Werewolf News

It’s a rare thing to get to catch a werewolf film in its natural habitat (i.e. a movie theater), so I jumped at the chance to see this at its one local screening earlier this month. The poster trumpeted the participation of Shelley Duvall, Edward Furlong, and Dee Wallace, but The Forest Hills proved unworthy of their talents, and a pitiful swan song for Duvall, who died in July and receives an “In Loving Memory of” dedication in the closing credits. The brainchild of multi-hyphenate Scott Goldberg, the film starts off reasonably well, with Duvall’s character receiving the news that she has stage four lung cancer with a world-weary resignation — and without pausing her near-constant smoking. The trouble comes when the call goes out to her estranged son Rico (Chiko Mendez), who is the actual protagonist and is not the sort of character whose exploits one wants to follow for 70-ish minutes.

Before we know it, Duvall has exited the picture and Mendez has taken center stage, going on the war path against the werewolf he’s convinced is lurking in the woods around the farmhouse where he has set up shop, and randomly shooting friends and acquaintances with the guns he’s gotten from a fellow werewolf hunter. In fact, Rico has bagged two of them (friends, not werewolves) before the film gets around to properly introducing his best friend Billy, the kind of role that illustrates just how far Furlong’s star has fallen since he made his screen debut 33 years ago in Terminator 2).

For someone who gets top billing in the film, with his name before the title, Furlong doesn’t actually stick around very long, and a late-arriving flashback shows that Billy isn’t as much of a friend as he makes himself out to be. (Wallace, meanwhile, has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-her cameo as Rico’s boss, who unceremoniously fires him from his dishwasher job.) Also in the mix is Rico’s sister, who is concerned that he’s off the meds, and a social worker who tries to get him back on them to no avail, at which point it becomes abundantly clear that Rico’s main problem is that he’s mentally ill, possibly stemming from a head trauma he sustained at a vaguely defined point in the past.

Randomly edited to the point of incoherence, with an overabundance of dream sequences, slow-motion shots, and scenes of Mendez bellowing at the top of his lungs in varying states of undress, The Forest Hills eventually starts introducing new characters and plot twists at such a rapid clip, it’s as if Goodman decided every single idea he had needed to make it into the final film, regardless of whether it fit or not. If this had been told in a straightforward fashion, it could have been a compelling portrait of a mentally unstable man driven to commit terrible deeds. It could have even been played as a black comedy, leaning into some of the more risible moments that inspired peals of laughter at my screening. As it is, it’s an incredibly shitty no-budget indie that is to be avoided at all costs. True, it occasionally throws in a cool-looking shot of a werewolf, but there are better films with cooler-looking shots of werewolves out there.

Charley Barrett is a wolf man on a mission. What that mission entails — and how he came to be cursed with lycanthropy in the first place — is a bit murky at the start of Larry Fessenden’s Blackout, but all eventually becomes clear. Emphasis on eventually.

The latest feature from the indie auteur behind Glass Eye Pix — which previously gave us the 2014 werewolf-in-a-retirement-community film Late Phases — Blackout finds Fessenden exploring territory he previously covered in his 1995 film Habit, in which he played an alcoholic on the rebound who falls into a destructive relationship with a vampire. As this films opens, alcoholic artist Charley (Alex Hurt, son of William) has severed ties with his wife and virtually everyone else in this life following a werewolf attack that Fessenden refrains from depicting in any detail until the very end. After laying low at the Talbot Falls Motel (yes, he went there) for a whole month — during which he has been obsessively filling canvas after canvas with self-portraits and images of his unfortunate victims — Charley packs up his belongings, hops in his car, and hopes to take care of some unfinished business before he reaches the end of the road, at which is a friend who has made some silver bullets for him.

That’s the plan, at least, but those have a tendency to go sideways in horror films and this one is no exception. Between telling off his father-in-law Hammond (Marshall Bell), a developer whose Hilltop Resorts has been divisive in the community, dropping off some of his late father’s papers with lawyer friend Kate (Barbara Crampton), and having an awkward reunion/farewell with his estranged wife Sharon (Addison Timlin), Charley is behind schedule enough to still be behind the wheel when night falls. As a result, he transforms while driving, a rookie mistake I haven’t seen since 1995’s Werewolf (as featured on MST3K). When he goes off the road, flipping his car in the process, a couple of passing motorists (one of whom is played by Steve Buscemi’s brother Michael) stop to see if they can help, prompting Charley to help himself to them. And then there’s the other motorist who arrives on the scene in time to be added to Charley’s roll-call of victims.

