Reviews

Summer won’t officially be here for another month, but the summer movie season has already been in full swing for the past few weeks. Alas, we won’t be seeing any werewolves at the multiplex this year, but Syfy has our back with Battledogs, which our esteemed webmaster was kind enough to bring to our attention. Sure, it actually premiered back in April, but Syfy is giving fans another chance to check it out on Saturday, June 29, at 3 p.m. In the meantime, I figured it would be worthwhile to run down some of the other werewolf films the channel has seen fit to grace us with over the past decade and change.

It may surprise some to know that back in the Dark Ages, Syfy was the Sci-Fi Channel, and it actually gave Neil Marshall’s Dog Soldiers its US premiere. For those who have been living under a rock for the past 11 years, the film is set in the Scottish highlands, where an Army patrol on a routine training mission finds themselves up against a pack of werewolves (who are, I’m happy to report, almost entirely men in werewolf suits — and pretty good-looking ones at that). Sean Pertwee stars as the squad’s sergeant, who gets eviscerated by one of the beasts early on, leaving private Kevin McKidd in charge. This leads to some conflict with the Special Ops officer they run into (Liam Cunningham), who has a history with McKidd and knows more than he’s letting on about their furry foes. And the same goes for zoologist Emma Cleasby, who picks the soldiers up in her Land Rover and takes them to a remote country house where they hold up for the night.

Marshall may have gone on to bigger (and occasionally better) things like The Descent and Doomsday, but this was his feature film debut and he pulled out all the stops for it. His characters are well-drawn, their dialogue is snappy, the action sequences are exciting (and edited in such a way that you can tell what’s going on), and the special effects are much better than you would probably expect from such a low-budget film. Even given Marshall’s predilection for blowing shit up (which he indulges on a few occasions), I’ll take this over the much more extravagant Underworld films any day. It’s just too bad the proposed sequel has had so much trouble getting off the ground, but I’ll happily lap it up should it ever see the light of day (or night).

Like Dog Soldiers, 2005′s The Beast of Bray Road wasn’t produced by the Sci-Fi Channel (as a matter of fact, The Asylum is the company that holds that dubious distinction), but that is where I got to see it. You know you’re in for something different when you’re watching a werewolf movie and the first words that pop up on the screen are “BASED ON A TRUE STORY.” Thanks to the Asylum connection, my expectations weren’t very high going into The Beast of Bray Road (which is apparently based on actual werewolf sightings that took place in rural Wisconsin), but at least it had the good sense not to take itself too seriously.

Written, directed and edited by Leigh Scott, the film has more than a few parallels with Jaws. For example, star Jeff Denton is the new deputy in town who moved there from the big city for the peace and quiet, with Thomas Downey in the Richard Dreyfuss role as a cryptozoologist working on his Ph.D. who is attracted by internet reports of an unidentified wild beast. (Downey was something of an MVP on the film since he also served as production designer and stunt performer and did the special effects.) There’s even a budget-conscious sheriff who’s more concerned about selling hunting licenses and the tourist trade than hunting down the creature.

Speaking of the beast, it would probably be more frightening if it didn’t look like a guy wearing a collection of throw rugs, which makes it doubly confusing why the director would show it so fully and so early in the film. He also gives the new deputy a seemingly pointless love interest in local roadhouse owner Sarah Lieving (who could probably use a bouncer like Patrick Swayze), which I suppose is meant to heighten the drama at the climax, but it ends up seeming as random as most every other element in the film. Still, if all you’re looking for is a cheesy werewolf movie, you could probably do a lot worse than this one — and cheesy is definitely the word for it. What else would you expect from a film that is “dedicated to the Great State of Wisconsin”?

Next Up: Syfy goes the hybrid route, and I don’t mean they bought a Prius…

Do not be alarmed by the title of this month’s Full Moon Feature: Orgy of the Dead was made in 1965, so it’s nowhere near as risque at it sounds. It was also written by Edward D. Wood, Jr., based on his own novel, so there’s little chance of anyone finding it at all erotic in spite of the bevy of nearly naked women that are made to dance for the pleasure of Criswell, the Emperor of the Night (and allegedly the audience).

It all starts out innocently enough with a young couple (William Bates and Pat Barrington) driving out to a cemetery because, he being a horror writer, he’s looking for inspiration for one of his extremely popular monster stories. She’s not so keen on the idea, but she does exchange a chaste kiss with him, prompting him to remark, “Your puritan upbringing holds you back from my monsters, but it certainly doesn’t hurt your art of kissing.” Soon after, he loses control and crashes the car, which they are thrown clear of. That’s the cue for Criswell to beckon forth the “princes of darkness” — or maybe he says “princess.” It’s really hard to tell. I’m leaning toward the latter because only one darkness-dweller comes forth, the Black Ghoul (Fawn Silver), who gets things started by summoning a Native American girl who died in flame to… dance topless near a flame. This she does for a long time, setting the precedent for all of the acts to follow.

