The Howling (1981)

Joe Dante’s The Howling was released in 1981.

The 80s was a mini-golden age of werewolf movies. It’s not hard to see why. There had been great werewolf movies in the past (The Wolf Man, Hammer’s The Curse of the Werewolf) but the problem had aways been that the look of the werewolves was so disappointing. They looked like guys who were just badly in need of a haircut and a shave. During the gothic horror boom of the 60s and early 70s werewolves were largely ignored. They would have looked too lame.

But by the 80s practical effects and makeup effects had become incredibly sophisticated. This was before CGI. CGI wasn’t needed. By the 80s old school effects could produce a genuinely convincing and terrifying werewolf. The result was movies like An American Werewolf in London (1980), The Company of Wolves (1984) and later, in the 90s, Wolf. And The Howling.

Interestingly enough werewolf movies would soon once more disappear into oblivion. Werewolves are the kinds of creatures that are always going to look lame done with CGI. CGI cannot capture that visceral feel that 80s special effects achieved so well. In The Howling you can almost smell the musky wild animal scent of the werewolves.

The Howling starts off as a scuzzy crime thriller. Newsreader Karen White (Dee Wallace) is helping the police to catch a psycho killer. He’s a media-obsessed psycho killer so he’s made contact with her. They arrange a meeting. Karen will be safe. The cops will be watching. Of course the cops, being cops, make an unholy mess of things. Karen finds herself trapped in an adult bookstore with a crazed killer. She is lucky to escape alive. The killer is gunned down by the cops.

The police have been getting advice from renowned psychiatrist Dr George Waggner (Patrick Macnee). You have to remember that this was the 80s, when people still took psychiatrists and the media seriously.

Karen is badly shaken up. Dr Waggner advises her to go his therapeutic retreat, The Colony. Her husband Bill (Christopher Stone) can accompany her. It’s in the middle of the wilderness. Karen is sceptical. Like any sane person she knows that the countryside is much more dangerous than the city.

The Colony is full of weirdos, perverts, burned-out hippies, drunks, druggies and assorted losers. Karen is not very happy. She’s even less happy when she sets eyes on Marsha (Elisabeth Brooks) and we can’t blame her. One look at Marsha and you know she’s a sexy dangerous bad girl who’s probably a firecracker in bed. Karen is not reassured when she’s told that Marsha is being treated by Dr Waggner for nymphomania.

And Marsha is already casting lustful glances at Karen’s husband. Karen suspects that Marsha will soon be tearing BiIl’s trousers off and that he probably won’t put up much resistance.

Meanwhile Karen’s media friends Chris and Terry have been finding out some disturbing things relating to that now deceased psycho killer.

And that’s before Karen finds out that the woods around The Colony are crawling with werewolves.

This was a fairly low-budget movie (made for $1.1 million dollars). When it was completed Dante realised that the special effects were hopelessly inadequate but luckily was able to pry some more money out of the backers and do some reshoots. The final results are quite impressive.

It’s an example of good low-budget filmmaking. If you only have one werewolf suit but you know what you’re doing you can convince the audience that there are lots of werewolves.

The gore level is moderate.

There’s only one sex scene and it’s great - it convinces us that this man and woman are no longer bound by civilised restraints. They’re werewolves and they’re coupling like wild animals.

The acting is mostly good. I liked Patrick Macnee. He’s playing a psychiatrist so he’s supposed to be weird and creepy, and he leaves us guessing as to whether this is just a regular creepy psychiatrist or a totally evil one.

Elisabeth Brooks as Marsha is not just mysterious, dangerous and sexy but also gives off some seriously wild vibes. She’s like a she-cat on heat. And she looks terrific.

The most interesting thing about his movie is how long it take for the werewolf elements to kick in. First it makes us think it’s a gritty sleazy urban crime drama, then it makes us think it’s a psychos in the woods movie. Don’t worry. Once the werewolf thing gets going there’s plenty of it.

The best thing is that this really feels like a drive-movie. In the best possible way. The Howling is highly recommended.

It looks great on Blu-Ray.

The first of the sequels, Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf, has little connection to the first film but it’s great cinema trash.