Waking up in the woods the next morning, Charley is understandably disappointed in himself, but this does give him an extra day to tie up loose ends, including picking the brain of the one man who’s seen him in his feral state and lived. “Be honest with me, man. What did you see that night?” he asks Miguel (Rigo Garay), a Mexican laborer whose succinct reply is “Hombre lobo.” Charley also accepts a ride from local pastor Francis (John Speredakos), who like everyone else sees he’s worse for wear than when he left town one month earlier, but is unable to get out of him what’s troubling him. That’s saved for his friend Earl (Motell Gyn Foster), who was expecting him the night before and is still ready to carry out his last wish. “You’re really a fucking werewolf?” Earl says. “I gotta see this shit.” Alas, their plan of Earl tying Charley to a chair, filming his transformation, and shooting him also goes awry in spectacular fashion, resulting in more death and dismemberment and a town full of easily stirred-up yahoos.

Also in the cast are such indie stalwarts as Kevin Corrigan (as one of the aforementioned yahoos), James Le Gros (as Hammond’s foreman, who’s prepared to take charge of the situation on his behalf), and Joe Swanberg (as Sharon’s new beau, who isn’t destined to stick around long). The characters the most in over their heads, though, are sheriff Luis (Joseph Castillo-Midyett) and his deputy Alice (Ella Rae Peck), whose playful banter and speculation about what they’re up against does little to prepare them for the reality when they actually confront it. “Sad to say, if you combine a wolf with a person, you’d probably get the worst of both,” Luis says. “You’d just have a vindictive asshole with big teeth and claws.” Big teeth and claws Charley definitely has, but it must be said the werewolf that bit him (not glimpsed until the flashback that closes the film) has the better overall look.

Watch enough werewolf movies and one is bound to come across more than a few dogs — and I’m not referring to the ones some filmmakers try to pass off as their werewolves. This is the first time I’ve encountered a jackal, though, which archaeologist David Barrie (Anthony Eisley) is cursed to transform into when he ignores the clear warning on the side of the glass-topped sarcophagus of beautifully preserved Egyptian Princess Akana (Marliza Pons). Well, it’s clear to him because he can decipher hieroglyphics.

“Whoever is in the presence of the sacred Akana’s body during the cycle of the full moon will suffer the Curse of the Jackal,” he reads, so naturally David wants his friend Bob (Robert Alan Browne) to lock him inside the room in his house where he’s storing Akana along with her fully mummified sacred protector, Sirak. Bob and David both laugh off the curse, but when he’s alone, the latter writes in his journal, “What this will be, I don’t know, if anything.” David has his answer soon enough, though, when he drowsily lies down and, in a series of dissolves, becomes an utterly unconvincing jackal-man. He then promptly escapes, kills two policemen, returns home, lies back down, and transforms back in another series of dissolves.

All this happens in the first 15 minutes of The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals, which is good because it’s only 81 minutes long and there are three more nights of the full moon to get through before the cycle is over. The film also needs time for a lengthy flashback to ancient Egypt and the entombment of Akana, who’s so well-preserved because she’s actually been in a deep sleep for 4815 years. (Meanwhile, Sirak gets to be the movie’s shambling mass of bandages, earning Saul Goldsmith the coveted “And” credit “as The Mummy.”) When Davis awakens after his second night of were-jackaling, he is greeted by the revived Akana, who says he has served her well. She also puts him off when he goes in for a kiss, saying, “There is much we must do. Later we will have time for… other things.” (She means sex.)