While this is going on, director Stephen C. Apostolof (credited as A.C. Stephen) cuts away to Bates and Barrington as they come to and decide to investigate the music coming from the cemetery. They miss most of the next act, a streetwalker, but they watch in an unconvincing approximation of horror from the treeline as a girl who worshiped gold in life (also Barrington) is put through her paces. Her routine ends with Criswell imploring her two hunky helpers to “Throw gold on her” and “More gold” and “More gold” and “More gold!” It’s only after she gets deposited in a boiling cauldron of gold and emerges looking like she ran afoul of Auric Goldfinger that the two interlopers are caught by a Werewolf (John Andrews) and Mummy (Louis Ojena) and tied up so they can have a better view of the proceedings. Incidentally, when the Mummy speaks his voice is dubbed in such a way that’s oddly muffled, which makes it really strange when he banters with the Werewolf, who only howls and growls. They also stand off to the side for the rest of the picture and seem to get a lot more into it than the other four spectators, who can’t work up the energy to look even slightly enthused to be there.

And it’s hard to blame them, really, since the balance of the picture is taken up by half a dozen mostly interchangeable dance numbers punctuated by the occasional Wood-ism. (My favorite: “A pussycat is born to be whipped.”) Apart from the cat woman, who wears a full-body costume and is whipped throughout her number (a reference to the Ann-Margret vehicle Kitten With a Whip, maybe?), the others can only be distinguished by their outfits (which always disappear during a cutaway — it’s like the filmmakers were specifically prohibited from showing any actual stripping) and maybe a thematic prop or two. (For example, the bride who strangled her husband on their wedding night gets to keep her veil on the whole time.) Finally, the whole shebang comes to an end with the sunrise, which causes the creatures of the night to turn into skeletons (yes, the Werewolf, too), but as Criswell warns, they’ll return with the next full moon. Personally, I think one visit with them is more than enough.

In the wake of Universal’s success with The Wolf Man in 1941, two other studios rushed their own werewolf films into production, but only one of them had significant resources to throw behind it. The one that didn’t was Poverty Row studio Producers Releasing Corporation, which turned out The Mad Monster in record time, releasing it just five months after Larry Talbot first sprouted fur and ravaged the countryside.

Directed by Sam Newfield, a preternaturally prolific filmmaker who cranked ‘em out at the rate of a dozen or more a year at his peak (and whose vast filmography includes such anti-classics as The Terror of Tiny Town, The Monster Maker and I Accuse My Parents), The Mad Monster stars George Zucco as a mad scientist whose theories on blood transfusions between species (which he believes will produce feral, unstoppable soldiers) got him laughed out of academia, forcing him to retreat to the swamp to conduct his unethical experiments in secret. There he injects the blood of a wolf into his slow-witted handyman Petro (Glenn Strange), who becomes a wolf man in a series of lap dissolves, and sets the savage beast on his critics. Well, that’s what Zucco says he’s going to do. Mostly he just lets Strange wander around the foggy swamp aimlessly — all the better to pad out the running time. There’s also a budding romance of sorts between cub reporter Johnny Downs and Zucco’s daughter (Anne Nagel), who believes he’s a great scientist without having any idea what he’s working on. Naturally she has to find out in the most dramatic way possible.

As it’s in the public domain, The Mad Monster has been packaged and repackaged several times over, and can be come by quite cheaply. Budget label Alpha Video has it by itself, but it can also be found in Mill Creek Entertainment’s “Horror Classics” 50-movie pack alongside a number of Newfield’s other PRC cheapies. The best way to see it, though, is with Joel and the Bots from Mystery Science Theater 3000 (it’s in Volume XIV from Shout! Factory). Even if they did tackle it in the show’s first season, when the writers were still working the kinks out, they gave it no quarter.

In comparison, 1942′s The Undying Monster has been treated much more respectfully on home video, but that’s what comes of having a major studio behind you. Produced by Twentieth Century-Fox on a substantially larger budget, the film was given a professional sheen by director John Brahm (who also did the 1944 version of The Lodger and 1945′s Hangover Square, released alongside The Undying Monster in the first “Fox Horror Classics” set) and cinematographer Lucien Ballard, who withhold for as long as possible the revelation that there’s something supernatural afoot at Hammond House.