The Werewolf and the Yeti (1975)

The Werewolf and the Yeti (La maldición de la bestia) is a 1975 Spanish horror film directed by Miguel Iglesias and starring Paul Naschy and it’s one of the long series of films in which he appeared playing the tragic tortured werewolf Count Waldemar Daninsky. This movie was also released in English-speaking markets as The Curse of the Beast, Hall of the Mountain King and Night of the Howling Beast. Naschy as usual wrote the screenplay.

Waldemar Daninsky is now an anthropologist and he’s part of an expedition, led by Professor Lacombe (Josep Castillo Escalona), to the Himalayas to find the Yeti, the fabled Abominable Snowman. You have to admit that’s a setup that is very promising.

All the passes have been closed by bad weather. All except one. There is a man who knows of a pass open all the year round. The guy is unfortunately not entirely sane. He is haunted by nightmares of the Demons of the Blue Moon. They scare him more than the Yeti. He is however persuaded to act as guide.

The expedition sets off, with half a dozen or so men and two young women plus the guide and a team of sherpas. You’ll be amused to hear that one of the expedition members is named Larry Talbot.

Daninsky and the guide decide to scout out the pass on their own. They are soon lost and Daninsky finds himself alone.

That’s when he finds the cave. There’s some kind of shrine. And two gorgeous babes. The girls are very friendly. Daninsky has a most enjoyable roll in the hay with the girls but then things get weird and scary.

At this point it becomes obvious that the entire Daninsky backstory from the previous films has been scrapped. This is in fact a radical reboot of the franchise, with a brand-new origin story for Waldemar Daninsky the werewolf. It all starts for him in that cave, with those two scary chicks. Scary chicks with sharp teeth.

The expedition is attacked by bandits. There’s an evil warlord named Sekkar Khan (Luis Induni) to whom the bandits seem to be answerable.

More scarily there’s Wandesa (Silvia Solar). She is beautiful, sadistic evil and lustful. She has a dungeon full of babes and her plans for these girls are decidedly unpleasant.

Sekkar Khan is suffering from some horrible disease. Wandesa is trying to cure him. He thinks Professor Lacombe might be able to cure him. That enrages Wandesa. Her power rests on Sekkar Khan’s belief that she is his only hope.

Daninsky is now a werewolf. Professor Lacombe and the two girl members of the expedition are in Sekkar Khan’s hands. Then Daninsky falls into the hands of the arch-villain as well. Of course it isn’t particularly easy to hold a werewolf captive. Despite the wholly new origin story this is still recognisably Waldemar Daninsky - a brave honourable man cursed by a terrible affliction.

The bad news is that this is not really a yeti movie, although a yeti does put it a brief appearance. This is a werewolf movie. The good news is that it’s a very cool werewolf movie.

It also incorporates hints of other genres - women-in-prison movies, lost civilisation stores and mad scientist movies.

There’s plenty of mayhem and a fair bit of nudity. Exploitation movie fans will not be disappointed by this movie.

Naschy’s script is very good. There’s lots going on in this film. There’s that sense of tragedy about Daninsky, there are thrills and chills. And there’s a love story.

There’s a fine arch-villain and a memorable sexy sinister cruel villainess.

It was obviously made on a very modest budget but it looks quite impressive. The transformation scenes are amazingly well done.

The Werewolf and the Yeti is an interesting werewolf movie with some offbeat touches but enough conventional werewolf stuff to keep werewolf fans happy. Later in his career he made another excellent unconventional werewolf movie, The Beast and the Magic Sword (1983).

An under-appreciated Naschy movie. Highly recommended.

This movie is included in Shout! Factor’s Paul Naschy Collection II Blu-Ray set. The transfer is in the 1.33:1 aspect ratio. The transfer looks very nice.

Howling II (1985)

Philippe Mora’s Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf (also known by the much more obvious title Howling II: Stirba - Werewolf Bitch) is a memorable slice of 80s horror trash. It is obviously a sequel to The Howling.

While attending his sister’s funeral Ben (Reb Brown) is angered and disturbed when a mysterious old gentleman named Stefan (Christopher Lee) informs him that his deceased sister was a werewolf.

Reporter Jenny (Annie McEnroe) smells a good story here.

