Category: Film, Television & Music

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.