to rescue him from his real father (who is played in one episode here by Brian Cox). Meanwhile, Ethan in Texas (as played by the brilliant Josh Hartnett) is rescued from his captors by the leftover witch from last series, played wonderfully by Sarah Greene. They then go on a mission to wreak bloody vengeance on Ethan’s real father but... well, I’m really trying to not get into spoiler territory here. We also have Eva Greene’s Vanessa Ive’s character left on her own in London where, after a period of heavy depression, she makes the acquaintance of the head of the Natural History Museum... but is she also being stalked by a greater menace from her past?

And then we have Victor Frankenstein hooking up with Doctor Jekyll in order to help him perfect a chemical serum which he hopes will relieve mankind of their baser, violent, out of control desires. Of course, we all know where this is going with Jekyll but, alas, it’s another thing which we don’t get to see through to culmination... almost, again, as if the writers were holding it back for a further series. One wonders if the writers knew it would be finished when they started writing this season or if they were as taken aback by the cancellation as the many core fans of the show were.

Finally we have Rory Kinnear’s brilliant reprise as the Frankenstein monster, who is now finally beginning to remember scraps of his former life. There is what is probably a retro but still effective gesture on the part of the writers here where another character from the regular pool, turns out to have memory loss of certain events and, as that character regains it, we find that Frankenstein’s monster and this particular character have a much deeper connection/history than the friendship they have slowly cultivated over the last two seasons. There’s one episode here which features the full, shared history of both characters here and it’s addictive and jaw dropping. Which is just as well, actually, because the Frankenstein monster shares no screen time with any of the other, regular characters in this one except for hiding out of sight of them towards the end of the last episode when... no, if you need to know the rest of that sentence then you need to watch it.

Now, since I knew that this was the last series and had some expectations that the writers knew that too (the last episode does, indeed, finish with the words ‘The End’), I was interested in seeing how one of the regular characters, Miss Ives, would finish up and, I have to say, it wasn’t at all what I expected. I fully expected to see her on her own, with all her friends and colleagues dead by the end of the last episode and she, herself, imprisoned within a straight jacket. This would have been the perfect ending for me here. However, instead of this, admittedly downbeat conclusion to the series, the writers have gone for something less expected and, in my opinion, maybe just a little less interesting but... well, I’m not too disappointed by the end game here. I certainly would have had trouble keeping interest in another series after the final events in this one play out as they have done and it’s an end which certainly, in my opinion, brings things to a sound conclusion... despite the possibilities of new regular characters being an interesting proposition.

And there’s not much more to say about this one, methinks.

Penny Dreadful Series 3 is another slice of moody, twisted gothic literature remade in the new image of the writers and served up with a dark and enhanced flavour, well held together by one of Abel Korzeniowski’s excellent scores. One of the few TV shows I’ve watched over the last year and, if you’re into the kinds of characters and situations explored herein, definitely worth some of your time, I think. 

Penny Dreadful Series 2

Judged Dread

Penny Dreadful Series 2
2015 USA Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Yeah, okay. So this review of
Season 2 will go the ‘spoiler route’.

The second series of Penny Dreadful is something I was especially interested in seeing because, although the little sub-plots involving the Frankenstein monster (played by Rory Kinnear), Dorian Gray (played by Reeve Carny) and Ethan Chandler (as played by Josh Hartnett) all obviously have a much longer course to run, the main story which brings together Chandler, Vanessa Ives (Eva Green), Sir Malcolm Murray (Timothy Dalton), Sembene (Danny Sapani) and Dr. Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway) was pretty much finished with in the first series.

Now I was told that this second season is much stronger than the first but, although there is much to recommend in this one, I found it to be a little less compelling in places. Certainly the pacing, especially in the last few episodes, seems more than a little sluggish when compared to the previous series and although there is the sex, gore and action which helped make the first run so watchable, there seems to be less of this happening in this one and much more plotting and talking. Not that I mind this at all but I did find it a little duller than the first year, if truth be told.