That evening, David and Akana go on a double date with Bob and his girlfriend, model Donna (Maurine Dawson), to whom he introduces the princess as “Connie Adams,” a name he has to make an effort to remember every time he says it. Meanwhile, Sirak awakens, lurches out the door, and kills two Las Vegas showgirls (one in her dressing room, the other right on stage in front of everybody) so he can be even with David. They don’t compare notes, though, until after David has transformed for a third time (outdoors for variety’s sake) and pursues Sirak through the throngs of gawkers when the mummy attempts to make off with Akana. Realizing she’s in over her head, she calls on Isis, who uses Bob as a vessel to tell her, “I have given you Sirak and now the Jackal, who will fight for you and protect you. Each is in love with you and will have you for his own, and they will obey you.” Isis also generously throws in control of Bob, but thankfully he doesn’t have to be turned into a vampire or zombie or anything first. That would have been a monster too far for this film’s paltry make-up budget.

Anyway, John Carradine shows up in the home stretch to cash a paycheck and play David’s mentor, Professor Cummings, who is consulting with the police about the murderous mummy seen on the Strip the previous night. “You mean to tell me we have a live mummy here in Las Vegas?” asks the incredulous detective on the case. “We not only have a live mummy on our hands,” the professor replies, “but something else which nobody in modern times has had to contend with: a jackal-man.” Nobody in modern times has to contend with it for long, though, as David and Sirak have their final clash — and meet their mutual demise — in the waters of Lake Mead that very night.

The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals was filmed in 1969, but went unseen until it surfaced on videocassette in the mid-’80s (when a lot of other marginal entertainment saw the light of video store shelves). It has since been scanned from the internegative and released on Blu-ray by Severin, which means it looks leagues better than a film like this has any right to. Severin has also packaged it with a cover that promises so much more than the film can hope to deliver. The VHS rip streaming on Tubi (and available for rent on Amazon Prime for 99 cents) is more its speed.

Along with Hard Rock Nightmare, which I previously covered in this column, the similarly titled Hard Rock Zombies is leaving Shudder in a few days. This is no reason to seek out either, but of the two, Nightmare comes out way ahead since it actually looks like it was made by people who halfway knew what they were doing. This is not the case with Zombies, which is so haphazardly put together, it borders on incomprehensible — not that anyone should try to comprehend what’s going on in this bargain basement Cannon release.

The basic premise (and I’m using that term very loosely) of Hard Rock Zombies is that Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun resettled in California after World War II and put down roots in the improbably named town of Grand Guignol. That also happens to be the place where an up-and-coming rock band has arranged to play for a famous promoter who could make them big stars. As soon as they roll into town, though, the local bigwigs start giving them the stink eye, and after a Monkees-style musical interlude where they prance around town to a song titled “Na Na Na,” the band and their uptight manager are thrown in jail on trumped-up charges. The bigwigs even go so far as to ban rock and roll in all its forms within city limits at a hastily called council meeting that does not show off producer-director Krishna Shah or his co-writer David Ball’s flair for comedy. This is extremely detrimental to the film as a whole since it is pitched as a horror-comedy. It’s doubly disappointing, then, that it isn’t remotely scary or even vaguely creepy. It’s just dumb.

Take the nonsensical introduction of the film’s werewolf character. After picking up a scantily clad hitchhiker (who previously lured two unwary travelers to their doom), the band is directed to her family’s mansion, and as they pull up Shah cuts in flashes of a female werewolf in a wheelchair in an attic-like space brandishing knives and howling away for no particular reason (unless it’s just that she’s hungry). When one of the band members inquires about the howling, the hitchhiker explains it away as if it’s a perfectly normal sound for one’s mother to make. That the mother turns out to be none other than Eva Braun does nothing to make things any clearer, especially since the credits list different actresses for the roles of “Eva” and “Wolf Lady.” I refuse to speculate any further about the matter.

Anyway, the band does make it to their big audition, but only after they’ve been murdered in various gory ways by Hitler and his kin and brought back by a song their singer/bass guitarist was working on based on an ancient chant that has the power to raise the dead. In short order, they kill their killers in the space of a montage, but there’s still 45 minutes of movie left to go at that point, so Shah and Ball have to figure out how to keep it going. As it turns out, Hitler and company are unkillable ghouls, and everyone they bite also becomes a zombie, leading to a Night of the Living Dead-esque siege of the few remaining townspeople who aren’t Nazis, zombies, or Nazi zombies. As one of them says, “God, this sounds like a cheap movie.” “This whole day has been like a cheap movie” comes the reply. Nice attempt at lampshading, guys, but while Hard Rock Zombies is undeniably cheap, it is barely a movie.

