The one Blue Moon of 2026 is upon us, so to celebrate the second full moon of May, I’ve chosen Paul Naschy’s second werewolf movie of 1972. (The first, The Fury of the Wolf Man, was put out on Blu-ray by Scorpion Releasing in 2020, but I didn’t bother picking it up because frankly, it’s not very good.) As my prior exposure to Dr. Jekyll and the Werewolf was via one of Mill Creek Entertainment’s 50-movie packs — and the version in it was heavily truncated to 72 minutes — Mondo Macabro’s 2024 Blu-ray couldn’t help but be a vast improvement. Mondo also released a 4K UHD last year, but that only includes the 86-minute Spanish cut of the film, while the Blu-ray also has the slightly longer “Export” version, which features nude scenes not intended for the domestic audience. The Blu-ray also has new and archival interviews and featurettes that aren’t on the 4K disc, so keep that in mind if those sorts of things are important to you.
Directed by León Klimovsky, returning from The Werewolf Versus the Vampire Woman, Dr. Jekyll was the fifth film in Naschy’s “Hombre Lobo” series, but it takes a good long while for this signature character Waldemar Daninsky to show up. Instead, the story opens in modern-day London (making it the equivalent of Hammer’s Dracula A.D. 1972), where middle-aged businessman Imre Kastaz (José Marco) is hosting a dinner party for his new, much younger bride Justine (Shirley Corrigan). Also in attendance is his friend Dr. Henry Jekyll (Jack Taylor), who bristles at the mention of his infamous grandfather’s work.
At any rate, Imre takes Justine to Hungary for their honeymoon, but they run into all kinds of problems when they return to the village where he’s from. Not only does their car break down, but Justine is spooked by the local leper, they’re warned away from visiting the old cemetery where Imre’s parents are buried, and they’re told to avoid the nearby castle because “the man who lives there is a monster.” Naturally, that monster turns out to be Waldemar Daninsky, who enters the fray when the couple is attacked by bandits who stab Imre (to death, as it turns out) and are all set to rape Justine when a human but still formidable Waldemar intervenes, killing two of them. Out for revenge, the lone survivor recruits two numbskulls from the village and they make the mistake of trying to infiltrate the castle on the night of the full moon and meet Waldemar’s fur-faced alter ego, who makes short work of the numbskulls. It’s only when the villagers get riled up and decide they need to take care of their monster problem that Justine convinces Waldemar to return to England with her so he can seek a cure for his affliction.
Naturally, the man they go to is Dr. Jekyll, and he believes he can somehow use his granddad’s old serum to rid Waldemar of his lycanthropy. This involves turning him into Mr. Hyde (thus allowing Naschy to add another famous fiend to his gallery of screen villains) and using the antidote he has developed to quell both Hyde and the werewolf at the same time. Unfortunately, Jekyll’s jealous assistant Sandra (Mirta Miller) stabs him in the back (leading to one of the most dragged-out deathbed scenes in movie history) and un-cures Waldemar so Hyde can be free to stalk the streets of London and push unwary strangers into the Thames. This leads to an unforgettable sequence where Hyde parks himself in a discotheque and changes back into Waldemar just in time to transform into el Hombre Lobo (amusingly enough, this all happens in the space of a few minutes), but my favorite happens earlier, when Waldemar is on his way to Jekyll’s clinic on the first day of the full moon and gets trapped in an elevator with a soon-to-be innocent victim. That’s what he gets for not scheduling a morning appointment.