One of the problems I had was the way in which the writers forged a new plot/danger to ensure our heroes stay together, for the most part, to defeat the latest menace together. After a strong opening which sees Miss Ives and Mr. Chandler attacked in a coach by naked witch creatures, we are eventually treated to a whole load of extra back story about Miss Ives which establishes that she is a practitioner of ‘witchery’ and which gives her a new enemy acting as a representative of ‘the devil’ who is already trying to claim her soul. It seems somehow clumsy to me that this is all brought into play only now, when so little of this has been mentioned after the lengthy examination of her back story in the first series. However, it does at least make use of Helen McCrory as Evelyn Poole, reprising her role from the first series and being given a more personal history with Miss Ives.

A couple of things which were pretty predictable in the first season do come to pass in this...

First and foremost of those being Billie Piper reincarnated from her previous dead character to become Lily... the latest iteration for the Bride Of Frankenstein (or at least the Bride Of Frankenstein’s monster... although not quite). With this performance, her character appears to be one thing but, as we learn later in the season, looks can be deceptive and Lily has a far less passive role in the impact of her life on others than you might at first suspect. The real problem with this character though is that although Billie Piper does an amazing job with her (I wouldn’t expect anything less from the lady in question), she does seem to be suffering from Clark Kent/Superman syndrome throughout the whole production. That is to say, in the DC comics involving Superman we are asked, for some strange reason, to assume that when he is wearing glasses, he is somehow disguised from being mistaken for Superman. This makes no sense, of course...

Similarly, in this incarnation as Lily, the previous version of the character, Brona Croft, is not in any way recognised by anyone other than, perhaps, that there is a strong probability that Dorian Gray does and can see something has happened to her. But only Dorian. Why? Because she’s had her hair dyed blonde... um. What? So, for instance, after having picked out dresses for her, when Miss Ives is asked by Frankenstein to meet his ‘cousin’, she doesn’t immediately say... “Oh, I remember you. You were my current love interest’s girlfriend I met outside the theatre in the first season... how come you’re not still dead?” Instead, she has no idea and goes about her business, Lilly’s golden tresses fooling even this cunning character. Um... yeah, okay.... moving on.

I said in the last interview that Ethan Chandler looked like he was well on the way to becoming another staple of Universal Horror after his werewolvery was finally revealed (or rather confirmed) at the end of the last series. I was, in fact, referring to the character that Lon Chaney Jr made famous as The Wolfman... Lawrence Talbot. Well, in this one the connection is tracked down by an interesting, one armed detective character, who himself seems to be a quick, half hearted nod to Lionel Atwill’s character in the 1939 film Son Of Frankenstein. Turns out Ethan’s Chandler’s real name is 'Ethan Lawrence Talbot'... so, yeah, as far as I know, Hartnett’s only the third person to play this role which, for most of film history, was played almost exclusively by Chaney Jr. Josh Hartnett’s role is more developed as a character in this one, where he’s shifted over from being the ‘hired hand’ to being a friend and protector to Miss Ives. He also makes friends with Sembene... a friendship which has tragic results in a much more traditional kind of problematic manifestation for the Lawrence Talbot character.

So yeah, we have intrigue and mayhem and we finally get to see ‘the portrait’ of Dorian Gray. Only a fleeting glimpse but it’s not done too badly although the character is almost something you feel the writers don’t quite know what to do with yet. He’s been pretty much at the periphery of the other character’s lives for two series now but you at least, at the end of this one, get the impression that he’s going to be thrown into the mix more when the next series hits, due to his unholy alliance with Billie Piper’s Bride of Frankenstein character.

All in all, there was enough to keep me interested in continuing to watch this second series and, once again, I really don’t know where they are going to go from here, being that each set of characters seems to have split up and gone to different parts of the world. The first trailer to the third season looks like none of them are together and I just hope that the series manages to find a credible way to reunite them all again at some point and, hopefully, fairly early on in the season... it’s the chemistry of having all these strong actors and actresses integrating with each other and also having to deal with their own subplots, in my opinion, that is one of the main strengths of the show.

Since I don’t have the fancy channels where programmes like this are broadcast, and I certainly don’t want to be left a the mercy of commercial breaks anyway, it looks like I’ll have to wait until near the end of the year before I’ll be able to catch up with Series 3 of Penny Dreadful but, certainly, this previous season was, at the very least, good enough so that I still want to. Although I think they could have done a little more with the creepy little dolls than they managed here.


My review of Series One can be found here.