Set at the turn of the century, The Undying Monster is in fact the dreaded Hammond Monster, which visits its curse upon siblings Heather Angel and John Howard, although they’re a bit blasé about it until it strikes them directly. That’s when Scotland Yard forensics specialist James Ellison and his eccentric assistant Heather Thatcher are brought in. The curious thing is they’re introduced in such a way that it seems like this is but one entry in a series of films featuring the duo, but that is not the case. The other major character is doctor Bramwell Fletcher, who clearly knows what’s going on from the start but is tight-lipped about it until the last minute. For a film that barely tops an hour, that doesn’t leave much time for the monster to do its thing.

When it came time to make House of Dracula in 1945, Universal Pictures must have known its classic monster series was winding down for good. The second film to bring Dracula, the Wolf Man and Frankenstein’s Monster together, it doesn’t appear to be too concerned with plot continuity. There are also coincidences aplenty since Count Dracula (John Carradine) and Lawrence Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.) both arrive at the door of the same blood specialist (Onslow Stevens) without once revealing how they managed to come back to life after being felled by sunlight and a silver bullet, respectively, at the end of House of Frankenstein. This is probably for the best, though, because when screenwriter Edward T. Lowe (who also penned House of Frankenstein) gets around to bringing Frankenstein’s Monster (Glenn Strange) aboard, his explanation for how the monster came to rest in the mud-filled cave beneath the doctor’s house is patently ludicrous. Sometimes it’s best to just leave things unexplained.

Since the film bears his name, it’s fitting that Dracula get the most attention, at least at the start. After being given little more than a glorified cameo in House of Frankenstein, Carradine — here passing himself off as Baron Latos — uses his expanded screen time to exude menace and sexual temptation, particularly when it comes to the doctor’s beautiful assistant (Martha O’Driscoll), who quickly falls under his spell. The same is not the case with the doctor’s less beautiful assistant (Jane Adams), a hunchback who hopes to benefit from his experiments with spore concentrate, which can apparently be used to soften and reshape bones. This comes in handy when the doctor determines that Talbot’s transformations are caused by pressure on his brain, which can be relieved by a simple skull operation, but Dracula requires a different kind of treatment and the doctor soon learns the folly of giving blood transfusions to a vampire. The film also features Lionel Atwill (in one of his final screen appearances) as the local police inspector — the kind of role he could probably play in his sleep by this time.

As with House of Frankstein, the directing chores on House of Dracula were handled by Erle C. Kenton, who made a few more films before jumping to television in the ’50s. And as for Universal’s monsters, this wasn’t quite the end of the road for them since the studio would bring all three back one last time for the 1948 horror comedy Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. In many ways the movies were becoming parodies of themselves anyway, so ending the cycle with an outright spoof was only logical.

Made in 1948 and directed by Charles Barton, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein was the first in a series where the irascible Bud Abbott and his pudgy pal Lou Costello met up with various creatures from Universal’s stable of monsters. Of course, if the studio had known it was going to be such a huge success they probably wouldn’t have stacked the first one so full of monsters. In addition to the Wolf Man and Frankenstein’s Monster (again played by Glenn Strange), the film also features Bela Lugosi’s final appearance as Count Dracula, a role he hadn’t played since the original in 1931. I guess it’s a good thing the cape still fit.

Totally ignoring the fates that had befallen all three of them at the end of House of Dracula (pretty much par for the course for Universal at this point), this film casts Abbott and Costello as railroad baggage handlers who receive a frantic call from Chaney (taking his last turn as the Wolf Man), who phones from London to prevent them from delivering two crates containing the bodies of Dracula and the Monster to a wax museum where they’re to be put on display. They go ahead and deliver them anyway but lose the bodies (that is to say, the bodies get up and walk out on their own volition, which Costello witnesses but Abbott does not), which puts insurance investigator Jane Randolph, who pretends to have a thing for Costello, on the case. Meanwhile, Costello is being played up to by the beautiful Lenore Aubert, who secretly plans to transfer his brain into the body of the Monster at Lugosi’s request. I’ll bet he’s never felt so wanted in all his life.

The first time I saw Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein I wasn’t entirely sold on it despite its reputation as a classic. Maybe that’s because I had only seen the original Dracula, Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein and The Wolf Man at that point, so I didn’t know how much their respective series had already fallen into self-parody by the time this came around. In fact, the argument could be made that this film takes the monsters more seriously than some of the films that preceded it. Not that we believe for one minute that the bumbling Costello is actually in danger of losing his brain, but we believe in the threat that the monsters pose to him (and, to a lesser extent, Abbott). Still, it’s a pity this took the place of a House of the Wolf Man, which surely must have been considered at least in passing. As it was, the Wolf Man would have to wait another six decades to find his home.

