Author: Craig J. Clark

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.

Inspired by the twin successes of The Howling and An American Werewolf in London, the ’80s yielded a veritable bumper crop of werewolf-centric horror comedies, most of which chose to accentuate the comedy over the horror. Whether this tendency arose out of a misreading of what made those hit films resonate with audiences or the desire to keep budgets down by limiting the mayhem, the end result was the same: almost to a man (and, in one case, woman), they were effectively defanged.

That’s definitely the case with 1981’s Full Moon High, which was written, produced and directed by perpetual triple threat Larry Cohen, whose approach to comedy is scattershot at best. The story opens in 1959, when high school football star Adam Arkin is attacked by the cheesiest-looking werewolf imaginable while accompanying his super-patriotic father (Ed McMahon!) on a super-secret mission to communist Romania. Upon their return home, Arkin takes to attacking young women, but the most he does is nip them in the butt, inspiring the local paper to run the understated headline “Werewolf Annoys Community.” After transforming in front of McMahon, who freaks out and accidentally shoots himself, Arkin leaves town just before the big game, which his school loses in his absence. The film then leaps forward 21 years, at which point he returns home and, posing as his own son, hopes to fulfill his destiny.

Chock full of non sequiturs, one-liners and running gags (such as the pesky gypsy violinist who seems to follow Arkin everywhere), Full Moon High comes equipped with a supporting cast augmented by the likes of Kenneth Mars, Jim J. Bullock, Bob Saget, Pat Morita, and Alan Arkin (a.k.a. Adam’s father), who plays a famous abnormal psychologist who specializes in insult therapy. In the end, though, the film is a little too chaotic for its own good, but that’s pretty much par for the course for Cohen. Still, it does cause me to wonder whether the makers of Teen Wolf, which came along four years later, ever looked at Full Moon High and said, “Hey, we could make a movie like that, only not so schticky.”

In many ways, Teen Wolf‘s Scott Howard (played by Michael J. Fox, as if I needed to tell you that) is one of cinema’s most nonthreatening werewolves, so much so that the movie even spawned a Saturday morning cartoon. A wholly unremarkable small-town youth, Scott plays for his high school’s lousy basketball team, hangs out with his slacker friend Stiles, is mooned over by his best friend Boof, and works part-time at his father’s hardware store. Then he starts noticing some things — extra hair on his chest and hands, heightened senses of smell and hearing, pointy ears — that aren’t the sorts of changes that they talk about in health class. Everything becomes clear on the night of the full moon, though, when he undergoes a full transformation and discovers that his father is also a werewolf (just not of the teen variety).

Since Teen Wolf is primarily a comedy as opposed to a straight-up horror film (or even a send-up like Full Moon High), being a werewolf turns out to be a pretty sweet deal for Scott, especially once he demonstrates his prowess on the basketball court. All of a sudden, the hot blond he has the hots for is giving him the time of day, the drama teacher is writing a part into the school play just for him, and his coach has a winning team on his hands. His only problems are the vice principal who’s gunning for him for some unknown reason, a sporting and romantic rival who knows how to push his buttons, and his teammates who grow to resent his ball-hogging antics. Will Scott learn to control the wolf within in time to help his school win the state championship? Do I even need to answer that?

When the time came to make a sequel to Teen Wolf, Michael J. Fox was far too big a star to want to don the hair, fangs and claws a second time, so it was left up to his sitcom sister’s real-life brother Jason Bateman to take on the role of his college-bound cousin for 1987’s Teen Wolf Too. Of course, his casting may have also had something to do with the fact that the film was produced by Jason’s father Kent Bateman, who in all honesty should have held out for a better vehicle for his talented son’s feature debut. I’m not saying Teen Wolf is an unassailable classic or anything, but on the list of unnecessary sequels Teen Wolf Too has to rank somewhere near the bottom.