Stefan finally manages to persuade Ben and Jenny that they really are up against werewolves. Not just werewolves, but particularly dangerous werewolves led by the most dangerous of them all, Stirba (Sybil Danning). The three of them set off to Transylvania to confront the powers of darkness.

You know that the werewolves will be found in an old castle, you know the heroine will be captured by the werewolves (to be threatened by a number of fates worse than death), you know there’ll be a showdown in the castle.

This is a pretty conventional werewolf movie but with an 80s sensibility.

It adheres closely to the werewolf lore with which we’re all familiar from earlier werewolf movies, with quite a bit of traditional vampire lore thrown in. There’s a token attempt to make things seem more up-to-date - silver bullets aren’t enough, sometimes only titanium will do the job. But the werewolf hunters make use of garlic, holy water, religious amulets, all the usual stuff. Since this is the 80s they also use guns a lot.

There’s an attempt to add a punk rock vibe, with music by a bad called Babel. Unfortunately the band only seems to have had one song and we hear it over and over again and it becomes incredibly irritating. It’s not a bad song, it’s just over-used.

There’s plenty of gore. The makeup effects are sometimes very effective, sometimes less so, but at least the werewolves look genuinely monstrous rather than looking like cuddly furry teddy bears (which is alas the case in a lot of earlier werewolf movies). At least the makeup effects look better than CGI.

The problem with the werewolf masks is that they were the same ones used in the Planet of the Apes movies. So of course they make people look like were-apes rather than werewolves. Apparently Christopher Lee suggested the solution to this problem. His idea was that when someone is transformed into a wolf they first go through an ape stage. It’s a kind of weird evolution-in-reverse thing which Lee explains in a prologue. This ability to come up with a workable solution to an unsolvable problem is that low-budget film-making is all about and Philippe Mora decided it would add an extra level of craziness.

The supporting cast is OK but this movie has two major assets. The first is Christopher Lee. He brings to the rôle of Stefan that portentousness that he had used to such wonderful effect in Hammer’s The Devil Rides Out. He takes things seriously and the movie needed a central character with some gravitas.

The other major asset is Sybil Danning. She makes a terrific sexy werewolf. I love the costume she wears, which looks like a combination of a suit of armour and bondage gear. And yes, she has some topless scenes.

The movie has a rather sleazy vibe to it, which is fine.

This movie is of course total trash. But it revels in its trashiness. It gets down and wallows in its own trashiness. I like that.

It’s not an overly scary movie. Philippe Mora was aiming for fun rather than trying to make a serious horror movie. There’s plenty of humour, and the humour is intentional.

Mora also wanted to make this a sexy werewolf movie. That’s one of the things that critics hated about it at the time. Hollywood has never been comfortable with sex. Blowing people’s heads off is good clean fun but the sight of boobs is nasty and might traumatise teenagers.

The movie was shot largely on location in Czechoslovakia and those locations look terrific. The room made of human bones is a highlight. It’s also beautifully photographed.

Mora didn’t bother seeing the original movie in the franchise because he didn’t want to make a sequel, he wanted to make his own movie his own way. That was of course the right decision but at the time it upset some fans of the original movie.

This movie is a total romp. Don’t make the mistake of taking it seriously. It’s fast-moving and it has boundless energy.

Howling II is highly recommended.

The Beast and the Magic Sword (1983)

The Beast and the Magic Sword (La bestia y la espada mágic) is a 1983 Spanish-Japanese co-production written and directed by Paul Naschy (under the name Jacinto Molina). It was filmed partly in Spain and partly in Japan.

The story begins in the year 938. The Emperor Otto has defeated the Magyars and has thrown their chieftain Bulcho into a dungeon. Otto is afraid to execute the Magyar - the people believe that doing so will unleash a curse. Bulcho must be killed in single combat and only one man can be sure of doing that - Count Irineus Daninsky. The price Daninsky sets for doing this favour is the hand of Otto’s youngest daughter Iswaka in marriage.

Otto’s plan works and Bulcho is destroyed, and Daninsky marries Iswaka. But they don’t live happily ever after.

There’s one thing Otto has failed to account for - Bulcho’s mistress Armesse. Armesse is a powerful witch and she curses not just Daninsky but all his descendants. The Daninskys will be werewolves, hated and feared.