The Werewolf and the Yeti

Yeti’s Burg

The Werewolf and the Yeti
aka Night Of The Howling Beast
aka La maldición de la bestia
1975 Spain
Directed by Miguel Iglesias
West Minster Fayre Films Ltd 
DVD Region 0

Warning: Big hairy spoilers at the end... 
but it’s not that kind of film and it’s all to be expected anyway.

Depending on your belief as to whether the “lost” 1968 film, The Nights Of The Wolfman, was ever shot or not, The Werewolf And the Yet is either the 7th or 8th in the series of 13 (or 12 or 14 depending on your viewpoint on other movies including this character) films featuring Paul Naschy as his famous werewolf creation, Waldemar Daninsky (aka The Hombre Lobo series) which he made between 1968 and 2004. It’s also one of the few in that series that I’ve not seen before and one I’ve been trying to get a hold of for a long time (as has my supplier, also a Waldemar Daninsky fan).

What I'd completely forgotten when I was watching it, until I did a touch of research for this review, is that one of the reasons it’s been especially difficult to see, in this country in particular, is that it was a victim of the “video nasties” act back in the 1980s. Looking at it now, of course, when so many things shown on popular television are far stronger meat than anything on the menu here and when films like the banned, uncut Zombie Flesh Eaters are readily available nowadays at your local video store (if you can still find a video store standing), one wonders why it was even on the radar as a video nasty in the first place (see my review of a documentary detailing that particularly dark period in the BBFCs evil history here - Video Nasties: The Definitive Guide). Of course, looking at the majority of films on that list, some of which seemed quite tame even by 70s and 80s standards, one could ask oneself the same question of pretty much most of the films that had the misfortune of ending up on that list.

The Werewolf and The Yeti, however, is not a great hidden gem, as it turns out. It’s certainly one of the more competently shot in the series, with some occasional nice designs and transitions...  and with a certain clean, uncluttered look about it... but it’s also less interesting in terms of the Daninsky series as a whole, which is a shame because the setting and plot, such as it is, are something which could have fuelled a really great “hombre lobo” film.

It starts off quite strongly with three snowbound explorers being attacked by the yeti of the title. Our scene then shifts to London, Westminster. And how do the Spanish film-makers further support the obvious visual and tell the audience that this part of the movie is set in England? Well that’s easy isn’t it? You just play Scottish bagpipes over the shot, so people know it’s London. Um. Wait! What?

Anyway, an elderly professor and his beautiful daughter are planning a trip to Tibet to track down the yeti who destroyed the last expedition, so the professor sends for world famous anthropologist and psychologist Waldemar Daninsky, as played by Paul Naschy.

Wait. Hang on!

"Since when is Waldemar Daninsky a world famous anthropologist and psychologist?" you may ask yourself. Well, since they decided to make this movie, I guess? The professor wants Daninsky, not just for these credentials but because he can apparently speak fluent Tibetan.

Of course, right? Whatever...

We’ve often seen Daninsky burst into snatches of Tibetan before, right? Maybe that’s the growling sound he makes whenever he turns into a werewolf because I’m buggered if I can remember a movie where he was a master of such foreign languages.

Moving swiftly on...

After the expedition has started, Daninsky and his guide, who looks like a giant bear, cross eyed version of Peter Lorre on steroids, scout ahead for the professor and his team and the guide promptly vanishes under the snow when he goes mad about being in the valley of the howling devils, or some such. It all happens so fast. Waldemar is alone against the elements but, a minute or so later, he stumbles into some kind of Tibetan temple cavern in a mountain and promptly faints. He is alone with two good looking ladies, guardians of the temple, who nurse him back to health and decide to keep him prisoner as he will be, and I quote, “a good companion and an ardent lover.” Obviously not happy about being the dedicated sex slave of two gorgeous women (because who would be, eh?) he tries to escape, only to stumble across the two of them eating bits of somebody, possibly Daninsky’s former guide, in their dining area... also known as “the floor”. The women promptly turn into she-wolves and bite Waldemar before he escapes, quickly transforming him into the angst ridden werewolf creature we know and love.

Oh hold on a minute!

This is preposterous. How many bloody times do we have to put up with another origin story for this character! We saw him turn into a werewolf back in 1968 in Mark Of The Wolfman (aka Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror) and since then we’ve seen him rebooted and re-bitten afresh with absolutely no reference to his past in almost every movie. What are these writers playing at? He’s Waldemar Daninsky. He is always played by Paul Naschy but... he has a different origin in practically every movie. C’mon guys! Nobody’s memory is that bad! I just don’t get it.