Believing the werewolf gene has skipped his generation, Bateman’s Todd Howard has landed at a second-tier college where he wants to study science to become a vet, but the imposing Dean of Men (John Astin) would rather he concentrate on boxing since he’s there on a sports scholarship due to the machinations of Scott’s old coach, who has graduated from high school basketball to college boxing. From there, the story follows the Teen Wolf template almost to the letter (there’s even a direct callback to the first film in the scene where Todd’s eyes go red and he uses a deep voice to intimidate an unbending registrar into changing his classes), even to the point of giving Todd a nerdy, Karen Allen-ish biology lab partner who’s hopelessly hung up on him. And like in the first film, Todd doesn’t know quite how to handle his new-found popularity after he becomes the wolf during his first boxing match and cleans his opponent’s clock. The post-fight celebration is something else entirely, though, with Todd singing “Do You Love Me?” and leading an embarrassing dance number. And his cousin Scott would have never consented to catching a Frisbee in the air, which is beyond degrading.

If Full Moon High and the Teen Wolf diptych tipped more toward the comedy end of the spectrum, then The Monster Squad (also from 1987) made up for them by not skimping on the horrific aspects of its story. Of course, instead of being centered on a sympathetic (and occasionally just plain pathetic) werewolf, it had the advantage of having five kinds of monsters to work with, led by a ruthless Count Dracula bent on world domination. Written by Shane Black and director Fred Dekker, The Monster Squad follows the titular quintet of grade-school Van Helsings as they take on not only Dracula, but also Frankenstein’s Monster, Wolfman, the Mummy and the Gill-Man in a bid to restore the balance of power.

A real treat for horror movie fans, The Monster Squad gave special effects wizard Stan Winston the opportunity to have a go at all of Universal’s iconic monsters. He does an especially good job on Frankenstein’s Monster (who’s played quite effectively by Tom Noonan), although I’m less impressed with his Wolfman since the poor guy’s completely unable to turn his head and his face is pretty immobile. And then, of course, there’s the Scary German Guy (played by veteran character actor Leonardo Cimino), who turns out not to be so scary after all. So I guess the moral of the story is don’t be afraid of the German guy who lives down the road because he just might be able to help you banish the bad guys to limbo where they belong. Also, Wolfman’s totally got nards.

Skipping over 1988’s Scooby-Doo and the Reluctant Werewolf and Curse of the Queerwolf (something I recommend you do as well), the final werewolf comedy of the decade is 1989’s My Mom’s a Werewolf, which was directed by Michael Fischa (who apparently felt that he was under no obligation to make it a good one). As it opens, klutzy housewife Susan Blakely is feeling decidedly unappreciated, both by her schlubby hubby (a well-cast John Schuck) and her headstrong teenage daughter (Tina Caspary). Then, while out running errands one day, she meets charming pet shop owner John Saxon, a werewolf on the prowl for a mate who seduces her and, one bite on the toe later (shades of Adam Arkin’s butt-nipping), she’s on her way to becoming the wolf woman of his dreams. She also goes from being a strict vegetarian to eating raw meat and growing fangs, pointy ears and hair all over her body. (And she thought Saxon was a “furry little devil.”)

At first Caspary merely thinks her mother is having an affair, but when the truth comes out she turns to a gypsy fortune teller (played by Laugh-In‘s Ruth Buzzi) for help. Along the way there’s a lot of silly gags, forced physical comedy and cartoony sound effects, and more dog- and hair-related jokes than you can throw a stick at. These would be tolerable if they were even marginally funny, but alas, that is not the case. It may have taken a decade, but My Mom’s a Werewolf proved that the werewolf comedy had finally had its day and needed to be put down.

Unlike Universal, which had its writers concoct original stories for its werewolf films of the ’30s and ’40s, Hammer Studios used a literary source — namely Guy Endore’s sensationalistic 1933 novel The Werewolf of Paris — as the basis of its lone such effort, 1961’s The Curse of the Werewolf. Directed by Terence Fisher and scripted by producer Anthony Hinds (using the nom de plume John Elder), the film is a very loose adaptation of Endore’s book, as evidenced by the fact that the setting was moved from France to Spain in order to utilize a set that the studio had built for a film about the Spanish Inquisition that never got made due to censorship problems. Even so, within those limitations Fisher and Hinds managed to produce an engaging film that adhered to the spirit, if not always the letter, of Endore’s story.