More than six centuries later the Daninskys are still cursed. Waldemar Daninsky, a distant descendant of Irineus, is a werewolf.

Waldemar is a tortured soul. He is aware of his nature and he is aware of the horrors he has perpetrated. He hates himself and he hates his fate. But what can he do? He cannot be killed.

The only man who might be able to help him is Salom Yehuda but that wise old man falls victim to ignorance and superstition. He does however manage to give Waldejmar some hope - in a distant land called Japan in a city named Kyoto there is a sage named Kian who may be able to cure him. Waldemar and his wife along with Salom Yehuda’s blind niece Esther travel to Japan but finding Kian will not be so easy. And Waldemar has already started to spread death and destruction in Japan.

While Kian is being sought by Waldemar Kian, whose wisdom is well-known, has been asked to investigate the recent spate of brutal killings. Kian is not a superstitious man but he has come to believe that the murders have been carried out by a wolf-man. He has even seen this creature. So Kian is looking for Waldemar.

Kian is not sure that he can cure Waldemar but he intends to try, a decision that has fateful consequences.

Paul Naschy was already an established star (and screenwriter) in Spanish horror cinema when he started directing in 1977. He played a wide variety of horror rôles but it was his many portrayals of the tragic werewolf Waldemar Daninsky which made him a cult icon.

Junko Asahina steals the picture as the evil but seductive sorceress Satomi. Junko Asahina had made quite a few Roman Porno movies for Nikkatsu so being seductive was no problem for her. Shigeru Amachi is very good as the troubled Kian.

It’s easy to see why so many Waldemar Daninsky movies were made. He’s a true tragic monster. He is responsible for the deaths of countless innocent people, but is he really responsible? He’s not sure himself. He was a character who lent himself to horror movies with some complexity. And he presents a real challenge. The audience has to be horrified by his evil deeds but still be able to empathise with the good side of him.

Kian is somewhat complex as well, a wise man who fears that he is not wise enough and that he may be making tragic mistakes. Which to some extent is true. He has been presented with an awesomely difficult problem in trying to save the soul of Waldemar Daninsky and his fears that he is out of his depth may be well-founded. Kian is a samurai as well as a sage so he gets to do plenty of action hero stuff as well. A character who is both action hero and sage is an interesting touch in an 80s horror movie.

There are really two heroes, Daninsky and Kian, although Daninsky is obviously both hero and villain. There’s an excellent out-and-out villain, the samurai Eiko Watanabe (Jirô Miyaguchi), a man who has long been jealous of Kian. And of course there’s the deliciously evil villainess Satomi.

There’s some gore but it’s not too over-the-top and there’s some nudity but not very much.

And since it’s set in Japan you may be wondering - are there are going to be ninjas? The answer is yes. There’s even a girl ninja. And as well as the usual werewolf mayhem there are sword fights.

There is some controversy concerning the correct aspect ratio of this film. It was shot open matte but the guys at Mondo Macabro believe that that it was intended to be shown theatrically in the widescreen format. They’ve solved the problem by providing both 4:3 and 16:9 versions on their Blu-Ray release. Being Mondo Macabro they’ve also provided us with plenty of extras including an audio commentary.

This is perhaps the most satisfying and interesting of all Naschy’s horror movies. The Japanese co-production deal was very successful, the film was made mostly with Japanese money and the budget was much higher than he was used to (and the Japanese producers were very supportive). The sets and costumes are quite lavish. Naschy was at his peak as a director - this is a rather polished movie. The meshing of European folklore and Japanese culture works well. The fight scenes are exceptionally well done. There are really two main characters, Daninsky and Kian, and both are interesting and complex. The tragic nature of the werewolf is handled cleverly and Daninsky is one of several characters whose fates have an element of tragedy to them. Unfortunately after this film Naschy’s career went downhill but The Beast and the Magic Sword remains an impressive achievement. Highly recommended.

The Werewolf (1956)

The 1956 release The Werewolf was another of producer Sam Katzman’s 1950s low-budget horror films, included in Sony’s terrific four-movie Icons of Horror: Sam Katzman Collection. 