Anyway, while Daninsky has been having his adventures, the main expedition has been set upon by bandits who are lead by a man who is clinging on for life and who is manipulated by the evil scientist woman who has promised to keep him alive through alchemical means derived from her hobby of torturing people. The professor’s daughter is her prisoner, as is Daninsky who has since learned that a special flower that grows only in Tibet, mixed with the blood of a woman who loves him, will cure him of his werewolvery ways (which I think must be the fanboy who is Paul Naschy referencing the Marifasa Lupina flower from my all time favourite werewolf movie, Werewolf Of London, which was Universal’s first attempt at establishing a werewolf myth back in 1935) . All hell soon breaks loose and the beast lurking inside Waldemar’s tortured heart kills all the villains (and pretty much everyone except his main squeeze) before he is suddenly startled by the roaming yeti (finally) from the pre-credits sequence.

In a startling let down of expectations, werewolf and yeti fight... and when I say fight I mean trade a couple of blows before Daninsky bites the yeti on the neck and kills him, right before the girl accidentally finds the flower and, following the instructions she wasn’t in any way present to hear in the scene in which they were revealed, mixes her blood with it and gives it to Waldmemar to eat. Waldemar is cured and the two go off arm in arm into the sunset.

In the snow.

In the snowy, snowy, snow setting sunset in Tibet where they probably won’t make it back alive before freezing to death but, hey ho, you’re not supposed to imagine what comes next after the credits have rolled in these kinds of movies, are you?

The Werewolf And The Yeti is a nice looking entry into the series, to be sure, but ultimately it’s also one of the weaker ones and I wasnt’t all that entertained by the onscreen antics past the opening promises of snowy settings to the werewolvery action. And, big tip for the marketing people? The print I saw of this movie is called The Werewolf And The Yeti. This raises expectations of their being some sizeable “yeti action” in it. However, the time spent with the actual yeti is abominably small - a few seconds at the start of the film and, maybe not quite two minutes right at the end does not constitute the kind of yeti co-starring status I was expecting from your title. So all in all, I would only recommend this one to people who are already fans of this series of films. This is not a good jumping on point (which might explain why it’s so maddeningly hard to get hold of) and I would point people in the direction of something like the much better Dr. Jekyll And The Wolfman for a good one in this series to watch instead.

My review of the book Muchos Gracias Senor Lobo is here

Some of the other films in this series are reviewed by me here...

Assignment Terror
The Beast And The Magic Sword
Fury Of The Wolfman
Howl Of The Devil 

Muchos Gracias Senor Lobo

Paper Naschy

Muchos Gracias Senor Lobo
by Thorsten Benzel
Creepy Images 
ISBN: 978-3000393419

This marvellous tome was given to me by “a very good friend” recently for my birthday... because she knew just how much I wanted to read it. Now, while the book isn’t quite what I was expecting it to be, I was so struck by the design and beauty of this limited edition that I really wasn’t overly worried and, as it happens, this proved an absolutely amazing read, in addition to the heady experience of looking over the thousands of beautiful posters, lobby cards, locandinas and foto busta reproductions which make up 99% of the book. It really is one of the three or four most beautiful books I’ve ever owned... right up there with Tim Lucas’ All The Colours Of The Dark (his epic work on director Mario Bava... and I mean epic) and my Taschen book, The Pedro Almodovar Archives (reviewed here).

Now, when I first caught sight of this wonder on the internet, I was labouring under the false impresssion that this book, which has all the text in two languages (one of which is English), was concerned with talking about the films of Paul Naschy... who was perhaps most famous for his Waldemar Daninsky wolfman character which he played on and off for a number of decades. Well this is not strictly true, although, it certainly is one of the most valuable resources on the films of Paul Naschy there is (possibly the most indispensable actually). I don’t think you would find as fine a collection of posters and lobby cards etc as comprehensive as this printed anywhere else. However, the sharper eyed among you may have noticed the subtitle of the book is actually “Paul Naschy Memorabilia” and while the book features all these quite rare and opulent examples of various promotional materials on a film by film basis, it turns out that it is these artefacts from the films themselves, and not the actual films, that are the source of discussion here.