Made independently in 2009, House of the Wolf Man was written, produced and directed by Eben McGarr, who shot it in black and white and in the Academy ratio of 1.33:1 for verisimilitude’s sake. He even recruited Ron Chaney, the grandson of Lon Chaney Jr. (which makes him the great-grandson of Lon Chaney), to play the sinister Dr. Bela Reinhardt, who picks a rainy night to invite five strangers to his spooky estate to find out which one will inherit it. They include jock Dustin Fitzsimons and intellectual Sara Raftery (who are fraternal twins), geek Jeremie Loncka, sultry siren Cheryl Rodes, and great white hunter Jim Thalman. They are all greeted by Reinhardt’s creepy servant Barlow (John McGarr, who’s made up to look like Warren Publishing’s Cousin Eerie) and try their best to keep their wits about them — no small feat, all things considered.

Like the films that inspired it, House of the Wolf Man is on the short side, clocking it at 76 minutes, and the first hour or so is more or less the preamble to the monster melee that occurs once Reinhardt reveals his true nature to his guests. “My heir will be chosen by the process of elimination,” he tells them early on and he means that literally. Not even the eleventh-hour intervention of Frankenstein’s Monster (who’s being kept in the basement because of course he is) and Dracula can save them from the Wolf Man’s curse. I only wish the ending of the film didn’t feel so abrupt. A little denouement would have gone a long way.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the earliest known werewolf film, a silent short from 1913 called (creatively enough) The Werewolf, about a Navajo woman who uses her ability to transform into a wolf against the white settlers encroaching upon her people’s lands. Unfortunately, this 18-minute film is considered lost, and little is known about its successor, a French silent feature from 1923 called Le loup-garou. At least 2013 can definitively lay claim to being the 70th anniversary of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, which was released on March 5, 1943, and plays to a certain degree like the world’s first example of fanfiction (albeit one perpetrated by Wolf Man screenwriter Curt Siodmak).

With its Frankenstein series winding down and the Wolf Man as its new breakout character, Universal decided to combine the two into a film that is more Wolf Man than Frankenstein’s Monster and give it to Roy William Neill (who had just taken over its Sherlock Holmes series) to direct. For starters, the story picks up four years after the events of The Wolf Man, with the cursed Lawrence Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.) being revived when his crypt is disturbed by grave robbers. After reverting back to human form far from home, he’s taken to a hospital where his head wound is treated by kindly doctor Patric Knowles (who had previously played Chaney’s romantic rival in The Wolf Man), who knows nothing of his history or his ability to change out of his hospital pajamas and into his Wolf Man get-up (and back again) when the moon is full.

While Knowles is investigating his puzzling new patient’s identity, Chaney escapes from the hospital and seeks out the old gypsy woman from the first movie (Maria Ouspenskaya) and together they search for Dr. Frankenstein, who is said to hold the secrets of life and death. When they reach the town where he lived, though, they are rebuffed by the townspeople and Chaney is chased by a mob after he transforms under the full moon. Eventually Chaney stumbles upon the monster (now played by Bela Lugosi, a full twelve years after he initially refused the role) frozen in a block of ice in the ruins under Frankenstein’s castle, which makes no sense in light of the ending of 1942′s The Ghost of Frankenstein (the previous film in that series), but I’m guessing Siodmak wasn’t too concerned about continuity. That also carries over to the casting of Ilona Massey as Elsa Frankenstein, who has a completely different accent than her predecessor did, and the location of the castle at the bottom of a ravine overlooked by a previously unseen dam. (No points for guessing how the castle ends up getting destroyed.)

Eventually Knowles tracks Chaney down and he, Massey and Ouspenskaya team up (with the apparent blessing of town mayor Lionel Atwill) to try to help him end his cursed existence and rid the world of the monster at the same time, but Knowles changes his mind at the last minute and recharges the creature instead, touching off the monster battle royale the audience has been waiting for since the start of the picture. Audiences must have liked what they saw, too, because they were immediately scheduled for a rematch the following year in House of Frankenstein, which introduces a brand new mad scientist played by Boris Karloff, who claims to be the brother of Dr. Frankenstein’s assistant and who is obsessed with the idea of transplanting the brain of a man into the body of a dog (and probably vice versa). Locked up for 15 years for his crimes against man and canine, Karloff escapes from prison thanks to a freak thunderstorm and, with the aid of soulful hunchback J. Carrol Naish, who wants Karloff to give him a new body, sets about getting revenge on those who put him away.

Soon after their escape they come by a traveling Chamber of Horrors that houses the skeletal remains of Dracula, who is embodied by John Carradine when the stake is removed from his chest, but he barely merits a walk-on. Karloff then moves on to the village of Frankenstein, where he hopes to find the doctor’s records and where Naish falls head over hump in love with gypsy girl Elena Verdugo, who finds it hard to see past his physical deformity. In the meantime, Karloff thaws out Talbot and the monster (Glenn Strange) when he finds them frozen in the glacial ice cavern beneath Castle Frankenstein’s ruins. (Doesn’t every castle have one?) When first seen Talbot is the Wolf Man, but upon thawing out there is a too-quick dissolve to his human form, whereupon he agrees to help Karloff in exchange for a brain transplant that will rid him of his curse. How this is actually supposed to work is never adequately explained, but it turns out Karloff has lots of brain transplants in mind once they reach their final destination of Visaria, where his laboratory is still standing.