Previously in this column, I’ve covered El Santo’s adventures Santo y Blue Demon vs Drácula y el Hombre Lobo and Santo vs. las Lobas, both of which hailed from the 1970s. This month, I’m going back one decade to the first time the silver-masked wrestler grappled with a wolf man (or men, as is the case). Released in 1963 as the eighth in the series, Santo en el museo de cera was brought to the US a couple years later by K. Gordon Murray as Samson in the Wax Museum. Why Murray decided to call him Samson instead of Santo is a mystery, though. Sure, he’s strong, but since he never takes off his wrestling mask, there’s no way of knowing if he even has hair for Delilah’s non-union Mexican equivalent to cut off.

At any rate, the action takes place in and around the wax museum of the not-at-all-sinister Dr. Karol (Claudio Brook, who co-starred in several Luis Buñuel films and logged time in three about black-masked wrestler Neutron). Like many a wax museum proprietor before him, Dr. Karol has found his patrons are more drawn to the macabre monsters in his lower gallery than the likes of Gary Cooper, Mahatma Gandhi, Joseph Stalin, and Pancho Villa. To that end, he has made figures of Mr. Hyde, Frankenstein’s Monster, Quasimodo, the Phantom of the Opera, and a quartet of fur-faced fiends, none of whom are specifically described as wolf men, but that’s what they look like. The one Dr. Karol singles out during his tour is identified as the seventh son of a seventh son who had lycanthropy passed down to him by a relative caught and bitten by the Abominable Snowman in the mountains of Tibet, which would be convoluted even by Paul Naschy’s standards. There’s something of a giveaway, though, because close-ups of a few of the figures reveal them to be actors in make-up trying their best to stand still, a guarantee the script will eventually call on them to mobilize themselves.

How Santo gets involved is due to a series of kidnappings that have occurred near Dr. Karol’s museum. One opens the film and is not followed up on, but the second one seen (and third overall) is of photographer Susana (Norma Mora), who is taking photos for an article by her sister’s fiancé when she catches Dr. Karol’s eye. Despite declining his invitation to see his laboratory, she takes up residence there anyway, and her disappearance is reported by her sister Gloria (Roxana Bellini) and her fiancé Ricardo (Rubén Rojo). They’re not the ones who contact Santo, though. That falls to kindly Professor Galvan (José Luis Jiménez), who has an “electronic localizer” which can find Santo anywhere and a wall-mounted monitor that can observe him in action. This is how the first of three wrestling matches gets integrated into the film, since Galvan has to wait for Santo to defeat his challenger before passing along Dr. Karol’s request for assistance in clearing his name.

At the film’s midpoint — and after Santo’s second match, against another masked man known only as “El Tigre del Ring” — Dr. Karol is anticlimactically revealed to be the villain when he eliminates Galvan and announces his intention to turn Susana into a panther girl. “I hate beauty in others, and for that I’ll punish you,” he says, although his motivation for acting the way he does could be said to be somewhat in bad taste. Later he boasts, “Not all of the figures in my museum are made of wax. I can create ugliness in humans, too.” This explains the beast men — the first step in his plan to turn the Earth into a “planet of monsters” — but Santo shows up in the nick of time to thwart him and heroically dump a vat of molten wax on Dr. Karol’s creations. “I only do what I can to wipe out injustice and crime,” the silver-masked one says. That apparently doesn’t extend to cleaning up after himself, though.

[Note: Inspired by Dobes’s comprehensive list of Werewolves of the 80s and its attendant screencaps repository, I’m covering movies I previously passed over because they only tangentially feature werewolves. Hence, this month’s double feature.]