The Werewolf is an attempt to update the lycanthropy concept by throwing in some pseudoscience and some 1950s obsessions.

A stranger appears in a small American town somewhere in the mountains. Soon afterwards a grisly murder occurs - the victim’s throat appears to have been ripped out by an animal but a witness says it was a man. Things start to get really worrying when Sheriff’s Deputy Ben Clovey (Harry Lauter) is attacked. He describes his attacker as a kind of wolf-man. 

Pretty soon the town is close to panic and there are lots of guys with rifles running about the woods.

Then a woman turns up, looking for her missing husband. Duncan Marsh had been slightly injured in a minor road accident and treated by two doctors.

We soon discover that the two doctors, Dr Morgan Chambers (George Lynn) and Dr Emery Forrest (S. John Launer) are actually part-time mad scientists. Dr Chambers is convinced that the world is going to be destroyed by radioactive fallout. He and Dr Forrest have developed a vaccine for radiation but it seems to have side-effects. Like turning people into werewolves. In the 1950s radiation was responsible for just about everything from giant killer insects to dandruff, and in this case it is (indirectly at least) responsible for lycanthropy!

The town’s sheriff, Jack Haines (Don Megowan), is a pretty reasonable sort of fellow and he wants if possible to bring in werewolf Duncan Marsh alive. Unfortunately Drs Chambers and Forrest have now arrived in town and they are determined that Duncan Marsh must die so they can continue their vital work.

This is actually a pretty downbeat sort of movie. Poor Duncan Marsh was just some poor slob who was unlucky enough to have a car accident. Now he’s a monster and he’s being hunted down. He’s about as tragic a monster as could be imagined and Steven Ritch’s somewhat overwrought performance goes all out to engage our sympathies.

The fact that everybody in town owns a gun and is at home in the mountains makes this a movie where the monster really has the odds stacked against him big-time. That helps in making the monster even more sympathetic but it also tends to make the werewolf a lot less scary than he should be.

The two mad scientists are interesting, Dr Chambers being a typical idealistic scientist whose obsessions have rendered him totally deranged while Dr Forrest seems like a gentle soul who wouldn’t hurt a fly.

While the movie tries to give werewolves an up-to-date scientific veneer it does add one amusing nod to the classic horror movies of the 30s - it actually includes a villagers with flaming torches scene.

The werewolf makeup looks reasonable and has the advantage of allowing Steven Ritch to show some emotion but the transformation scenes are decidedly dodgy.

There’s plenty of location shooting and the movie in general doesn’t suffer too severely from a low-budget look. Fred F. Sears was not a great director but he does fairly well here, and most importantly the movie is quite well-paced. The climactic scenes on the bridge are reasonably effective.

The transfer is 16x9 enhanced (the movie was shot widescreen) and image quality is excellent.

The Werewolf is a bit lacking in genuine chills but it does follow the pattern established in Universal’s classic The Wolfman in portraying werewolves as victims rather than mere monsters. It’s not a great horror movie but it’s enjoyable enough. Recommended.

The Curse of the Werewolf (1961)

It was of course inevitable that having produced their own very successful versions of Frankenstein and Dracula Hammer would eventually turn their attentions to Universal’s other classic monster subject, the wolf-man. Rather than just remaking The Wolf Man they decided to do something a little bolder - adapting Guy Endore’s interesting and original 1934 novel The Werewolf of Paris. Unfortunately the themes of the book would probably not have lent themselves to Hammer’s approach to gothic horror and the screenplay by Anthony Hinds ended up having almost nothing in common with Endore’s novel.

The screenplay does however come up with a couple of reasonably effective twists on the werewolf idea. Director Terence Fisher was always attracted by stories that presented a conflict between good and evil and Hinds’ screenplay gives him plenty of scope to explore this conflict.

Universal's The Wolf Man established the werewolf as a tragic monster, doomed through no fault of his own. The Curse of the Werewolf follows the same pattern. A serving girl (played by Yvonne Romain) is raped by a beggar in prison. That’s bad enough, but the resulting child is born on Christmas Day, a circumstance that always involves the danger that the child will be exposed to evil influences (the idea being that a child born on the same day and at the same hour as Christ is an insult to Heaven).