Directed by Erle C. Kenton, who previously helmed The Ghost of Frankenstein, and based on a story by Curt Siodmak, House of Frankenstein may be a little overstocked in the monster department, especially as it represents the convergence of three disparate series, but it’s kind of disappointing that we never see all of them active at the same time. That said, I did like some of the details that went into the Wolf Man’s subplot, like the way he thoughtfully removes his shoes and socks before transforming. (No reason to ruin good footwear.) This is also the first film in history where a lycanthrope is felled by a silver bullet, so that’s one more trope for the pile. It may have taken a few entries, but Universal’s monster series eventually established all the rules that future werewolf films would abide by (or subvert, as the case may be).

Next Up: A visit to Dracula’s pad, plus a meeting of monsters and comedians.

For my final Full Moon Feature of the year, I went with what promised to be the werewolf movie event of 2012 — Universal’s Werewolf: The Beast Among Us. Supposedly an offshoot of The Wolfman (although there’s no real connection between them as far as I can tell), the film takes place in a world where the existence of werewolves and other creatures of the night is taken as a given, which saves a lot of time and unnecessary dickering around. It’s also a world with enough of a werewolf problem that it can support teams of professional werewolf hunters, with one particularly colorful crew headed up by top-billed Ed Quinn, whose backstory involves bearing witness to his mother and father getting batted around by an enormous beast when he was a wee lad, but not before having a wolf-headed family heirloom passed on to him.

Twenty-five years later, Quinn and company are summoned to a remote village where they encounter a foe of unusual intelligence and a whole array of potential suspects. They’re also dogged by an overeager doctor’s assistant (Guy Wilson), who has to offer his services three times before Quinn finally relents, over the objection of his preening second-in-command (Adam Croasdell). For his part, Wilson is a constant worry to his gypsy mother (Nia Peeples), sneaking off to meet up with his rich girlfriend (Rachel Katherine DiPillo) — whose trigger-happy father doesn’t exactly approve of him — whenever he isn’t needed by the doctor (Stephen Rea, appearing in his second werewolf movie in one year), who’s grown distressingly accustomed to putting down the survivors of the werewolf’s attacks. (Seems if this isn’t done soon enough, they turn into wurdaleks, although the film never actually bothers to explain what a wurdalek is. All we know is that you don’t want them hanging around.) Steven Bauer rounds out the cast as the boastful huntsman with an eye patch and the one story about how he got it that he trots out in every town they visit.

Given its direct-to-video budget, it’s a wonder Werewolf: The Beast Among Us is as watchable as it is, what with its Renaissance-Fair-crossed-with-the-Old-West costumes and Van Helsing-like weaponry. As for the plot, director Louis Morneau and his co-writers toe the line between painfully generic (pretty much any scene between Wilson and DiPillo is a waste of time) and bizarrely specific (e.g. Rea’s determination to send Wilson off to medical school). They even find a way to tie the whole thing to the winter solstice, which is when we get our most sustained look at the title creature, which goes back and forth between being an entirely digital creation and a stunt man in a suit. It fails to sustain a consistent look, though, which is the most basic thing you can ask for. If there’s a sequel — as the open ending suggests there could be — maybe they’ll manage to hammer that out.

When Spanish horror icon Paul Naschy died on November 30, 2009, at the age of 75, he left behind a legacy of dozens of horror films in which he played all kinds of monsters and heroes — as well as monstrous heroes in the case of the long-running Waldemar Daninsky series. Of the eleven films that are extant (the twelfth, 1968′s Las Noches del Hombre Lobo, was apparently never completed), only a handful have received proper Region 1 releases. That means collectors who want to revel in all of Waldemar’s misadventures have to rely on somewhat more dubious sources to get their fix. That’s certainly the case with 1970′s Los Monstruos del Terror, which is more commonly known as Assignment Terror.

Even though it was intended to be the third film in the series, Naschy is actually sixth-billed in Assignment Terror, but that may be because Waldemar is but one of four monsters in the film, the main plot of which is about aliens from a dying world who occupy the bodies of dead human scientists so they can carry out their plan to kill off all of Earth’s inhabitants. This they do by reviving a dead vampire whose skeleton has been put on display in a carnival sideshow, a werewolf that has been resting peacefully in his family crypt, a mummy whose tomb has heretofore been undisturbed, and Frankenstein’s monster, which was apparently just lying around somewhere.

