Category: Film, Television & Music

By the end of the ’70s, werewolf movies were fairly thin on the ground and very much in need of new blood (or at the very least, a novel way of transforming men into monsters). There was one throwback, however, that managed to make a killing on the drive-in circuit without ever venturing north of the Mason-Dixon Line — and without breaking new ground in any other way. Written and directed by first-timer Worth Keeter and produced by Earl Owensby, 1979’s generically titled Wolfman has a vaguely Southern Gothic atmosphere (various reference books list its setting as 1910 Georgia, but the film itself isn’t so specific on that point) and stars Owensby as Colin Glasgow, the “worldly” cousin who’s called home for the funeral of his elderly father. Seems there’s a curse on his family and Colin’s aunt and uncle, Elizabeth and Clement Glasgow (Maggie Lauterer and Richard Dedmon), would much rather it fall on him than either one of them. Good thing for them that they have Satan-worshiping priest Reverend Leonard (Edward Grady) on their side.

Soon after his arrival at the estate, Colin starts having Vaseline-smeared nightmares which cause him to wake up in a cold sweat (and show off his naturally hairy chest and back). He also hooks up with old flame Lynn (Kristina Reynolds) and consults with family doctor Dr. Tate (Sid Rancer), who confirms there’s something strange going on. With all the repetitious dialogue and endless scenes of Colin riding around in his horse-drawn carriage (Owensby paid for it, so they obviously decided to shoot the hell out of it), it’s nearly an hour before he changes into the title character and goes on his first rampage which, when discovered, elicits the usual bewildered reactions from the authorities. (“It wasn’t anything human that killed them. Some kind of animal got them.” “I can’t say this looks like the work of any ordinary animal.”) It also produces the usual headlines about animal attacks, but I loved the ancillary story on the front page of the prop newspaper with the headline “CHURCH HOMECOMING DISRUPTED BY BEES.”

Without much further ado, Colin transforms a second time with the aid of quick lap-dissolves and, after chomping on his greedy relatives, is pursued by a trigger-happy posse. That doesn’t prevent him from picking a few of them off and evading capture until sunrise, when he transform back into a man. While Colin languishes in jail, Lynn and Dr. Tate confront Reverend Leonard, which immediately puts Lynn in peril (and leads to a foot chase through a cemetery over which some unmistakably modern electrical wires are strung). Will Colin escape in time to save her? And will he get to transform one last time while doing so? I wouldn’t dream of spoiling the ending of a good movie, but yes, he does both of those things.

Just as having a sizable budget is no guarantee of making a good werewolf movie, having a miniscule one doesn’t automatically mean you’re going to turn out a bad one. If you make the right creative decisions and spend what little money you have wisely — and make sure your script is good enough to compensate for any shortcomings in the effects department — it’s possible to make a werewolf movie on a shoestring that isn’t a complete embarrassment. Unfortunately, that’s precisely what Adam R. Steigert’s FANG is, which is doubly baffling because it’s not his first feature (which would be understandable), but rather his seventh (with a few shorts thrown in for bad measure).

Based in Buffalo, New York, where FANG (yes, the title is in all caps) had its premiere last October, Steigert has been pumping out low-budget genre flicks at a rapid clip for the past decade, often acting as his own cinematographer and editor in addition to his writing and directing duties, which he frequently shares with others. From the start, he’s set most of his movies in the same fictional town known variously as Metzburg, Metsburg, Metzburgh, or Metsburgh. However it’s spelled, the town figures into FANG since it’s the destination of strung-out junkie Joe (Theo Kemp) and his equally strung-out but not strung-out-looking girlfriend Chloe (Melodie Roehrig), who knows of the proverbial house “in the middle of nowhere” where they can hide out after murdering a stranger for drug money. While walking to Metz/sburg/h, Joe and Chloe encounter Chris and Shelly (Jason John Beebe and Jennie Russo), a bickering couple on their way to a wedding whose vehicle has broken down and who grudgingly tag along with them until they get to Chloe’s relatives’ house, which is when things really start going sideways for all concerned.

For starters, creepy caretaker Harold (second-billed Gregory Blair, whose character’s last name is never spoken, but is listed in the credits as Pinter, an in-joke that makes next to no sense since there’s little about his character that is Pinteresque) informs them they can’t call anyone for help because “The Crowleys don’t really believe in phones.” They do, however, believe in having every door in their house locked at all times, a plot point Steigert immediately bungles because the set of clanking keys Harold carries around are too large to fit the one door we see that has a lock, and none of the others even have keyholes. Since that’s a detail that figures heavily into the script (which Steigert wrote with his wife Kristin), that definitely should have been caught during the location scout.

