Werewolf News

Through a quirk of timing and the 25th anniversary of its Japanese release (on April 21, 2001), I am covering Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust on April Fools’ Day, which coincides with this year’s Pink Moon. But fear not, fellow lycanthrope fans. I have no intention of joking about abandoning werewolf movies and switching over to vampires full-time. Angela would shut this site down before she let that happen.

Compared to 1985’s Vampire Hunter D, which I covered back in December, Bloodlust is a more lushly animated affair, and it makes better use of the werewolf that shows up in it, even going so far as to give him a name and humanoid form. He doesn’t enter the picture right away, though. First there’s a prologue set in a town with a cross on every roof, a precaution that offers little protection when an infernal carriage passes through.

The metal crosses get twisted, water freezes, flowers wilt, and a mirror cracks as a powerful vampire — identified as Meier Link — sets his sights on beautiful maiden Charlotte Elbourne and whisks her away, prompting her wealthy father to summon Dunpeal Hunter D, who is described as being “at war with himself, feared by all, tortured and alone.” Well, alone if you don’t count his chatty left hand, who fills in many of the gaps in dialogue in the English dub. (At one point, it makes a crack about “the sound of one hand yapping.”)

Also put on the job are the Marcus Brothers, who tool around in a fortified locomotive engine and are accompanied by female bounty hunter Leila, who has a personal vendetta against bloodsuckers, so naturally she’s got it in for their competition as well. After forcing Meier Link to abandon his well-concealed “resting house,” D and the other hunters track his carriage to the Barbarois, which is said to be “full of lunatics and monsters.” That’s where werewolf Mashiro comes in since he and two other night creatures are tasked with protecting Meier’s carriage as it lights out for the Castle of Chaythe, home of Carmilla, the infamous “Bloody Countess.”

As one might expect, Mashiro is a formidable foe, shredding one of the Marcuses when he assumes lupine form, which strangely enough has a gigantic mouth in his abdomen. He also chooses to stay behind to deal with D while Meier and Charlotte complete the journey to the castle, but alas, Mashiro proves to be no match for the ageless, deathless half-human half-vampire. Still, he puts up a good fight, at least when director Yoshiko Kawajiri deigns to show it. We’re kinda cheated out of Mashiro’s climatic clash with D, but that doesn’t surprise me in the least. The werewolves always get short shrift in these stories.

While Paul Naschy had introduced his signature werewolf character Waldemar Daninsky in 1968’s La marca del Hombre Lobo — inexplicably released in the US as Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror — and included him in the monster menagerie Los monstruous del terror a.k.a. Assignment Terror in 1970, he really got into the lycanthrope groove with 1971’s La noche de Walpurgis. That went out variously as Werewolf Shadow and The Werewolf Versus the Vampire Woman, with the latter title the one chosen by Vinegar Syndrome when they released their 4K restoration in a package that includes three different cuts.

The one that gets the full UHD treatment is the 87-minute International Export Version, which is the shortest of the three and features the English dub alongside the original Spanish language track. This is also referred to as the “Nude” version since it includes shots of female nudity that had to be trimmed out of the domestic release to appease local censors. Accordingly, the “Clothed” version included on one of the Blu-rays has some extra scenes to pad out the running time to 94 minutes, and the Integral Version, which combines all of the available elements together, is 95 minutes. Both are in Spanish with optional English subtitles.

I provided a succinct plot summary of The Werewolf Versus the Vampire Woman when I did my first Daninsky round-up in 2012, so I won’t repeat myself here. I would, however, like to note the modern references sprinkled throughout, such as the ones to “the space age” and James Bond. Then there’s the fact that the main exposition scene is delivered in a discotheque where grad student Elvira (Gaby Fuchs) tells her policeman boyfriend Marcel (Andrés Resino) why she and her friend Genevieve (Barbara Capell) are researching the notorious Countess Wandesa (Patty Shepherd). Marcel then disappears for a long stretch while Elvira and Genevieve make the acquaintance of reclusive werewolf Waldemar, who was revived in the opening scene when a skeptical pathologist removed the silver bullets from his chest, an operation that naturally had to occur during a full moon.