They also gave Oliver Reed’s budding film career a boost by casting him as the title creature, the son of a mute servant girl (Yvonne Romain) who was raped by a mad beggar (Richard Wordsworth) who was imprisoned by an excessively cruel Marques (Anthony Dawson) and left to rot in his dungeon for several years. The whole set-up is a major change from the novel, but the boy’s dubious parentage — as well as the fact that he was born on Christmas Day, which is considered an ill omen — is not. That doesn’t come to pass, however, until after Romain has escaped from the Marques and been taken in by a nobleman (Clifford Evans) and nursed back to health by his servant (Hira Talfrey), who is the first to voice concern about her impending due date. She’s also the one who has to take care of the child after his mother dies in childbirth, which is only fair since his father died right after conceiving him.

The next part of the film pretty much comes straight out of Endore’s novel as the child, who has grown into a young boy (Justin Walters), begins changing into a wolf (which he believes is just bad dreams) after he gets his first taste of blood. Evans puts bars on his windows to prevent him from getting out at night and consults a priest whose knowledge of lycanthropy is pretty shaky, but the holy man’s diagnosis that what the boy needs is extra love to counteract his wolfish nature seems to do the trick until he grows up to be Reed and is ready to go out into the world. As befits a young man who needs to stay on the straight and narrow, he goes to work at a winery where he falls in love with the boss’s daughter (Catherine Feller), despite the fact that she’s already engaged to a priggish fop. Their relationship is further doomed when he abruptly resumes his beastly ways after being dragged by a co-worker to a house of ill repute for a night of debauchery. Sure enough, it isn’t long before he’s begging to be put out his misery, but first he has to have one last night on the town — literally.

Unsurprisingly, a great deal of the film goes by before we see Reed in his wolf form. (Then again, Reed himself doesn’t even show up until the film is half over, but he takes command of it once he does.) When we finally do get a look at it, though, it’s quite a stunner — unlike any other werewolf design I’ve ever seen. It’s a pity this film wasn’t a financial success for Hammer, but in a way I’m glad they didn’t drain the life out of the concept, as they did with their other, long-running monster series. This also left the door open for another British company — the short-lived Tyburn Film Productions — to take another stab at Endore’s novel 14 years later.

Not only does 1975’s Legend of the Werewolf have the feel of an old-school Hammer film (the period setting, decent production values on a limited budget, the emphasis on sex and blood), it was even made by a number of Hammer vets, from director Freddie Francis and screenwriter Anthony Hinds (again using his John Elder pseudonym) to star Peter Cushing and supporting player Michael Ripper (who also appeared in The Curse of the Werewolf). It’s no mere retread, though. Rather, Hinds used some of the story elements that hadn’t made it into his previous adaptation and even moved the setting back to Paris (which doesn’t prevent most of the cast from speaking in British accents, but there’s nothing unusual about that).

Cushing gets top billing, but he doesn’t appear until the story is well underway. Instead, the film opens with an orphaned baby being adopted by a pack of wolves and growing into a feral child who is taken in by professional swindler Hugh Griffith, who makes the wolf boy the star attraction in his decidedly low-rent traveling show. Eventually the boy grows up to be a strapping young lad (David Rintoul) who transforms into a hairy beast under the full moon one night and, after making his first kill, hightails it to the city whereupon he immediately lands a job as assistant to grubby, raspy-voiced zookeeper Ron Moody. He also promptly falls in love with prostitute Lynn Dalby, who tries to keep her profession a secret from him with predictable results. Meanwhile, forward-thinking police surgeon Cushing takes an interest when bodies start showing up at the morgue with their throats torn out and investigates the attacks on his own initiative, despite being warned off the case by inspector Stefan Gryff (one of the few actors who even attempts a French accent). As for Ripper, he’s one of Rintoul’s victims, who’s so unfortunate I don’t even think he gets to be discovered by the police.

Since Legend of the Werewolf predates The Howling and An American Werewolf in London by half a decade, its makeup and transformation effects aren’t groundbreaking in any way, but the werewolf does have a great look that holds up well even at the end of the film when the camera settles down and holds on him long enough for us to really study it. And speaking of the ending, this may very well be the first werewolf film on record where the fully transformed creature is still able to speak and be reasoned with. I know there are a number that have come out since where that is the case, but it’s nice to see a werewolf on film that isn’t entirely bestial, that hasn’t completely lost touch with its humanity.