When I previously covered werewolves in anthology films, I lamented that for budgetary reasons, they “tend to skimp on the makeup effects.” That, happily, was not an issue when producer Charles Band commissioned The Dungeonmaster for his fledgling Empire Pictures. Filmed under the title Ragewar and boasting makeup by the great John Carl Buechler, the film is about a computer wizard named Paul (Jeffrey Byron) who comes to the attention of evil sorcerer Mestema (Richard Moll) and is thrust into various fantasy scenarios to rescue his frustrated girlfriend Gwen (Leslie Wing), who can’t commit to him because he seemingly has a deeper relationship with his computer. The one that is of interest to us, though, is the first, which was written and directed by Rosemarie Turko.

As with most of the segments in the film, “Ice Gallery” is on the short side, but among its rogues is a wolfman who stands frozen alongside Jack the Ripper, a nameless samurai warrior, a mummy, a random hangman, and even more randomly, Albert Einstein. Paul and Gwen are in and out in four minutes, which is about how long they spend in the other segments (where they run afoul of zombies, the band W.A.S.P., a giant stop-motion statue, a slasher, a cave beast, and refugees from Band’s post-apocalyptic Metalstorm). That’s just enough time to establish the menace in each and have Paul come up with an easy fix that tends to involve shooting lasers out of his wrist-affixed computer. (He’s not an “ace troubleshooter” for nothing.)

A few years after The Dungeonmaster came and went, British writer/director Anthony Hickox took the concept of a museum where the displays come to life and expanded it to feature length with 1988’s Waxwork. Run by a suitably malevolent David Warner, the film’s wax museum is similarly focused on history’s most dastardly villains, including a werewolf played by John Rhys-Davies who puts the bite on an unwary teenager played by a pre-Twin Peaks Dana Ashbrook. Their scene is a given more time to develop and even includes a couple of transformations (one mostly offscreen, the other mostly done with cuts). The werewolf also puts in an appearance during the monster melee that closes the film, with The Howling‘s Patrick Macneee as a wheelchair-bound occult expert who finds himself on the wrong end of its fangs and claws. A neat casting coup, that.

[Note: Inspired by Dobes’s comprehensive list of Werewolves of the 80s and its attendant screencaps repository, I’m covering movies I previously passed over because they don’t feature werewolves, per se. As long as they have wolfish enough beast men, though, I’m considering them fair game…]

In the mid-’80s, erstwhile Incredible Hulk Lou Ferrigno starred in a pair of Hercules pictures for Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus’s Cannon Films, because what other role was he cut out for with that physique after Arnold Schwarzenegger scooped up Conan for himself? (Coincidentally, Arnie made his screen debut in the justifiably obscure Hercules in New York in 1970, so if Golan and/or Globus approached him about headlining their Hercules franchise, he had every reason to turn them down.) Both written and directed by Luigi Cozzi (using his Anglicized pseudonym “Lewis Coates”), 1983’s Hercules and 1985’s The Adventures of Hercules are decidedly cheap-looking affairs, in spite of the fact that $6 million was allegedly spent on the former. (The budget for the sequel is unknown, but there’s no way it was more than a fraction of that.) Taking inspiration from the likes of Flash Gordon and Clash of the Titans, Cozzi’s Hercules has plenty of flashy costumes and stop-motion monsters to go around. The same cannot be said for The Adventures of Hercules, but that’s the one where the musclebound demigod fights a wolf creature, so it is the one I’m writing about.

In tandem with its Superman II ripoff credits, The Adventures opens with eight minutes of reminders of the first film’s chintzy special effects. (If you’ve even seen the clip of Hercules fighting a bear and tossing it into space, that’s where it comes from.) The plot then kicks into gear with the theft of Zeus’s seven mighty thunderbolts by four rebel gods who hide them in the bellies of seven monsters. To retrieve them, Hercules has to defeat each one, so it’s convenient that immediately upon being sent down to Earth by his father, the demigod is set upon by a wolf-man who’s big on leaping and hopping and can be readily dispatched by being stabbed in the chest with a tree branch. When the creature dissolves away, it is revealed that it was the hiding place for one of the thunderbolts, meaning Hercules has six more to go before the whole shebang is tied up 70 minutes later. (That’s one of the benefits of a small budget: a short running time.)