The book is put together by a private collector of Paul Naschy items and, while there is obviously some technical background on the origins of each movie, the main thrust of the information is all to do with the history of each movie as seen by it’s release patterns and paper trail, so to speak.

Curiously, the book only goes up to the 1987 Naschy movie El Aullido Del Diablo (aka Howl Of The Devil, reviewed here), which co-starred the extraordinary Caroline Munro... and then covers some of the other films in a short appendix which also has some amazing poster artwork in it (I ordered a cheap copy of Mystery On Monster Island on DVD after finishing this book because of that appendix). So what would be a typical chapter here would be some bumph about the movie, followed by the curiosities manifest in the different styles of advertising campaign materials in different countries - things like a company logo being printed on the bottom right of a poster identical to another except for the absence of that logo or the fact that one country’s run of lobby cards was printed on a slightly thicker stock but printed offset litho instead of some other process. Some of the most amusing differences from territory to territory are the way in which some countries censor nudity... some will allow it, others will put little stars over ladies’ nipples and yet another went to quite elaborate lengths to “pen and ink” ladies underwear onto some of the actresses. All very strange but interesting.

Now, I’m a graphic designer for print, so I naturally found most of this stuff really fascinating anyway, but the real icing on the cake, and the strength of this book, is that the writer is able to then show you all these things illustrated in full colour with a wonderful (old, decaying book) background which is printed under the text and pictures on every page, presumably chosen to give the photographs of this rare, archival material a bit of 'lift' off the page in contrast. It’s really wonderful stuff and, even if there had been no accompanying text with each section, it would still be one of the most essential purchases going... not just for longstanding fans of Paul Naschy, but for anyone interested in knowing the ins and outs of the way films are marketed in different areas.

This is, untypically, one of my shortest reviews, but that’s because I really have nothing bad to say about this particular volume. The myriad illustrations of brightly coloured movie advertising confections coupled with the sheer enthusiasm and passion of the writer, who has obviously spent many decades putting together this collection of rare and sometimes rescued items, are more than enough to ensure this is a book I shall return to for reference and, well, to just lose myself in the pictures, time and time again. If you are a fan of either Paul Naschy, horror films or movie advertising in particular, I urge you to snap up one of the last copies of this book before it passes you by. An absolutely thrilling work of reference which is an absolutely essential purchase for lovers of film.

And another big thank you to my “extra special friend” who got me the book in the first place.

For some of my Paul Naschy movie reviews, check these links below...

Assignment Terror
http://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/assignment-terror.html

Fury Of The Wolfman
http://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/like-werewolf-scorned.html

The Beast And The Magic Sword
http://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2010/06/werewolf-vs-samurai.html

Howl Of The Devil
http://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/howl-of-devil.html

Attack Of The Werewolves

Hairs and Graces

Attack Of The Werewolves
aka Game of Werewolves 
aka Lobos de Arga
Spain 2011
Directed by Juan Martínez Moreno
Kaleidoscope Region 2

I first became aware of Attack Of The Werewolves about 2 months ago... but it’s only been released over here on DVD for about 2 weeks now. As usual with these kinds of films, it’s gone straight to home video over here and bypassed a cinema release, which is where I would have preferred to go and see it.

When I first read that this was a new Spanish werewolf movie, I immediately assumed this was going to be an homage to the late, great Paul Naschy werewolf movies, which he made about his famous, continuity challenged wolfman character Waldemar Daninsky in 13 films from 1968 to 2004 (I review four of them here, here, here and here). Although the prosthetic make-up on the actors playing the various wolfmen in this movie owes more to the Naschy style and look than it does to ‘the curse of CGI’, it would be true  to say that there’s not that much else that this movie has in common with those earlier Naschy ‘classics’.

In fact, this film turns out to be something I really wasn’t expecting (especially since the UK packaging makes it look more like a dark and sinister horror movie than the marketing in other territories)... it’s a horror comedy... with a lot of the emphasis on the comedy.