That is one of many plot contrivances built into the script by Naschy and co-writer Hans Munkel, but director León Klimovsky (making his first of many films with the star) compensates by ladling on the style and atmosphere. It may seem like an obvious choice to shoot all of the scenes with vampires in slow motion to give them an otherworldly feel, but it’s effective nonetheless. And while the film teases the imminent arrival of Satan, who is being summoned by the countess when Waldemar intervenes, the fact that he’s only seen in shadow means audiences had to wait for Naschy to portray the horned one. He got his chance soon enough, in 1973’s Vengeance of the Zombies. “But wait,” you say. “What does Satan have to do with zombies?” “Exactly,” I reply. “Exactly.”

Three years before famed Mexican wrestlers Santo and Blue Demon tangled with Dracula and the Wolf Man, they teamed up to fight a whole array of supernatural creatures. In 1970’s Santo el enmascarado de plata y Blue Demon contra los monstruos, they not only have to contend with El Vampiro (a generic one) and El Hombre Lobo, but also La Momia, El Ciclope, and Franquestain (yes, that’s how they spell it). All are under the sway of mad scientist Dr. Bruno Halder (Carlos Ancira, who gets the “special appearance by” credit), who died as a result of his previous run-in with the meddling masked duo, but is brought back to life by his hunchback assistant Waldo so he can take his revenge on them and his brother Otto (Jorge Rado), a more respectable scientist, and his niece Gloria (Hedy Blue), who so happens to be Santo’s main squeeze. With all this backstory, it seems like this movie should be a sequel to an earlier one, but while it was Santo and Blue Demon’s second screen collaboration (the first was 1966’s Blue Demon vs. el poder satánico, in which Santo has a brief cameo), it has no continuity with either of their respective filmographies.

And that’s just as well with a film like this, where the emphasis is intended to be on the action as opposed to how it fits into a grander narrative. It even opens with back-to-back tag-team matches, neither of which has any bearing on the plot, but at least the second one involves Blue Demon and his partner. (The first is a women’s wrestling match, which includes awkward inserts of Santo supposedly observing it with interest.) Next comes Dr. Halder’s funeral, which is witnessed by Waldo and a quarter of green-faced zombies, who immediately make off with the body. Then Blue Demon takes off on a vacation, but before he can get far in his red convertible, he sees Waldo and the zombies (all bearing torches, so I guess they’re not afraid of them, although later they are) transporting a body by cart and follows them to Dr. Halder’s castle, where his secret laboratory is located. While Waldo sets about reviving his master, a little alien guy with an exposed brain saunters in, a bit of unexplained weirdness that remains inexplicable.

Anyway, Blue Demon arrives on the scene just in time to witness Dr. Halder’s resurrection, but lets a zombie sneak up on him and knock him out, leaving him at the doctor’s mercy. “We meet again, Demon,” he gloats. “Saint and you destroyed by life. But the day I died I swore I would get my revenge.” To accomplish this, he makes an evil duplicate of Blue Demon and sends him out to kill Santo, who happens to be in the area, cruising in his silver convertible with Gloria, who is abducted when they’re ambushed. Luckily, Santo turns the tables and the car Blue Demon and the zombies are in goes over a cliff and explodes, but Blue Demon crawls from the wreckage, on fire but somehow unscathed. (Seems he and the zombies are invulnerable.) It’s at this point that the mad doc brings out the big guns, collecting monsters so they can be placed under his control and the promised monsters melees can commence in earnest. But first, some random mayhem!