In addition to Ferrigno, the other returning cast members from Hercules are Claudio Cassinelli as Zeus, Eva Robin’s as Dedalos (a bastardization of Daedalus, who built the labyrinth for King Minos in Greek mythology, but mostly just stands around mocking his efforts in these movies), and William Berger as King Minos, who was killed by Hercules at the end of the first film, but the renegade gods resurrect him by luring a warrior to his crypt, slaying the unfortunate man, and hanging him by heels over Minos’s coffin so his blood can be spilled on the skeletal remains inside. Once he’s back among the living, Minos wastes no time extolling the virtues of science over magic (sample line: “With this sword, science will triumph!”), and being totally ungrateful about being brought back to life. “Science and chaos have given me the power to eliminate you all!” he cries, and indeed, gods soon start getting zapped out of existence willy-nilly, much like they are at the end of Clash of the Titans.

Meanwhile, Hercules goes from mythological monster to mythological monster, slaying them and collecting the thunderbolts they possess until he has enough to challenge Minos, with their final confrontation taking the form of an animated fight between a dinosaur (Minos) and a gorilla (Herc). There’s also a ticking clock of sorts since the Moon is on a collision course with Earth, which Hercules is able to prevent at the last minute, just like at the end of Flash Gordon. Now if only Flash had fought a wolf-man…

[Note: Inspired by Dobes’s comprehensive list of Werewolves of the 80s and its attendant screencaps repository, I’m covering movies I previously passed over because they don’t feature werewolves, per se. As long as they have wolfish enough beast men, though, I’m considering them fair game…]

Following in the furry footsteps of last month’s Full Moon Feature, I’m continuing my survey of ’80s sword-and-sorcery flicks with cameos by fellows in fuzzy makeup with 1987’s The Barbarians. This late-arriving entry in the cycle came courtesy of Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus’s Cannon Group and was the first starring vehicle for twin bodybuilders Peter and David Paul, billed as “The Barbarian Brothers.” A quarter of the film elapses before they make their first appearance, though, and their backstory is straight out of the Conan playbook.

In short, the Ragniks — a tribe of jugglers, musicians, and storytellers is possession of a magic ruby — are ambushed by the forces of the evil Kadar (second-billed Richard Lynch), who wants the jewel for his own nefarious purposes. After exhausting their knife-throwing and fire-breathing skills, Kadar takes Ragnik leader Canary hostage and enslaves orphan boys Kutcheck and Gore in response to one of them biting off two of his fingers. (That Canary is able to extract his promise not to kill them in the heat of the moment is one of those premises one must accept or the movie would be over before the first reel change.)

Entrusted to the Dirtmaster (Michael Berryman, who gets the “and [insert name here] as” credit), the boys are split up and put to the work in The Pit, where they’re goaded into hating men in helmets. This is because Kadar’s convoluted plan is to have them kill each other in said helmets when they come of age. This happens at the 21-minute mark, when we also discover Kadar literally keeps Canary in a cage in his harem, but she’s allowed out to watch the spectacle when the now-bulked-up Kutchek and Gore are pitted against each other. It doesn’t take long for them to realize they’ve been had — although it takes Gore a little longer since the dim one — and escape on horseback, but the Ragniks they encounter in the woods don’t recognize them and nearly hang them alongside thief Ismene (Eva LaRue). Naturally, she turns out to know how to find a way to sneak into the harem so they can rescue Canary, but that only leads to a side quest.

Said side quest is where the film’s first creature comes in since Canary sends Kutchek and Gore to the Tomb of the Ancient King to retrieve the Sacred Weapons required to defeat the Dragon guarding the Belly Stone in the Lime Tree in the Forbidden Lands. Canary doesn’t mention that the Tomb is watched over by a Guard Wolf Man, but he’s definitely lurking around when they show up. As impressive as he looks, he hangs back, letting two hairy, disembodied arms try to prevent Ismene and the boys from gaining entrance. The twins make short work of them, ripping the arms out of the ground, and immediately use the Sacred Weapons to behead the Wolf Man when he confronts them directly. (To add to the indignity, one picks up the severed head and waves it around while they bark and howl in triumph.)