Heading up the mission, incidentally, is Michael Rennie, who watches everything over closed-circuit TV and dispassionately dishes out punishments to his subordinates whenever they mess things up, which is often enough. Even second-billed Karin Dor is subject to his wrath after she lets Naschy escape for reasons that are never made clear. This time out Naschy has added another wrinkle to the mythology since a werewolf’s killer must not only be a woman who loves him, but she must also be willing to die with him. Alas, we only get to see him transform twice, but Naschy makes the last one count since he gets to play his hairy alter ego for the last 15 minutes of the film.

Naschy wolfs out a few more times in the next film in the series, 1970′s La Furia del Hombre Lobo or The Fury of the Wolfman. This entry turns Waldemar into a professor who is the sole survivor of an expedition to Tibet where he was attacked by a yeti. (He would return there for a rematch in 1975′s The Werewolf and the Yeti, but this time out their fight is left to our imagination.) Believing he has been cursed, Naschy is obviously in the perfect frame of mind to find out that his wife (Pilar Zorrilla) is cheating on him and her lover (Fabián Conde) has tampered with the brakes of his car, causing him to get into what they hope will be a fatal accident. It isn’t, though, and when Naschy reveals his condition to a colleague (Perla Cristal) who used to be his lover, she who wastes no time in making him part of her brain-control experiments.

First Naschy eliminates his wife and her lover, then he attacks some random people we’ve never met before, which baffles both the audience and the police. Even more baffling, though, is the way director José María Zabalza intercuts shots of Naschy wandering around like he’s just out for a stroll (or perhaps waiting to catch a bus) with more energetic scenes from Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror which do not match at all. Eventually the action shifts to Wolfstein Castle, where Cristal is holding Naschy captive, and where she keeps her failed experiments locked up in the dungeon. All Naschy has to do is wait for the next full moon, though, and he’ll make sure the mad scientist gets hers.

Mad science is afoot in 1972′s Dr. Jekyll y el Hombre Lobo as well, but I previously dealt with that in the Full Moon Feature about Other Werewolves on London. And skipping ahead, I’ll also have to skip over 1983′s Le Bestia y la Espada Mágica or The Beast and the Magic Sword, which plops Waldemar Daninksy down in the 16th century and finds him traveling to Japan in search of a cure for his lycanthropy, since that film continues to elude me. As time has shown again and again, though, you can’t keep a good werewolf down, so lucky thirteen years later he was brought back to be the title character in 1996′s Spanish-made Licántropo, which gives him yet another origin story.

This time out, he’s conceived in 1944 by an unwary gypsy (Ester Ponce) and a German officer (Bill Holden, playing a character named Colonel Wolfstein to tie into the first film in the series) who rescues her from a couple of SS thugs in the opening scene but is subsequently stabbed to death by her ungrateful brother. Fifty-two years later, Waldemar has grown up to be a bestselling novelist (of thrillers with lurid titles like The Psychopath) who has a wife and two children — and apparently no idea that he sprouts fur and fangs every full moon and kills people. (If his lycanthropy has lain dormant all that time, there’s no explanation given for why it has suddenly been activated after five decades.)

As far as Waldemar is concerned, he’s merely suffering from periodic chest pains and nightmares, which his comely doctor (Amparo Muñoz) assures him will go away as soon as he stops overworking himself, a view echoed by his lawyer wife (Rosa Fontana). There’s little chance of that happening, though, when a rash of brutal murders breaks out, stumping police inspector Antonio Pica and his green-around-the-gills assistant (Jesús Calle), whose animal attack theory isn’t given much credence. The same goes for pathologist José María Caffarel’s theory that the weapon used in the killings is a weeding hoe, particularly since that doesn’t account for the chunks of flesh missing from the first victim. Meanwhile, there’s a subplot involving Waldemar’s teenage daughter (Eva Isanta), whose friendship with horror aficionado Jorge R. Lucas is not looked kindly upon by his father, pessimistic priest Luis Maluenda. Then there’s the ghost of gypsy chief Javier Loyola, who appears to Waldemar to warn him about his curse and later to Muñoz when she begins reading up on lycanthropy.

Disappointingly, director Francisco Rodríguez Gordillo keeps Waldemar’s furry form out of frame for far too much of the running time. In fact, el Hombre Lobo doesn’t get his first, altogether too fleeting, closeup until the film is nearly half over. (And the second one is just as brief.) Perhaps the greatest crime of all, though, is the CGI-aided transformation in the final reel, which I should have realized was a distinct possibility, but somehow I had hoped that they would have stuck with the old ways. Then again, when an actor is nearing retirement age (as Naschy was at the time of filming), they’re less apt to want to spend hours upon hours in a makeup chair. He would consent to do so again eight years later, though, in Fred Olen Ray’s Tomb of the Werewolf. That’s another one that has escaped my attention, but not because it’s impossible to track down. Rather, it’s because life is way too short to spend any of it watching Fred Olen Ray movies.