El Hombre Lobo is the first out of the gate, invading the home of a villager and his wife and ripping their throats out, then chasing their son, played by Raúl Martínez Solares Jr., whose prominent billing in spite of his nothing role can be attributed to the fact that the film’s director is Gilberto Martínez Solares, and its cinematographer, his brother Raúl, is the boy’s father. Meanwhile, El Ciclope (who is treated like he’s an ersatz gill man) kills a fisherman, Franquestain murders a necking couple and stomps on the boy’s face for good measure, and El Vampiro puts the bite on the first of his two brides-to-be. The balance of the film is spent with Santo dealing with the monster menaces while protecting Otto and Gloria to the best of his abilities. This includes accepting a challenge from El Vampiro, who masks up for their bout, which prevents him from utilizing his signature move of going for his opponent’s throat. There’s also a lengthy sequence where Santo takes Otto and Gloria out to dinner, where they witness a four-and-a-half-minute dance number, followed by a musical number mercifully cut short by the sudden arrival of Blue Demon and his posse, which clears the joint out in a hurry and demonstrates Santo’s ineffectiveness as a bodyguard. What’s left, then, is for Santo to tail them back to Dr. Halder’s castle, awaken the real Blue Demon, and destroy the evildoers. All in a day’s work for the man in the silver mask.

Considering Charles Band named his production company Full Moon, it’s curious that he has largely shied away from making werewolf movies. One of the few exceptions (along with 1990’s Meridian, which he directed himself) is 1998’s Werewolf Reborn!, produced as part of Full Moon’s abortive “Filmonsters!” series. Slated to appear alongside stories about Dracula and the Mummy, Werewolf Reborn! and Frankenstein Reborn! were the only two to make it across the finish line, and since they run about 45 minutes each, Band cut his losses and packaged them together as Frankenstein & the Werewolf Reborn! We are only concerned with the latter rebirth, though.

Werewolf Reborn! has an evocative opening, culminating in a backlit wolf man howling at the moon, but it gets bogged down in the travails of a teenage girl sent to a backwards town in Eastern Europe (the country isn’t specified, but the film was short in Romania) to stay with her uncle while her parents are tied up with diplomatic duties in Geneva. Put out when she isn’t met at the train station, Eleanore (Ashley Tesoro) gets a frosty reception from the clerk and, given no other options, has to walk five miles to her uncle’s crumbling mansion, outside of which she is accosted by a gypsy boy and his grandmother, who give her a message for her uncle. Uncle Peter (Robin Downes, who gets the “introducing” credit) immediately tries to send her away, but opts for locking her in her room while he waits for the full moon to rise and the change to come over him.

The resourceful Eleanore takes the door off its hinges so she can snoop around and read the note from the gypsies (which is naturally in rhyme), but misses her uncle as he’s out in the woods being hunted by the villagers, one of whom falls prey to his blood lust, and one of whom shoots him. The next morning, when he limps home, Eleanore is stunned by his fast-healing wounds and listens to his story of the time he was bitten three months earlier by what the gypsies call “the wolf that walks like a man.” Overheard by the official Inspector Krol (Len Lesser, by far the most experienced actor in the cast), Peter is arrested and locked up, but his pleas fall on deaf ears. “Bars will hold you, bullets will kill you, and the rope with hang you,” Krol boasts, but we know better.

To make a long story short — or a short story even shorter — Eleanore is given a gun loaded with silver bullets by the gypsies and Peter breaks out of jail when night falls, shrugging off the ordinary bullets Krol and his men pelt him with. When he confronts his niece at the mansion, Tesoro does some of the worst “scared” acting I’ve ever seen, and Eleanore eventually shoots her uncle, who undergoes a bad morphing effect to return to human form in time to deliver his parting words. “This was my destiny,” he says. “To be a figure of wonder and terror, and to die. Do not cry. Do not be said for me.” No one is.

According to its opening title screen, 1985’s Vampire Hunter D “takes place in the distant future where mutants and demons slither through a world of darkness.” It is a time ruled over by the Nobility, a race of vampires descended from Dracula himself, though he is never named outright. (Most often he is referred to as their “Sacred Ancestor.”) In addition to the mutants they hold sway over, the Nobility also keeps werewolves at their beck and call, but apart from two blink-and-you’ll-miss-them moments, they aren’t called on to do much here, which is a shame because they look and behave quite ferocious.

The plot of Vampire Hunter D, culled from the first of a series of novels by Hideyuki Kikuchi, concerns a human named Doris Lang who is targeted by the local vampire Noble. She seems capable enough since she’s introduced hunting and killing a dinosaur with her laser rifle, but then she’s beset by a werewolf who removes the cross hanging around her neck (and then makes off with her cybernetic horse in its maw) so she can be bitten by its master, the 10,000-year-old Count Magnus Lee, who has decided to claim her as his latest bride. As the daughter of a Werewolf Hunter (deceased), Doris can handle herself well enough — and she has a way with a whip — but she’ll require outside help to escape the Count’s clutches.