After the interminable build-up, Doris and Roy Crowley (top-billed Melantha Blackthorne and “and ____ as” Patrick Mallette) arrive on the scene 23 minutes in and proceed to up the eccentricity factor significantly with their mannered performances and theatrical old-age makeup. Once they’ve thoroughly grossed out their reluctant guests during dinner and sequestered Joe in his room — which apparently leads to the basement, where he eventually finds editor Christopher Burns Jr. chained up in his underwear and being force-fed human remains — the Crowleys show their true colors and begin picking the interlopers off. Any viewers hoping to get a good look at their transformed state had better have the pause button handy, though, because they’re the “blink and you’ll miss them” kind of monsters.

Periodically, Steigert cuts away from the Crowley house to the half-assed police investigation of the opening murder, which leads the portly sheriff to consult with retired beat cop and full-time crackpot William Sanders (Michael O’Hear, reprising his role from Steigert’s sophomore feature, 2009’s Gore), who’s remarkably active for someone with stage-three cancer and three months to live. His cancer-rich blood turns out to be a better weapon against the Crowleys than silver bullets, even, although he has to be bitten by one of them for this to be discovered, and anyone who’s seen a werewolf movie before knows what that means. Oh, and did I forget to mention the part where he and Chloe go to Joe’s dealer (whose name, I shit you not, is Christmas Eve) for backup and he just happens to know a guy who knows how to make silver bullets? Yeah, FANG is that kind of movie. It’s also the kind of movie that closes with the message that two of its characters “will return in The Horrific Evil Monsters,” which is currently filming. Based on the evidence of this one, that’s more of a threat than a promise.

Released in the midst of the 1981 werewolf movie boom that yielded Full Moon High, The Howling, and An American Werewolf in London in quick succession, Wolfen is often lumped in with them in spite of the fact that its supernatural wolf creatures are emphatically not shapeshifters. The first of three Whitley Strieber books adapted for the screen (the other two being the modern-day vampire tale The Hunger in 1983 and the alien abduction trip Communion in 1989), Wolfen was co-written and directed by Michael Wadleigh, then most famous for making the documentary Woodstock. Not the most obvious proving ground for a horror filmmaker, but his background does lend the film a sense of realism that it shares with such contemporary urban fare as Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45, Sidney Lumet’s Prince of the City, and William Friedkin’s Cruising, to name a few.

With key scenes filmed in the shadow of the World Trade Center and in sight of the Statue of Liberty, Wolfen announces itself as a New York movie through and through. But just as Wadleigh was an unconventional choice for director, so too was his choice of leading man: British-born Albert Finney, who is nevertheless convincing as semi-retired police detective Dewey Wilson, who’s called in to investigate a puzzling triple homicide involving a super-rich real estate developer. (It’s never stated precisely why Dewey is on leave, but he’s told the reason his captain wants him on the case is because “It’s very weird and it’s very strange, just like you.”)

In the early going, Wadleigh keeps much of the gruesomeness off-screen. True, the developer’s Haitian bodyguard gets disarmed in the most literal fashion, but we’re spared the sight of his trophy wife’s head falling off when the police are taking in the crime scene the following morning. Later on, when a junkie picks the wrong spot to “get straight,” we actually get to see his throat torn out and heart unceremoniously dropped on the ground, but because Wadleigh is unable to reveal who or what is responsible for these acts, it’s impossible for them to register as anything other than quick shocks. In fact, the most effective jump scare in the film was manufactured in the editing room by zooming out from a blowup of Dewey looking out on what he doesn’t realize is the Wolfen’s hunting grounds. That can’t necessarily be attributed to Wadleigh, though, because he isn’t responsible for the final shape of the film, which was worked on by no fewer than four editors, some of whom came onto the project after he was unceremoniously kicked off it.

Supporting the late Finney is a uniformly great cast including Gregory Hines as a coroner who throws Dewey a curve by ruling out metal weapons and introducing him to eccentric zoologist Ferguson (Tom Noonan), who identifies the hairs found on the victims as being from the species canis lupus. Ferguson also makes the first connection between wolves and Native Americans, which leads Dewey to Eddie Holt (Edward James Olmos), a militant high-steel worker who casually tells Dewey he can “shift with the best of them.” “Shift?” Dewey asks. “Shapeshift,” Eddie clarifies. “We do it for kicks.” In short order, Dewey watches as Eddie undergoes an esoteric ritual where he accepts a ceremonial necklace, goes to the beach to strip, makes paw prints in the sand with his knuckles, and howls at the moon. He doesn’t physically change, though, which surely disappointed anybody expecting a Rick Baker or Rob Bottin-style transformation. “It’s all in the head!” he shouts in Dewey’s face, leaving an impression on the hard-nosed cop nonetheless.