From there, it’s off to the Forbidden Lands where Kutchek and Gore easily shake off of a couple of gill men, stab the dragon to death and get showered in its green blood, recover the ruby from its innards, and bide their time until their requisite showdown with Kadar. Considering there are two of them, it might have made dramatic sense for Kutchek to sacrifice himself to save Gore (or vice versa), but The Barbarians isn’t interested in that kind of drama. Rather, it’s about two lunkheads who look good in loincloths and furry boots, kicking the asses of everyone who goes up against them. “Look at us,” one boasts. “We’re huge!” He is not wrong.

[Note: Inspired by Dobes’s comprehensive list of Werewolves of the 80s and its attendant screencaps repository, I’m going to start covering movies I previously passed over because they don’t feature werewolves, per se. As long as they have wolfish enough beast men, though, I’m considering them fair game. Hence, this month’s entry…]

Okay, so there’s this kid, see, and his name is Ilias (Andrea Occhipinti), and he comes from the only agrarian society at the dawn of civilization, but before he can become a man, he has to don some leather armor, take up a mystical bow that shoots flaming arrows and make his way in the world. Then there are these goat herders with mud smeared on their faces sitting around waiting for their high priestess, a topless beauty in a gold face mask named Ocron (Sabrina Siani, veteran of the first Ator movie), to bring forth the sun. Then Ocron’s beast men attack some cave dwellers, smash their elder’s skull in and tear some random naked girl to pieces, delivering the head to Ocron, who subsequently drinks from it and writhes around on an altar with a large snake. Then she has a vision where she’s shot with a glowing arrow fired by a faceless man wearing Ilias’s armor, which really harshes her buzz. Incidentally, all this happens within the first twelve minutes of Lucio Fulci’s Conquest, so if you haven’t figured out you’re in Conan the Barbarian ripoff land by the first reel change, then you obviously didn’t live through the early ’80s.

Made in 1983, at the crest of the wave of sword-and-sorcery flicks inspired by Conan‘s success, Conquest actually takes place so far back in the past that it’s more of a sticks-and-stones flick, with Ilias’s magic bow being the most sophisticated weapon around. In order to establish the dream-like atmosphere, Fulci kind of overdoes it on the smoke and haze, though. (Just because your story is set way back in the mists of time, that doesn’t mean it has to be misty all the time.) Soon enough, we’re back with Ilias, who saves some random naked girl (Maria Scola) from a snake, is attacked by some random soldiers, and is saved by a passing stranger named Mace (Jorge Rivero) who is friend to all animals, but doesn’t take kindly to the beast men who try to jump him. Mace is only interested in the bow, but lets Ilias tag along with him as long as he shows him how to use it. The two of them get trapped in a cave by Ocron’s forces, but easily escape and Mace takes Ilias home with him to meet the family (well, a family, at least). There Ilias runs into the girl again and they make doe eyes at each other over dinner, but before she can make a man out of him they are ambushed, the women and children are brutally killed, and Ilias and the bow are captured. Mace was inexplicably left alive, though, and after he rescues Ilias, Ocron roasts her head beast man Fado (José Gras) alive for failing her. (His biggest failing, it appears, was not inventing the night watch.)

Realizing she needs to bring in the big guns, Ocron summons forth the all-powerful Zora (Conrado San Martín), a magical dude in thick plate mail, and promises herself to him if he kills Ilias. Zora is down with this and shoots the lad with a poison dart (which Fulci accomplishes by scratching the film) while he’s out hunting with Mace, but luckily Mace knows of a small valley where a magical plant grows and goes to fetch some of its leaves while Ilias lies around oozing pus from nasty-looking wounds that Fulci shows in extreme close-up. On his way back from the valley, Mace is attacked by some swamp mummies, but manages to impale all of them and, upon his return to Ilias’s side, has to fight his own double (Zora in disguise) before he can apply the life-saving vegetation. This is followed by a truly bizarre scene with Zora sitting on a throne and Ocron fondling his metal plating, but I guess it’s no more strange than Mace being captured by some white-haired, cobwebbed Wookiees and, after he’s thrown into the water, being rescued by some dolphins that happen to swim by. (This is more tedious than you could ever imagine.) From there, Ilias and Mace are captured again, this time by cave creatures we can’t see too well in the blue light, and Ilias is beheaded, but that isn’t the end of him, for when Mace burns his body (in a sequence that Fulci lingers over for several minutes) he takes on the fallen warrior’s spirit and fulfills his destiny. The end. And in case you had any lingering doubts about what you’ve just seen, a title card comes up that states, “Any reference to persons or events is purely coincidental.” Thanks for clearing that up, title card.