Enter the title character, who appears riding through a post-apocalyptic wasteland on his own mechanical steed, identified as a DL4 model cyborg by Doris’s younger brother Dan. A man of few words who lets his actions speak for him, D agrees to protect Doris, but doesn’t immediately let on that he’s a dhampir, meaning he’s the product of a vampire father and human mother. This explains his quick-healing powers when he goes up against the Count’s haughty daughter Larmica and her pet mutant Rei. Their approach to Doris and Dan’s farmhouse is preceded by a werewolf tearing a protective cross out of the ground and destroying it, but unfortunately it disappears right after performing this act. We are even denied the spectacle of D facing off with it, which is decidedly a missed opportunity.

The balance of the film finds Doris being kidnapped and rescued, Dan being kidnapped and rescued, and Doris being kidnapped and rescued again. All the while, D fights a golem, a phantom jaguar, and the infamous Midwich Medusas, along with his own vampiric instincts. As expected from a Japanese animated film of this vintage, there is blood and viscera galore, as well as a gratuitous shower scene, and a talking hand that taunts D every step of the way for good measure. (Naturally, it is his left.) Fifteen years after riding off into the sunset, D returned to movie screens in 2000’s Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, which also has a werewolf in it, apparently. I haven’t seen that since it showed up in US cinemas the following year, though, so I guess I’m due for a refresher.

This month’s Full Moon Feature is one I’m not going to dwell too long on because the wolfman content is minimal — and ultimately toothless. A product of the post-Roger Corman New World Pictures, 1985’s Transylvania 6-5000 is of a piece with the company’s previous PG-rated horror comedies The Private Eyes (1980) and Saturday the 14th (1981), which were similarly anemic in the horror and comedy departments. It is also reminiscent of the following year’s Haunted Honeymoon, which features its own werewolf, but is more competently put together by co-writer/director Gene Wilder.

In the case of Transylvania 6-5000, the principal architect is writer/director Rudy De Luca, also a frequent collaborator of Mel Brooks, making his feature directing debut and swan song simultaneously. The basic premise is reasonably solid — two mismatched tabloid reporters are dispatched to the title locale to investigate the possible return of Frankenstein’s Monster — but the execution is lacking, as if De Luca shot his first draft and hoped the actors would breathe life into it. And with actors like Jeff Goldblum, Ed Begley Jr., Joseph Bologna, Geena Davis, Norman Fell, Jeffrey Jones, Carol Kane, and Michael Richards on hand, he may have thought that would work. As it stands, though, they can only do so much, and some wind up doing too much to compensate for the threadbare script. (Richards’s physical schtick wears out its welcome the fastest, but he has plenty of competition for the film’s most grating performance.)

Then there’s the matter of the film’s wolfman, the son of a gypsy who tells Goldblum and Begley of a “creature that walks as a man by day, but as the full moon rises, he becomes a wolf. He’s a werewolf.” He also goes by the name Lawrence Malbot Jr. (har har) and is played by Donald Gibb between stints as hulking frat brute Ogre in the Revenge of the Nerds movies. While he’s certainly hairy enough, Lawrence Jr. takes forever to show his furry face, and the mundane explanation for his condition — hypertrichosis as opposed to lycanthropy — is the definition of anticlimactic. When Goldblum moans that he’s wasting his talents (“This is my contribution to journalism. Waiting for a werewolf.”), it’s remarkably easy to sympathize.

Witches and werewolves don’t often mix, but they did in two television projects aimed at younger audiences made seven years apart. First came the Canadian animated special Witch’s Night Out from 1978. The sequel to 1974’s The Gift of Winter, which features a pre-SNL Gilda Radner and Dan Aykroyd in its voice cast, Witch’s Night Out brought Radner back to play a Witch who’s peeved that she doesn’t get to enjoy Halloween like she used to. That changes when the people in her town decide to have a party in her allegedly haunted house, a bash spearheaded by the officious Goodly (co-writer/director John Leach). He’s the sort of guy who, when he decides to throw a party, immediately assigns jobs to all his friends and sits back and lets them do all the work.