Now comedy horror films are nothing new and it’s a testament to how well the two genres mix that they have been around for so long. I think the reason for this is because the horror genre, in particular, is so easy to understand that the rules of the horror film need a little extra to keep the genre alive sometimes. Because audiences understand and read horror texts so well in a cinematic setting, it’s such an easy one to cross pollinate with other genres. That’s why you get horror-westerns and, especially, horror/comedies, right the way back to movies where Universal allowed their once successful back-catalogue horror icons to be used for the blockbuster success that was Bud Abbot And Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein in 1948... which brought three famous actors back to roles they had played earlier for Universal; Lon Chaney Jr as Lawrence Talbot/The Wolfman, Bela Lugosi as Dracula and Glenn Strange as the Frankenstein monster (a part he had played in the previous two Universal outings for this monster). This movie actually did much more to revive Abbot and Costello’s ailing career (and gave them a long second wind) than it did the Universal monsters, to be honest, but it does prove that horror serves the mistress of comedy well when it’s harnessed for this kind of cinema-going experience.

So back to the movie on hand... what’s this fine example of the genre about? Well...

When an unsuccessful writer returns to his childhood village, he doesn’t know that he is invited to be the main course for a werewolf in order to break the curse set on the village by his ancestors 100 years ago. Only his childhood friend, his agent and his trusty and comical pet dog are on hand to help him. There’s not much more you need to know other than that.

Bereft of any really strong female characters, until the end, the movie still managed to keep me totally entertained and even made me laugh (which is kinda hard these days) in a few places. Everybody plays the movie with a straight face but there’s also a curious, almost underplayed attitude in some of the roles which make it even easier to believe the fantastic and mostly comical ‘werewolf shenanigans’ you see on screen.

The main protagonist’s pet dog is the real star of the show and as its antics on screen get more and more Looney Tunes cartoon-like and crazy, you are willing to suspend your disbelief because everyone is buying into their own roles so much. There is hardly ever a sign of ‘tongue-in-cheek’ and the camaraderie of the characters and the way they interact carries the film through completely. There’s even a heroic policeman towards the end of the movie who works surprisingly well and has at least one surprise up his sleeve, which he blatantly states on screen before the movie makers actually spring it on you a little later in the film’s running time.

This one doesn’t skimp on the gory effects either... which is possibly why it didn’t get a cinema release over here (although the DVD carries a 15 rating so they could probably have got away with attracting the teens). It’s not excessively gory and people who are used to watching horror films won’t see anything that will in any way disturb them, but it doesn’t pull back from showing, for instance, a torn throat or a severed arm and the effects of those kinds of injuries. And there’s one instance involving severed fingers (which I don’t want to spoil here... but which was done in a US thriller in 2005 in much the same spirit of hilarity) that will probably have you laughing out loud.

What the director does, very well, is handle these gory sequences and walks the thin line between too much and too little without killing off either the light hearted tone of the overall feel of the movie or harming the sense of peril and danger you get when you are rooting for the main protagonists to survive their ordeal. It’s a well crafted little horror/comdy delight, competently shot, nicely framed and with a pacing that is just about right... with maybe a couple of false stops near the start to set up the characters a little more.

And that’s all I’ve got to say about this one really. A great little genre movie that really needs a bit more mainstream recognition, as I think it’s a film which would be hard for most people not to appreciate. Certainly if you’re a fan of either horror comedy films or werewolf movies, it’s well worth putting this one on your shopping list. It’s no howler.

The Return Of The Vampire

Tesla Foil

The Return Of The Vampire
USA 1944
Directed by Lew Landers
Columbia Region 1

I can’t believe it’s taken me until now to have even heard of this film or get access to it. Thanks to Hypnogoria for bringing it to my attention with a posting of the movie poster.

Made in 1944, just when Universal were getting towards the end of their second wind with their successful box office monsters, The Return Of The Vampire was supposed to be Columbia Pictures direct sequel to the original Tod Browning version of Dracula. However, when Universal did the obvious thing and threatened to sue, Columbia just changed the names of some of the characters, altering what would have been Bela Lugosi’s second shot at Dracula into the more ‘electrical’ sounding Armand Tesla. That being said, he plays him just like Dracula in this, and pretty much in the same costume. It wouldn’t be for another four years before he would actually play Dracula again, this time in comedy monster-mash up Bud Abbot & Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein.

The film starts off in 1918, where a talking and very eloquent wolfman goes to wake his master, Count Tesla, from his sleepy-time coffin. Tesla has already left one person dead in the hands of Dr. Walter Saunders (played by Gilbert Emory) and his assistant Lady Jane Ainsley (played by Frieda Inescort), who both seem to live together in the same house with their respective son and daughter (I’m assuming these two aren’t an actual family unit, due to the son and daughter getting married when they grow up). While the doctor in question reads an interesting book on supernatural lore, ignores his blinded, scientific mind and realises this was a vampire attack, Tesla bites the neck of his little girl, sending her into a coma requiring blood transfusions.