P.S. – At the climax, when Mace appears to challenge Ocron, she cries out, “Stop him, Zora!” Fulci then pans over to Zora, who sighs heavily and disappears. This is my favorite moment in the entire film.

It’s been nearly 15 years since Shout! Factory had to scuttle its proposed release of the ’80s TV series Werewolf due to unforeseen music rights issues they weren’t able to resolve, but the disappointment is still palpable. Boasting werewolf characters designed by the great Rick Baker (although the day-to-day makeup, effects and transformations were left to Greg Cannom), the series wasn’t enough of a ratings winner to get picked up for a second season, leaving the fate of its lycanthrope lead as much in the air as it was at the conclusion of the feature-length pilot, which aired on July 11, 1987. The show’s cult remains steadfast on YouTube, though, where fans have posted the entire series exactly as it aired three and a half decades ago.

As pilots must, the one for Werewolf — written by series creator Frank Lupo and directed by David Hemmings — spends a fair bit of time establishing its main character, college student Eric Cord, who’s first seen threatening to drop his studious girlfriend Kelly into a swimming pool. (You can’t get more happy-go-lucky than that.) Before that, though, it teases one of the show’s antagonists, bounty hunter Alamo Joe, who delivers hard-boiled narration while loading a rifle with silver bullets. (A sample: “You can stand up to anything if you’ve got the guts to look it in the eye. If you can look it in the eye.”) This is followed by a sequence in a club soundtracked by the Mike + the Mechanics song “Silent Running (On Dangerous Ground)” where an unidentified character with a pentagram etched into the palm of his hand stalks the couple he plans to make his next meal out of. (Naturally, this features POV camerawork overlaid with video effects to indicate that we’re seeing were-vision.) Then comes the aforementioned pool scene and the opening credits, depicting Eric driving around to Timbuk 3’s “The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades.” (That one could easily be substituted, so my money’s on “Silent Running” being one of the songs Shout! couldn’t clear.)

Eric’s life is irrevocably changed when he arrives home to find the lights out in his apartment and his roommate Ted loading a revolver with silver bullets and referencing a newspaper headline (“MURDER VICTIMS FOUND PARTIALLY DEVOURED”) he claims to be responsible for. “You better have one hell of an explanation to get me to believe this,” Eric says. After a long pause punctuated by thunder, Ted replies, “I’m a werewolf.” (This happens 19 minutes in for those keeping score at home.) When Ted begs to be tied up until midnight, Eric humors him, but dozes off while waiting for him to transform and is caught unprepared when Ted finally wolfs out, losing the gun in the scuffle and getting bitten in the shoulder before recovering it and putting Ted out of his misery. Eric’s misery has only just begun, however, since he’s soon charged with murder and showing signs of following in his roommate’s paw prints.

The balance of the pilot includes an American Werewolf-like nightmare, multiple scenes of Eric sheepishly waking up in the buff, the addition of two comic-relief characters (Eric’s klutzy doofus of a lawyer and his fast-talking bail bondsman), and the proper introduction of Alamo Joe and the show’s other antagonist, salty boat captain Janos Skorzeny, who readily confirms that he’s the werewolf who infected Ted the previous summer and claims Eric as part of his bloodline. (“You’re one of mine, aren’t you?” he asks with a twinkle in his eye.) Since Ted’s belief was that he could end his curse by killing Skorzeny, that becomes Eric’s mission as well, but their first face-to-face — or snout-to-snout — encounter ends in a stalemate and Skorzeny scampering away unharmed. “Maybe it’s ending,” Kelly says hopefully, but Eric is quick to correct her. “No, it’s just beginning,” he says, and his adventures continued for 28 more episodes before the plug got pulled the following spring.