Meanwhile, two children named Small and Tender (Tony Molesworth and Naomi Leach) are excited about dressing up as a werewolf and ghost for Halloween, but are dismayed that everybody knows who they are and aren’t scared of them. Before you know it, Small is wishing he was a real wolf man and Tender is wishing she was a real ghost, which is music to the Witch’s ears since she swoops in to grant their wishes. Their babysitter, Bazooey (Gerry Salsberg, another holdover from The Gift of Winter), is aghast, but the Witch assures him that it’s just “harmless amusement” and grants his wish to be the Frankenstein Monster for the night, ignoring the implication in her rhetorical question, “What can go wrong?” Plenty, it turns out.

Due to its brevity, Witch’s Night Out doesn’t give Small, Tender, and Bazooey much time to enjoy their monstrous forms before regret sets in and Small starts whining about wanting to go home. Meanwhile, the Witch’s magic wand winds up in the hands of Malicious and Rotten (Catherine O’Hara and Bob Church), who abuse its power, much like Goodly lets the power go to his head when Nicely (Fiona Reid) encourages him to take charge after they’ve been scared out of the Witch’s house. All is made right again when the Witch recovers her wand and is able to transform everybody in town into what they want to illustrate what Halloween is all about. “Every day we go about our lives in the same old way. But once a year we can be whatever and whoever we please.” Amen.

The transformation of an entire town into a variety of monsters is also the crux of The Midnight Hour, which aired on ABC on November 1, 1985, thus missing when it’s set by one day and for no discernible reason other than the 1st was a Friday. Anyway, the town of Pitchford Cove, Massachusetts, is all set to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the execution of witch Lucinda Cavender by Witchhunter General Nathaniel Grenville, whose descendant Phil (Lee Montgomery) gets caught up in some supernatural shenanigans when he and his high school friends (one of whom is Lucinda’s descendant Melissa, played by Shari Belafonte-Harper) steal some costumes from the local Witchcraft Museum along with a trunk containing a scroll which brings the dead back to life when it’s read in the graveyard. That includes a well-preserved Linda and an extremely shaggy werewolf. Before long, he’s putting the bite on the locals and making more werewolves, and she’s putting the bite on the students gathered at Melissa’s Halloween party, because I guess she came back as a vampire.

Anyway, The Midnight Hour is pretty strong for something that aired on network television 40 years ago. Its supporting cast also features some recognizable faces, including LeVar Burton as another one of Phil’s so-called friends, Kevin McCarthy as the town’s judge and father of one of his other friends, Dick Van Patten as Phil’s father (a dentist), Kurtwood Smith as a police captain whose first line of dialogue is a disdainful “Halloween, my favorite day of the year,” and the voice of Wolfman Jack as the radio DJ who plays Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour” every hour on the hour. Other seasonally appropriate songs on his playlist include Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising” (previously used in An American Werewolf in London), Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs’ “Little Red Riding Hood,” The Guess Who’s “Clap for the Wolfman,” and The Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now.” The movie stops dead in its tracks, though, for a “Thriller”-like dance number for the original song “Get Dead,” sung by Melissa. The most amusing moment in the film, though, comes when the whole town is in an uproar and the first werewolf actually tears a fire hydrant out of the ground. All things considered, he could have done something much worse to it.

When I started this column 14 years ago, I was admittedly a little cavalier when it came to how I went about it. True, most months I stuck to one film, but sometimes I wrote about three or four at once, grouping them thematically — like the time I wrote about the ’80s werewolf comedy boom. (Incidentally, if you’d like to read more detailed thoughts about Teen Wolf, which just marked its 40th anniversary, check out my Crooked Marquee article about it.) Similarly, when I first covered Spanish horror star Paul Naschy and his signature werewolf character, Polish count Waldemar Daninsky, I split up his filmography into The Best and The Rest, saving his more obscure titles for when I could get my paws on them.