Horror anthologies have a long history that goes all the way back to the silent era, but relatively few have featured werewolves, and there’s a very good reason for that. The main problem our furry friends face in such films is they’re generally only in one of the segments, so the filmmakers tend to skimp on the makeup effects when the time comes for them to appear. After all, why blow a sizable chunk of your budget on a creature that’s only going to get a couple minutes of screen time?

One solution, of course, is to skip the makeup effects entirely, which is the tack 1965′s Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors takes. The first horror anthology from Britain’s Amicus Productions, it was directed by Hammer vet Freddie Francis and scripted by producer Milton Subotsky, who links together its five individual stories by having self-proclaimed “doctor of metaphysics” Peter Cushing use a deck of tarot cards (which he calls his “house of horrors”) to predict the gruesome fates of the five gentlemen sharing his train compartment with him. Luckily for the impatient lycanthrope lover, the werewolf segment is the first one out of the gate.

In it, Neil McCallum is an architect who’s been called out to his family’s old estate, which has since been sold to a rich widow, because the current owner (Ursula Howells) wants to make some alterations to the interior. We know something sinister’s afoot when McCallum hears a wolf howl, asks what it was, and gets the disingenuous reply, “I didn’t hear anything.” Later, while poking around in the basement, he happens upon the coffin of long-dead werewolf Cosmo Waldemar, who was killed by McCallum’s great-grandfather and, according to legend, will return to take his revenge. Believing Howells is in danger, McCallum goes about trying to protect her, but completely misjudges who the beast’s real target is.

As is frequently the case with horror anthologies, not every segment in Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors works, but at least it has a better batting average than Jeffrey Delman’s Deadtime Stories, which includes a modern-day take on “Little Red Riding Hood” where the Big Bad Wolf is a black leather pants-wearing lycanthrope. Made in 1986, the film gets off on the wrong paw with an opening credits gag stolen wholesale from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. And the wraparound segments — with an increasingly harried uncle (Michael Mesmer) telling gruesome fairy tale-derived bedtime stories to his rambunctious nephew (Brian DePersia) — aren’t much better since they were plainly shot in the middle of the day. (The sunlight streaming in through the gap in the curtains is something of a giveaway.)

As for the individual stories, the “Red Riding Hood” segment comes up second, with Red recast as Rachel (Nicole Picard), a high school cheerleader who’s introduced fondling herself in the mirror before being sent to the drug store to pick up something for her grandma (Fran Lopate). There she crosses paths with leather-clad loup-garou Willie (Matt Mitler), which results in the pharmacist mixing up their prescriptions. While Willie camps out on grandma’s doorstep, Rachel is waylaid by her preppy boyfriend (Michael Berlinger), who insists on relieving her of her virginity right then and there. By the time she finally makes it to grandma’s house the old lady has been savagely attacked, and her boyfriend hangs around long enough to become werewolf chow, but Rachel fares a bit better since she’s able to put her hand to her grandma’s silver cake cutter. The final twist, though, finds the original fairy tale reasserting itself as grandma, recovering in the hospital, sprouts fangs while Rachel watches, marveling at the size of her teeth. “And unfortunately,” Uncle Mike quips, “no one lived happily ever after. The end.”

The trend of unhappy endings continues with 2003′s Exhumed, a Canadian horror anthology which was shot on video and looks it. Doubtless, this gave writer/director Brian Clement the flexibility he needed to make sure each segment had its own distinct look, but he can only do so much to hide the lack of production values. And bringing up the rear in its low-rent trilogy is a story set in a post-apocalyptic future where motorcycle-riding “mod” vampires and sideburn-rocking “rocker” werewolves are all set to have their “Last Rumble” when both sides are ambushed by hazmat suit-wearing soldiers who look like they’ve been airlifted in from George A. Romero’s The Crazies. The only ones spared are a female vampire named Cherry (Chelsey Arentsen) and a werewolf named Zura (Chantelle Adamache) who have to get over their mutual enmity if they’re going to make it out of the compound alive (or undead as the case may be). Eventually we find out how their story ties in with the first two, but it didn’t make a whole lot of sense when I heard it in the movie, so I’m not going to try to explain it here. All I can tell you is that the werewolves in Exhumed look like fanged Klingons with super-long eyebrows. That’s a new one on me and a design I don’t expect to see again anytime soon.