The evil influences in this case go back before the conception of the child. It was the brutality and lust of the Marques Siniestro (Anthony Dawson) that began the chain of unfortunate circumstances.

The child is adopted by the kindly Alfredo (Clifford Evans) who gradually becomes aware that there is something amiss with young Leon. A wise and sympathetic priest explains the workings of the curse - a werewolf is a man with a human soul and a wolf spirit constantly at war with each other. The outcome of the struggle is always uncertain, with both damnation and redemption being possible. This is an idea that allows Fisher to explore the good/evil dichotomy in a single individual.

To add to the tragedy, even as a boy Leon is not unaware of the struggle for dominance between good and evil being waged within him. As he grows up he, and everyone around him, tries to pretend that somehow the evil has been averted.

There are plenty of promising ideas here and Fisher makes the most of them.

Oliver Reed plays Leon as a man and of the various rôles he played for Hammer in the early 60s this is the most demanding, and the most rewarding. Reed could be menacing and he could be very dark indeed but he could also be very sympathetic and this part gives him the opportunity to show his full range as an actor. Most importantly Reed has that indefinable quality that makes a true star - the ability to dominate the screen.

While I don’t wish to take anything away from Lon Chaney Jr’s fine performance in The Wolf Man there’s no question that Oliver Reed was the better actor and he adds extra layers of complexity to the doomed hero. One cool thing about this movie is that to play Leon as a boy Hammer found a child actor who looks exactly like a child version of Oliver Reed!

Fisher knew that the problem with any werewolf movie is that even the best werewolf makeup can look a little silly so he wisely refrains from revealing the werewolf until very late in the picture. Most of the horror is portrayed indirectly and as so often this has the effect of making it all the more effective. Suggested rather than overt horror is always more frightening, especially when you’re dealing with a tragic monster. The fact that we don’t see Oliver Reed in the full werewolf makeup until the end helps us to regard Leon as a man and not a mere monster. The makeup effects aren’t spectacular but they do have the advantage of allowing Reed to express emotion. Fisher has enough sense to know that poorly executed transformation scenes have ruined many werewolf movies so he achieves the transformations in stages using cutaways rather than taking the risk of showing them directly.  

Fisher demonstrates his sure touch with the pacing of the film - it starts slowly but gradually accelerates until towards the end it becomes relentless. He also knows that some horror movie clichés should not be avoided - a villagers with flaming torches scene is not a cliché but a much-loved horror movie convention, so he includes one.

This movie was made by Hammer’s A-Team - Terence Fisher directing, Arthur Grant doing the cinematography and Bernard Robinson doing the production design. The result is a classy and stylish gothic horror movie with a fine sense of tragedy. Highly recommended.

Universal have done a good job with the DVD transfer (from their Franchise Collection Hammer Horror Series boxed set). The lack of extras is a little disappointing but the set is excellent value for money.

Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943)

Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man was the first of Universal’s monster rallies, part of a last desperate attempt to flog a dead horse one more time. In spite of the inherent silliness of the idea, it’s a much more entertaining movie than it had any right to be.

It’s supposedly four years after the events described in The Wolf Man, but it seems to take place in an earlier period of history. The Universal monster movies, like the later Hammer gothic films, exist in a kind of imaginary universe of their own so that really doesn’t matter.

Grave robbers have broken into the Talbot family crypt, believing that money and jewels were buried with the body of Larry Talbot. The full moon and the presence of wolfsbane should have given them the clue that this was one grave better left unrobbed but greed gets the better of them, to their cost. The Wolf Man returns to life.

A few days later Larry Talbot wakes up in a Cardiff hospital. His surprise at being alive soon gives way to despair as he realises the awful truth - that he cannot die. Which is unfortunate because all he wants is to die.

He searches for someone who can help him die. He finds the gypsy woman Maleva, the mother of the man who turned him into a werewolf. She can’t help him but she tells him there is a man who might be able to - the famous Dr Frankenstein. He finds Frankenstein’s castle but is again disappointed - the villagers have razed the castle in order to destroy both Dr Frankenstein and his monster. In the vault of the castle he discovers that the villagers’ act of destruction was not as complete as they’d thought. He discovers the monster, encased in ice.