Now, thanks to the efforts of boutique labels like Mondo Macabro, Scream Factory, and Vinegar Syndrome, Naschy’s films are getting higher profiles all the time — and released in deluxe editions the likes of which were unheard of when I first encountered them. As I’ve been dutifully acquiring them as they come out, it only makes sense for to double back and go into them in more depth. And first up is 1968’s Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror, which comes to us by way of Kino Lorber’s Kino Cult line.

Originally released as La Marca del Hombre Lobo (“Mark of the Wolf Man”) in Spain and given its nonsensical English title when imported by Sam Sherman’s Independent-International in 1971, Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror opens with two different narrators — one sinister, the other bombastic — who explain how it’s not a Frankenstein picture at all. (“Now, the most frightening Frankenstein story of all,” says the second, “as the ancient werewolf curse brands the family of monster makers as Wolfstein. Wolfstein, the inhuman clan of blood-hungry wolf monsters.”) In between, the titles boast that the film is in 70mm and 3-D, which is true in the sense that it was shot in those formats, but on its initial run it was presented “flat” and almost exclusively at drive-ins, which weren’t equipped to run 70mm prints.

Genre expert Tim Lucas lays out how Independent-International’s subsequent 3-D release was a botch job from the start in a supplement included on the Kino Cult Blu-ray. (He also contributes one of two new critical commentaries.) The upshot is the materials used to make it were already several generations removed from the camera negative, and their deterioration over the past five decades and change is such that the mastering job carried out by the 3-D Film Archive has those flaws baked in. (Sadly, while the 65mm negative is known to exist, it’s located at a film lab in Spain, and its owner won’t let it be scanned, so this is as good as we’re going to get for the foreseeable future.)

As for the film itself, while it served as a good jumping-off point for Naschy (who is surely in the Guinness Book of World Records for most times playing a werewolf in a feature film), he would improve upon the formula in later entries in the series. Most of the elements are already present, though: Waldemar, the reluctant werewolf who seeks an end to his torment. The use of other supernatural beings as antagonists. (In this case, they’re a pair of vampires who purport to have a cure for lycanthropy.) A love interest who throws themselves into Waldemar’s arms and must be the one to kill him so he can be put to rest. True, this is the only one that features gratuitous 3-D shots, but now it’s possible to see them the way they were intended.

Howling in shadows / Living in a lunar spell / He finds his heaven / Spewing from the mouth of Hell

Unlike his fellow hard rocker Alice Cooper, Ozzy Osbourne never starred or made a cameo in a werewolf movie — though he did make a memorable “special appearance” in 1986’s Trick or Treat as an evangelist and moral crusader being interviewed on TV about “rock pornography.” Still, the late singer’s place in the lycanthropic hall of fame is secure thanks to the cover of his 1983 album Bark at the Moon and the accompanying video for the title track, both of which feature Ozzy in shaggy werewolf makeup designed by Greg Cannom, who has his own place in the pantheon courtesy of his work on Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Van Helsing.

While I didn’t see the “Bark at the Moon” music video at the time (MTV never played it when I was watching, and I watched a lot of MTV), I was intrigued by the album cover when a school friend played me the cassette one day and enthusiastically copied it for me. Alas, when my mother heard me playing the tape at home and asked what I was listening to (because it clearly wasn’t “Weird Al” Yankovic or the Ghostbusters soundtrack), she made me erase it, because all she knew about Ozzy Osbourne was one of his songs had inspired one of his fans to commit suicide, and his latest tape was therefore unsuitable for my impressionable ears. It would be years before I heard its like again, by which time Osbourne had become a household name for a different reason.

In the wake of Osbourne’s passing last month, I called up Bark at the Moon on streaming and listened to it for the first time in four decades, and also watched the “Bark at the Moon” video — his first, directed by Mike Mansfield — so I could review it for this very site. Made the same year as Michael Jackson’s Thriller, for which Greg Cannon helped Rick Baker transform the King of Pop into a werecat, “Bark” had a fraction of the budget, but still tries to tell a complete story within the confines of the music-video format. Along with the requisite shots of Osbourne’s band — including guitarist Jake E. Lee and bassist Bob Dailey, who co-wrote the song with him — during the instrumental passages, the video opens with some gothic horror touches, including a repeated shot of a pale-faced man in a black cloak, a group of mourners, and a brief shot of a skull. This is all but a prelude to the star’s entrance, however.