All is not doom and gloom in anthology land, though, especially when it can occasionally produce a gem like Trick ‘r Treat. Made in 2007, it promises four tales of terror and writer/director Michael Dougherty delivers, neatly tying all of them together and having the characters and events overlap in unexpected ways. (Kind of like Four Rooms only all of the rooms are actually good.) The entire film is set in a small Ohio town that takes Halloween very seriously (there’s a huge festival in the center of town and everything), as does the character of Sam, a mute trick-or-treater with a creepy-looking burlap sack over his head who pops up in each of the stories, even if it’s just to silently observe what goes on. One such story is about a virginal 22-year-old in a Red Riding Hood costume (Anna Paquin) who needs a date for a party taking place on the outskirts of town and, sure enough, has an encounter in the woods. There’s a twist to it that easily eclipses the ones in Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors, Deadtime Stories and Exhumed, though, and Dougherty gives us a full-on transformation that should make most werewolf fans howl with delight. If you’re looking for a good horror anthology this Halloween, Trick ‘r Treat is the one that will give you the most bang for your buck.

Before I tackle the rest of Paul Naschy’s “Hombre Lobo” series, I’d like to highlight one entry in particular that may be a little hard to come by since it’s never been released on DVD, but it’s definitely worth the effort to track down. That film is 1975′s Night of the Howling Beast, which was originally called La Maldicion de la Bestia (literally “The Curse of the Beast”) and also went out as Hall of the Mountain King (a somewhat nonsensical title) and The Werewolf and the Yeti (which is rather more germane since there is a scene at the end where Naschy’s Waldemar Daninsky fights a yeti). Directed by Miguel Iglesias (who’s credited under the not-fooling-anyone pseudonym of M.I. Bonns), the film opens with an incredibly brief and chaotic yeti attack, after which we’re whisked off to London. There Waldemar — a noted anthropologist and psychologist who just happens to be fluent in Nepalese — is recruited by an old professor (Castillo Escalona) for an expedition to the Himalayas to continue the work of the first expedition (shades of Monty Python’s “Sir George Head” sketch). Of course, the main attraction for Waldemar may be the presence of the professor’s beautiful daughter/assistant, Sylvia (Grace Mills). (And no, the fact that he knew her as a child isn’t creepy at all.)

As one might expect, things don’t really get rolling until the expedition reaches Nepal and Waldemar decides to scout ahead with a skittish local guide. When they reach the Pass of the Demons of the Red Moon his guide freaks out and disappears, leaving Waldemar to wander on his own until he finds sanctuary in a cave inhabited by two hot priestesses who nurse him back to health. After some disturbing dreams he discovers that they’re cannibals who worship a skeleton with fangs, kills one with a silver dagger and is bitten by the other before he can dispatch her. Thus having contracted the curse of the beast, he stumbles out of the cave in just a shirt, which would be a problem if he didn’t sprout fur and fangs that night during the full moon.

Meanwhile, there is unrest back at camp since one of the expedition’s Sherpas (Gaspar ‘Indio’ González) keeps warning them about the bandits that could attack them at any time. Waldemar kills three of them the first time he transforms and even chows down on Nathan (Juan Velilla), the group’s main naysayer, after he gets drunk and tries to paw Sylvia. Naturally, when the professor and the others discover Nathan’s body the next morning they think it could be the work of a yeti, but they are soon set upon by more bandits and there is a big shootout, during which Sylvia escapes and the professor and Melody (Verónica Miriel), the other female in the group, are captured. Alas, the bandits are less interested in poor Larry Talbot (Gil Vidal) — yes, Naschy went ahead and used the name of the most famous werewolf in history for a minor character in the film — but we don’t find out his fate until the next day, after Waldemar has reunited with Sylvia after slaughtering some more bandits in his bestial form.

When Waldemar and Sylvia find Larry he’s been impaled on a spike and begs to be put out of his misery (much like Lon Chaney, Jr. frequently did), but before he expires he tells them the bandits have taken the professor and Melody to the palace of the ailing Sekkar Khan (Luis Induni), who is attended by the sadistic Wandesa (Silvia Solar), a foreigner who delights in having people tortured and is stringing the Khan along. On their way to the palace Waldemar and Sylvia stop at an abandoned monastery where an old man tells them of the only cure for Waldemar’s condition (which involves the red petals of a magic flowering plant and the blood of a young girl), but before they can seek it out they are captured and taken to the palace, where Wandesa announces her intention to dominate Waldemar and make him her slave by having Melody skinned alive before his eyes. Before the full moon comes, though, Sylvia and the other female prisoners effect an escape and Waldemar is freed in time to have two protracted fights — one in human form with the Khan and the other in his more feral state with a yeti that tries to abduct Sylvia. Sadly, the creature’s shaggy costume looks decidedly off-the-rack, but that doesn’t make much of a difference since it’s hard to make out much detail against the blinding white snow. I’d say a DVD restoration is in order, but that seems about as likely as Waldemar Daninsky rolling over and playing dead.