When Wadleigh finally gets around to showing the Wolfen, the big reveal is somewhat underwhelming since they’re played by ordinary wolves (albeit spookily lit ones). The other area where Wolfen comes up short is the domestic terrorism subplot that takes up too much time for something that turns out to be a red herring. Its only benefit is giving Dewey a foil in psychologist Rebecca Neff (Broadway actress Diane Venora making her screen debut), who’s working for the security company that dropped the ball at the beginning of the film. Even she turns out to be largely superfluous, though, disappearing for long stretches without really being missed. It’s possible Venora had a lot more scenes that got lost in the editorial shuffle, but at least she’s around for the climactic standoff between Dewey and the Wolfen, which made sure Hines and Noonan couldn’t say the same.

A recent film that may be off the radar for most werewolf aficionados is the Estonian-made November, an adaptation of the popular novel Rehepapp by Andrus Kivirähk. (Well, it’s popular in Estonia.) Written for the screen and directed by Rainer Sarnet, November contrasts its bleak, medieval landscapes (filmed in luminous black and white by cinematographer Mart Taniel) with the fantastical creatures its inhabitants come into contact with on a regular basis. The first, in fact, is a wolf that a young woman named Liina (Rea Lest) either turns into or merely has a deep psychological link with. (There’s sufficient evidence for either interpretation.) And she’s not the only one with such tendencies because later on a German baroness (Jette Loona Hermanis) found sleepwalking by her father is told she can’t help herself. “It’s your illness,” he says. “There’s a full moon tonight.” Perhaps she’s simply going out in search of her peasant counterpart.

At any rate, the two women are part of an unrequited love triangle since Liina believes she’s destined to marry the strapping young Hans (Jörgen Liik), about the only age-appropriate suitor for her in the village. (Liina’s father repeatedly tries to pawn her off on a much older man, an arrangement she forcefully shrugs off.) Meanwhile, once Hans catches sight of the baroness he’s instantly, hopelessly smitten, inspiring both him and Liina to resort to desperate remedies. While she goes to a witch to reclaim Hans and comes to believe her only option is to kill her rival, he meets the Devil at a crossroads and exchanges his soul for one for a snowman he has built that gives him advice (which, it turns out, is mostly unhelpful).

Far from being a figure of childlike whimsy, the snowman is but one of many beings in the film called kratts that are made out of farming equipment and imbued with life (or at the very least locomotion) so they can perform menials tasks for their masters. Unnervingly enough, the first one Sarnet shows us is three scythes fastened together with an animal skull at the center, and the first thing it does is steal its master’s cow and take flight, ferrying the bewildered animal through the air like a helicopter until both come crashing down. You know the saying idle hands do the Devil’s work? Well, idle kratts are pushy about asking for jobs (“A kratt needs to work” is their mantra), and if one’s master is slow to find things to occupy them, they’re liable to have their throat slit in the middle of the night.

In addition to witches, werewolves, kratts, and the Devil, November also features ghosts that come visit their families on All Souls’ Day. Instead of being formless spirits, though, they’re strangely corporeal, capable of eating, sleeping, and using saunas, all of which are prepared for them by their dutiful living kin. Even stranger, when the beasts (as Liina’s father calls them) enter a sauna, they become human-sized chickens, an amusing effect Sarnet accomplishes by placing regular-sized chickens in a model set. That kind of lo-fi approach to realizing the supernatural serves the film well, giving its most outlandish conceits a necessary grounding. By the time the plague arrives in town (first in the form of a beautiful woman before changing to a goat and a pig) and the proscribed remedy is for everyone to gather in a barn, take off their pants and wear them on their heads (because, as the village elder says, “The plague will think we have two asses and won’t dare to touch us”), it sounds downright reasonable.

The past couple years have seen a sharp uptick in the number of Paul Naschy films getting Blu-ray upgrades, along with some that had never even seen the light of day on DVD in the States. (Such was the case with 1975’s The Werewolf and the Yeti, a.k.a. Night of the Howling Beast, put out as part of Scream Factory’s The Paul Naschy Collection II set last year.) So it seems like it’s only a matter of time before a company like Mondo Macabro or Scream Factory does the same for the elusive The Beast and the Magic Sword.

Made in 1983, the Spanish/Japanese co-production was Naschy’s last hurrah as Waldemar Daninsky — at least for the next 13 years — and found him sending the cursed Polish count to feudal Japan in search of a cure for his condition. As usual, how he came by it is completely different from how he got cursed in any of the previous installments, but Naschy (who wrote and directed) dispenses with the particulars rather quickly, so I will, too.

Back in 10th-century Germany, one of Waldemar’s heavily bearded ancestors (also played by Naschy) defeated a fierce Magyar warrior (who was said to be the devil, a shapeshifter, and a vampire) in single combat and was allowed to marry the king’s youngest daughter. Unfortunately, this pissed off the warrior’s mistress, a witch who puts a very specific and easily avoidable curse on his family since it only affects the seventh-born son and only if they’re born during the first night of the full moon. “The Daninskys will be a race of murderers, hated and persecuted forever!” the witch cries, not taking into account that they could simply stop having children when they get to six.