It surprised me a little, not knowing this film was starting on an extended prologue (and since the opening is a good ten or fifteen minutes long) to see the good doctor and Lady Ainsley stake Lugosi’s character through the heart. This breaks the werewolf’s curse from the man called Andreas, who in the intervening years becomes Lady Ainsley’s assistant when the good doctor has died. Lugosi is buried with the stake through his heart and left to his death... but somehow, I knew the movie wouldn’t really be over in a quarter of an hour.

Cut forward to the second World War and an air raid leaves the cemetery where Tesla is buried in turmoil. Two comic, British character actors find Tesla with a stake through his heart and, assuming it’s debris from the bomb, remove it before reburying him in a patch of ground. Of course, once the stake has been removed, Tesla is once more the undead vampire of years ago, ready to take revenge on the family that put him to rest.

Now then. Movie legend in some historical tomes has always been quite quick to say that the first imagery of an undead, or living dead (if you prefer) creature rising from the bowels of the earth is of the zombies in George A Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead. And for many years people have been arguing that the first imagery of undead creatures rising up from the soil is of the more traditional zombie creatures in Hammer’s The Plague Of The Zombies. And for years I have been saying that the first imagery I know of this occurrence is from one of the two Universal Mummy movies made in 1944 (the fifth or sixth in the series), either The Mummy’s Ghost or The Mummy’s Curse (I forget which one). However, since this film, The Return Of The Vampire, was released on January 1st of the same year, I’d have to say that the image of Bela Lugosi’s hands pushing its way out of the earth in this one is, so far, the earliest version of this phenomenon I have seen.

Of course, once Tesla is back in the game, the young child who has grown up (to be played by Nina Foch) is now, once more, under Tesla’s watchful spell. As is Andreas, his rejuvenated werewolf companion (the make-up job on Andreas, which is pretty good, was reused later for The Werewolf, reviewed here). From here on in it’s pretty much a straight remake of Dracula, with a bit of unbelieving police inspector and comedy policemen thrown in for good measure. But you know what? This is a pretty good movie.

I love the Universal monster movies and have found other studio’s films of the time, especially those retreading Dracula, to be quite dull and lifeless in comparison to their Universal counterparts (I might mention the much loved Mark Of The Vampire as being particularly witless and inscrutable in this respect). The only rival they had, for me, are the excellent Val Lewton RKO movies from the same period. This one, however, really is on a par with the best of the Universal monster movies in regards to everything you would want from these films. A bunch of actors taking it seriously, Lugosi reading his lines phonetically (he never really learned the English language and so had to learn all his lines in this fashion... but it kinda works for some of the characters he played), excellent gothic style lighting and a Universal style selection of wrought, pseudo gothic underscore by a composer, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, who I’ve never heard of but would like to know better... he gets those fake Salter & Skinner stings just right!

But it’s also got the background of the second war and various found footage of that in it, plus the bizarre shot of a topless Big Ben I’ve mentioned in one or two reviews before (my theory is a model was built to shoot the clock face from and then it was shot further back than the model had been built for... then re-used as a stock insert by everybody and their dog’s movies) and, as far as I can make out in my research, the first ever shot of a disintegrating vampire, melting exactly the same kind of way that Christopher Lee would do many years later (I’m not counting the original Nosferatu as that’s a different and less graphic kind of effect and target)... which is pretty strong and graphic stuff for the time, actually. I’m wondering if this movie ran into trouble with the censors in this country at the time and had to be judiciously snipped.

And did I mention it’s got a talking werewolf? The screen's first and last?

I guess you have to be of a particular mind set to watch these kinds of movies but I know there are a lot of people out there who, like me, love their Universal Monsters fix. If you’re one of them, then you owe it to yourself to give this film a bit of a watch. It really does stand head and shoulders with other classic Universal vampire movies like Dracula’s Daughter and Son Of Dracula.

And you noted it’s got a talking werewolf, right?

The Werewolf

The Way We Werewolf


The Werewolf USA 1956
Directed by Fred F. Sears
Sony Region 1


Warning: Big, hairy spoilers if you’re 
that worried about it on a title like this.