Bursting into a room filled with bubbling liquids in beakers and flasks, Osbourne holds a beaker in one hand and a brain in the other, a maniacal grin on his face. After he downs the concoction, his convulsions frighten his wife, who has him committed to an asylum, where he arrives in a straitjacket on the arms of two orderlies. There he’s put in a padded cell and subjected to electroshock treatments, but they fail to suppress the feral side his formula has unleashed since he flashes his fangs at the camera. There are also cutaways to Osbourne in his full werewolf makeup, but as the video continues, its story gets a little confused.

The confusion starts with the shot of a horse-drawn hearse bearing a black coffin, which Osbourne’s character is revealed to be inside. Standing over the open casket, his veiled wife drops rose petals on his corpse, which instantly appears decayed. Next he’s seen in a hallway with brightly lit doorways he can’t enter, then he’s being pursued through a candlelit basement by the rampaging were-Ozzy. (Talk about your classic split personality.) Before he can be caught, the pale-faced man in the cloak appears, keeping the beast at bay, and before we know it, a formally attired Osbourne is being walked out of the asylum by his doctor, apparently a changed man. Rejoining his wife, Osbourse looks up at the balcony, where the werewolf crouches, howling at him or, to put it another way, barking at the moon. Freeze-frame, fade-out. Rest in beast, Ozzy.

Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête was not the first screen adaptation of Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s story — there are at least two from the silent era that are wholly or partially lost — but the 1946 film set the standard for most that came after. These include Disney’s animated feature and its pointless live-action remake, as well as the French version I covered in 2017. Some notable exceptions are one made in Czechoslovakia in 1978, in which the Beast has a decidedly avian look and a feral attitude to match, and one made in the good old USA in 1962, which boasts solid make-up effects by Jack Pierce, who designed the werewolves in Universal’s Werewolf of London and The Wolf Man a couple decades earlier.

Directed by Edward L. Cahn, best known for such low-budget creature features as Creature with the Atom Brain, The She-Creature, Invasion of the Saucer-Men, and It! The Terror from Beyond Space, 1962’s Beauty and the Beast was his only film in color — and Technicolor to boot. Instead of crediting Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, its screenplay was “suggested by the Ancient Legend,” which is fair considering writers George Bruce and Orville H. Hampton wildly deviate from the source material. In fact, its Beast is entirely blameless when it comes to the curse that causes him to shun his subjects every night from dusk until dawn, making him a subject of gossip since he has his castle cleared out on a nightly basis.

This is the situation encountered by Lady Althea (Joyce Taylor) who’s traveling with her father, the Count of Sardi (Dayton Lummis), to be married to Duke Eduardo (Mark Damon), whose attempts to push her away only strengthen her ardor. Besides, he has other things on his mind, chiefly the suspicions of his uncle, Prince Bruno (Michael Pate), who’d like nothing more than to replace him on the throne. When Bruno’s spy Grimaldi (Walter Burke) starts digging up dirt on the Duke, he and his chancellor, Orsini (Eduard Franz), step up their efforts to find the chamber where the sorcerer who placed the curse on Eduardo was entombed alive. This, incidentally, only comes after Althea and her father are in the picture, a necessity considering she walked in on him in his beastly state her second night in the castle. (You’ve heard of love at first sight? Well, how about fright at first sight?)

Much like Eduardo tries to hide his affliction from the world, Cahn keeps his furry form under wraps at the start, only showing the effects of the transformation on his hands. The second night, Cahn starts on his hands again, but also shows Damon’s face as Pierce transforms him over the course of a handful of dissolves into the Beast, who looks like Lon Chaney Jr.’s shaggier cousin. Considering this came along one year after Oliver Reed’s Leon in The Curse of the Werewolf, it’s disappointing that Damon’s Eduardo is so subdued. He may in fact be the silver screen’s first depressed werewolf, spending all his Beast time in his own dungeon feeling sorry for himself instead of admiring his ample chest hair.