Anyway, when we pick up in the action in the late 16th century, Waldemar and the love of his life, Kinga (Beatriz Escudero), are in Toledo, Spain, consulting with Jewish occult expert Salom Yehuda (Conrado San Martín) and his blind niece Esther (Violeta Cela) when the townspeople denounce the lot of them for practicing witchcraft. Even worse, some of the locals decide to save the Grand Inquisitor a trip, throw some makeshift hoods on, and descend upon Salom’s home, mortally wounding him before Waldemar (still in human form) can fight them off. It is at this point that Salom sends them on to Kyoto, making Waldemar Esther’s protector in the bargain.

Once the action shifts to Japan (about 23 minutes in), things pick up considerably, especially in the werewolf attack/transformation department. (There are eight of them, but the first one doesn’t really count since it’s entirely shot from Waldemar’s point of view.) Curiously enough, we meet Kian (Shigeru Amachi), the man Waldemar is trying to find, before he does, and it is Kian who tracks the weary werewolf back to his den. Instead of turning him in to the authorities, Kian agrees to help him find a cure, but his first formula, which uses the leaves of a certain Tibetan snow flower, fails to do the trick. In desperation, Waldemar goes to sorceress Satomi (Junko Asahina), who gives him a potion and locks him in a chamber where he transforms in the most low-tech way possible (in the wake of The Howling and American Werewolf, I guess Naschy decided he just couldn’t compete on that level) and does battle with a tiger named Shere Khan. (This is the image that’s on the poster, so I’m glad the film delivers on the promise of a werewolf in paw-to-paw combat with a tiger.)

As for Satomi, she threatens to do nasty things to Kinga and Esther and keeps Waldemar at bay with a silver katana (the magic sword of the title), which Kian later retrieves so he can be put out of his misery. However, it’s up to Kian’s sister Akane (Yôko Fuji) to do the deed because the killing stroke has to be delivered by somebody who loves Waldemar or else it won’t take. Not that I really believe it will. I’ve seen enough of these pictures (ten of the eleven that are extant) to know a dead Waldemar Daninsky is only a few keystrokes away from getting resurrected at will. It’s the nature of the beast.

Since the full moon falls on Thanksgiving this year, I figured I’d highlight a slightly different kind of movie in this month’s column. While there’s no such thing as a movie about a wereturkey, there is 1972’s Blook Freak, which TCM’s Robert Osborne once sheepishly described as being about “a motorcycle enthusiast who’s turned into a blood-crazed turkey man.” Written, produced and directed by the dream team of Brad F. Grinter (who did the same jobs on 1970’s Flesh Feast and Devil Rider!) and Steve Hawkes (a Croatian-born actor who made this in between stints in a couple Tarzan knock-offs), Blood Freak presents itself as a cautionary tale about the dangers of taking illegal drugs and eating non-FDA-approved foodstuffs.

Hawkes plays Herschell, a ramrod-straight Vietnam vet who finds himself torn between a Bible-quoting drug counselor who gets him work doing odd jobs at a poultry ranch and her hedonist sister who gets him hooked on weed that has been laced with something to make it addictive. That would be bad enough, but since one of his odd jobs at the turkey farm involves eating what the guys in the laboratory cook up, the end result after one of the tests is Herschell’s transformation into a man wearing a rubber turkey mask and a ruff of feathers around his neck. Oh, yes. And he craves blood, which he gets by waylaying drug addicts and pushers and killing and mutilating them. These scenes are accompanied by a repetitive musical sting and one scream that is looped over and over. (Actually, there are two: one female and one male. Neither is particularly convincing.) Meanwhile, the sister who got him hooked feels guilty about what she’s done and worries needlessly about what their children would look like (as if she’s actually contemplating taking Mr. Turkey to bed).

Finally Herschell is put out of his misery by being beheaded (which Grinter and Hawkes depict by cutting to footage of an actual turkey with its head cut off), but it all turns out to be a dream (“My God,” Herschell moans, “I’ve been hallucinating. After eating that turkey, I went through hell.”), which is even more of a cop-out ending than it sounds. As if to further illustrate their contempt for the audience, Grinter and Hawekes periodically cut away to a narrator (played by an uncredited Grinter, obviously reading from a script) who recites deathless lines like “You ever think about this fantastic order of things? And how far does it go?” between drags on his cigarette, and actually goes into a coughing fit right before the final fade-out. Because why would you bother with a second take on something like that? It would only be a waste of film.

Note: This movie is real. I swear I did not make it up. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.