So here we have the director of such “classics” as Earth Vs The Flying Saucers (it’s in my “to watch” pile people, be warned) and The Giant Claw (reviewed here) directing what is probably a not so classic... and not that fun either, B movie.

I’ve begun to get a little respect for these Sam Katzman produced B movies because, although they’re not always as entertaining in the “so bad they’re good” kinda vein in which I would prefer to be watching them, you have to give them some credit for taking the terrible scripts quite seriously. None of the actors are particularly good in this one and a lot of them are spouting some really terrible 50s nuclear paranoia clichés to boot (you will be saying the lines out loud before the actors get there themselves) but they all seem to be really trying hard to sell this improbable story and make it work. Which has got to be worth something.

Now you may think from the title of this little mini epic that it’s a classic werewolf tale in the Lon Chaney Jr as The Wolfman mould, as did I, but I was wrong. The only thing this bears any resemblance to in the typical Universal template is that The Werewolf in this one is actully quite a tragic figure, more so than Chaney’s Lawrence Talbot character, in fact, because he’s a complete innocent who has been made what he is by the less than sincere intentions of a couple of “questionable” doctor/scientists and he also has a wife and young son who he needs to be mindful of.

Yeah, that’s right, “evil scientists” have made him into a werewolf in this one, not a gypsy curse living on in the bite of another like previous incarnations of this pseudo-myth. In fact, I’m led to believe that this is the first ever, pseudo-science fiction explanation for a werewolf used as a plot point in the long history of werewolf cinema, as opposed to the superstitius wolfbite explanation... so if any of my readers can refute that and let me know about it, I’d be happy to hear from you. This movie is very “50s scientists are evil and meddling in things they don’t understand” in its preoccupations and, as a result, we don’t have any of the full moon stuff happening as a trigger in this one... which means, quite often, the werewolf transformations take place in broad daylight and it does its hunting where we can get a good look at the cheesy make-up (with added drooling saliva content in this one, it has to be said).

Actually, the make-up's not completely terrible. It’s a bit like the kid in The Munsters but with much lighter hair and, since the guy is wearing a crumpled suit throughout the movie, this is what the werewolf is wearing in all its scenes too (I guess it saves on make-up time and costs when only the face and hands have to be “wolfed up good” for his close-ups. Because of the clothing and also the general grey tone of the wolf make-up, the titular character much more resembles Henry Hull’s incarnation of a wolfman in the 1935 film Werewolf Of London (my favourite werewolf movie) than any of the other screen predecessors of this one.

The direction is pretty competent here, nothing to relly complain about... or laugh at. The opening shots where a troubled man walks towards camera while a “poor man’s Rod Serling” voice-over tells us about lycanthropy is actually quite atmospheric and effective to be fair... or at least it would be if that damned lethargic narrative would shut up.

This movie is also interesting in that the film is really not told from the point of view of the werewolf at all, but more from the point of view of the village sheriff and his team. The actor playing the sheriff looks quite a bit like Fred McMurray and so has strong, heroic features with which to deliver his terrible lines and add some conviction to them. Consequently, he spouts rubbish, but it’s rubbish with gravitas and so he’s fairly okay as a likeable but incredibly dumb hero figure. I understand the actor had previously played the burned up land version of the gill-man in The Creature Walks Among Us (the third and final part in the Universal Creature From The Black Lagoon series) and so he probably saw this as a step up from what he was used to... poor guy. He’s actually quite likeable and cuts a fine figure of authority... just a pity he wasn’t doing it for a more upscale production.

The film ends quite abruptly and also quite bitterly for a movie of this type. You won’t go away from this one thinking, “well the police did a good job here” and the movie jumps to the end caption almost too quickly, like they want you to forget the incredibly dark consequences for other characters which will occur from the conclusion you’ve just seen. This is not really a happy ending like you might have hoped for on this one folks... this one’s a bitter pill to swallow.

At the end of the day, I’m not sure if I could recommend this one to anyone except dyed-in-the-wool B-movie fans or those who like werewolf movies. Most people are going to be bored by this one, I suspect... I wasn’t but then again, I love B movies so it’s not a worry for me. Approach this werewolf cautiously and with a certain amount of experience in the field, is what I guess I’m saying. It’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea.