Category: Film, Television & Music

One of the marketing hooks for 1992’s Sleepwalkers was that it was the first time Stephen King had written something directly for the screen. His previous screenplay credits — Creepshow, Cat’s Eye, Silver Bullet, Maximum Overdrive, and Pet Sematary — were all adaptations of existing short stories or novels. Of course, it’s entirely possible King had taken a stab at writing Sleepwalkers in prose form and it had gone unfinished/unpublished, but that seems unlikely considering how hot he was at the time. King could submit his grocery shopping list to a magazine and get it published, so the idea that he had a completed story sitting in a drawer is far-fetched.

At any rate, the movie version of Sleepwalkers is the only one that made it out into the world, so it’s the one that must be judged — and found wanting. For starters, the premise that there are supernatural werecats traveling from town to town sucking the life out of a single virginal female before moving on is faintly ludicrous. Add in the fact that their mortal foes are ordinary house cats that congregate on their lawn (which somehow doesn’t attract their neighbors’ attention) and that they have the ability to go “dim” (their term for cloaking themselves like a Klingon warship), and you have enough to contend with before considering the incestuous nature of their relationship, a detail seemingly lifted from Paul Schrader’s Cat People remake.

The only two Sleepwalkers we meet, for there is speculation they are the last of their kind, are mother/son pair Mary and Charles Brady (Alice Krige and Brian Krause), who enjoy slow dancing to Santo and Johnny’s “Sleepwalk.” First, though, we witness the aftermath of their time in Bodega Bay, California (where Hitchcock’s The Birds takes place). This amounts to an army of dead cats strung up around around their abandoned house and the desiccated corpse of a girl inside. Local cop Mark Hamill (who goes uncredited) is on the scene but isn’t given time to make sense of it because he never reappears. That’s because the Bradys have relocated to Travis, Indiana, where Charles has set his sights on high school student Tanya Robertson (Twin Peaks alum Mädchen Amick).

It seems Tanya is in the same creative writing class as Charles and praises his autobiographical story in a replay of the scene in Carrie where Carrie calls Tommy’s poem beautiful and is roundly mocked by their teacher. Charles and Tanya’s teacher Mr. Fallows (Glenn Shadix, late of Beetlejuice) even shares some of his predecessor’s affectations, but the teacher in Carrie doesn’t meet the same gruesome fate at Fallows when he attempts to blackmail Charles into giving him sexual favors and regrets being so handsy. True, Fallows gets to witness the film’s first transformation effect, but he doesn’t live long enough to tell anyone about it.

Employing primitive morphing effects, the transformations in Sleepwalkers are dated, but Charles and Mary’s feline forms are decent enough. There’s a subtle makeup job and a full-body suit, both of which could stand to be hairier, but they get the job done. Along the way, director Mick Garris (soon to be a King adaptation specialist) recruits the likes of Tobe Hooper, Clive Barker, John Landis, and Joe Dante for one-scene cameos, along with King himself, who plays a harried cemetery caretaker. And considering Ron Perlman was most famous at the time for playing the hirsute Vincent on the TV show Beauty and the Beast, it’s amusing when he pops by as a pushy state police captain who apparently has a history with the local constabulary. (Even though we’re in Indiana and not Maine, Travis is located in Castle County and there is mention of getting backup from nearby Castle Rock.) The real hero of the film, though, is Clovis, the Attack Cat. Like his counterpart in Cat’s Eye, Clovis takes care of the heroine’s supernatural threat with a minimum of fuss. Somebody has to with so many incompetent humans around.

This month’s Full Moon Feature is brought to you by the letter H, as in Hammer House of Horror, a television anthology series that ran for 13 episodes in 1980. Arriving midway through its run, Children of the Full Moon has a bit of a folk horror feel, somewhat akin to 1970’s Robin Redbreast. In that Play for Today, a newly single career woman moves to the country and finds herself at the center of a conspiracy involving the local gamekeeper. In this, a couple on a delayed honeymoon finds themselves in a similar situation when their car breaks down in the proverbial middle of nowhere.

The couple in question are Tom Martin (Christopher Cazenove), a corporate lawyer who’s always on the go, and Sarah (Celia Gregory), who’d like him to stay closer to home more often. Tom’s reward for a job well done is a week at his boss’s cottage, but where they wind up is an isolated house occupied by the kindly Mrs. Ardoy (special guest star Diana Dors) and her brood of unruly children who have the run of the house and the grounds. Thanks to the episode’s cold open, showing a girl singing to herself after taking a bite out of a sheep, we know the kiddies aren’t vegetarians (“The children do like their little bit of meat,” Mrs. Ardoy says), but the threat to Tom and Sarah doesn’t come from them, as they soon discover.

The first half of the story (which only runs 52 minutes) is rife with mounting dread as Tom and Sarah find there’s something off about the place and Mrs. Ardoy says things like, “They never go to bed at normal hours, not our little ones.” When he tries to go back to their car, Tom finds something even more menacing in the woods, which he describes as half-human. “It was covered in gray, spiky fur,” he babbles. “Its hind legs, its eyes… If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have believed it.” Knowing viewers would likely feel the same way, writer Murray Smith and director Tom Clegg give viewers a glimpse of the hairy creature outside the window of their room, which is the most we see him in full makeup.

The second half of the story, which begins with Tom waking up in hospital and Sarah telling him they were in a car crash, is more talky. In fact, much of it spins out of Tom telling his boss Harry (guest star Robert Urquhart) about his strange dreams and the strange ways Sarah has started behaving. At first she’s more amorous and naturally she has begun eating raw meat, but things immediately change when she reveals she’s eight weeks pregnant and cuts him off. Could that have anything to do with their encounter with the Ardoys and the traditional Hungarian festival they were celebrating the night the Martins had their breakdown? Does a wolf howl in the woods?

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.

As this year marks the 45th anniversary of Joe Dante’s The Howling and John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London (among others), I was invited to appear on the Horror 101 with Dr. AC podcast to discuss both of them. (Here’s the link to the episode.) Doing my due diligence, I gave The Howling a re-watch with the commentary by Dante and actors Dee Wallace Stone, Christopher Stone, and Robert Picardo, which was recorded in 1995 for the New Line Home Video laserdisc. (Coincidentally, all three had just appeared in Dante’s Runaway Daughters, made for Showtime the year before and something of a Howling reunion since it also featured Belinda Balaski, Roger Corman, and Dick Miller.)

I didn’t own the laserdisc, but the commentary was ported over to the DVD, which was how I first heard it. I have since upgraded to Scream Factory’s Blu-ray and, most recently, the 4K UHD using the 2021 4K restoration by StudioCanal. With each new edition, the film looks sharper, and a far sight better than my initial exposure to it, renting the pan-and-scan VHS tape from Blockbuster in the early ’90s. I go into this a little on the podcast, but that was less than ideal for several reasons, not the least of which is the fact that the tape was missing the first five minutes or so.

As I recall, the action started abruptly with the shot of Karen White being led out of the porno store by her husband Bill, shell-shocked from having witnessed two things her mind is having trouble processing: serial killer Eddie Quist’s transformation and his subsequent shooting by a trigger-happy patrolman. The meat of the movie was present and accounted for, though, and it left a deep impression on me. The same went for American Werewolf when I rented it the same summer, to the point where I’ve watched both at least a dozen times over the past three decades. Neither of them has come close to getting old for me.

This especially true of The Howling, which is packed to the gills with all kinds of details, movie references, and in-jokes. (No fewer than ten characters are named after the directors of earlier werewolf movies.) It’s a film I’ve written about here, I ran the series for The AV Club, and I included it in an article about “The Year of the (Were-)Wolf” for Crooked Marquee. There is simply no shortage of ways to frame a discussion about it and its importance to the depictions of werewolves on film.

As for its litter mate, people (like me) who bemoan the fact that they’ve never seen An American Werewolf in London on the big screen should be made aware that it will be screened at Regal Cinemas nationwide on Wednesday, May 13, as one of Fangoria‘s “Staff Picks.” I know I’ll be taking advantage of that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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