Believing that the monster can tell him where Dr Frankenstein papers are hidden and that these papers contain the secret of life and death that he is seeking he frees the monster. The papers are nowhere to be found.

Larry Talbot is not prepared to give up and finds Dr Frankenstein’s daughter, and eventually he finds the scientist’s diary. He has found another ally in his quest for death, the doctor who treated him in the hospital, Dr Frank Mannering. Dr Mannering restores Frankenstein’s laboratory but the results are not quite what he or Larry Talbot had hoped for.

That the movie works as well as it does is due to the fact that it was made by talented people. Curt Siodmak had written the screenplay for The Wolf Man and although his screenplay for this sequel is not as good it does contain some interesting ideas.

Roy William Neill directed Universal’s Sherlock Holmes movies and the gift for suspense and the moody gothic atmosphere that helped to make those films so hugely successful are present here as well. He was a B-movie director, but a very very good one. George Robinson’s marvelous black-and-white cinematography is another major plus. Plus of course there’s Jack Pierce doing the makeup again. The transformation scenes are better than those in The Wolf Man. All in all this is technically a very fine movie with some great moments. The revelation of the monster behind the ice wall is a highlight.

Lon Chaney Jr once again gives a sensitive and moving performance as the unfortunate Larry Talbot. Patric Knowles as Frank Mannering and Ilona Massey as Dr Frankenstein’s daughter are both good. Lionel Atwill is somewhat wasted as the village’s surprisingly sensible mayor. Making a mad scientist with Lionel Atwill in the cast and then not casting him as the mad scientist is an odd choice but there is a reason for it. Frank Mannering is not a mad scientist as such, just a conscientious doctor whose scientific curiosity tempt him into making bad decisions and Patric Knowles gives the right performance. Dr Mannering has to be young and with the right combination of dedication and youthful lack of judgment.

Bela Lugosi is completely wasted as the monster. This was his last performance for Universal and it’s not difficult to see why he thought that even working for Poverty Row studio Monogram had to be better than being treated the way Universal treated him in the 40s.

This movie is made with a degree of skill that the material doesn’t really deserve but it’s thoroughly enjoyable silliness.

The DVD transfer in the Wolf Man Legacy set is exceptionally good.

She-Wolf of London (1946)

If you were going to teach a course in how not to make a horror movie She-Wolf of London would be the ideal teaching aid. This 1946 Universal clunker ticks just about all the bad movie boxes.

Few things are more annoying than a horror movie that turns out not to be a horror movie because there aren’t really any supernatural elements, it’s really just a murder mystery. But there is one thing more annoying - a movie of that type where it’s obvious from the start that there’s not really anything supernatural happening. And there’s one thing that is worse still - a movie of that type where the solution to the murder mystery is painfully obvious right from the start. And that’s She-Wolf of London.

And this movie’s problems don’t end there, as we shall see.

Phyllis Allenby (June Lockhart) is an heiress who lives with her aunt and her cousin in London around 1900. Only they’re not really her aunt and her cousin. Aunt Martha (Sara Haden) was her father’s housekeeper. After Phyllis’s parents died Aunt Martha and her daughter Carol (Jan Wiley) continued living in the house although Phyllis still thinks they’re her relatives.

Unfortunately we’re told all this right at the start, an example of extraordinarily clumsy and inept writing, because the only hope of maintaining any suspense would have been to keep this knowledge from the audience.

Phyllis is engaged to Barry Lanfield (Don Porter), a wealthy young professional type. Phyllis is rather hesitant about the marriage though, on account of the Allenby Curse. We’re never told very much about the Allenby Curse except that it apparently involves lycanthropy. As a result Phyllis fears that she may be a werewolf. When she wakes up in the morning with mud caked on her shoes and blood stains and doesn’t remember anything she becomes more convinced she must indeed be a werewolf. In fact she believes she’s responsible for several recent attacks in the nearby park, attacks that were blamed on dogs.

Detective Latham from Scotland Yard has no doubt that a werewolf was responsible, although there’s little evidence to suggest such an outlandish explanation. Barry Lanfield on the other hand is certain that Phyllis could not possibly be a werewolf and he starts investigating the case privately.

I won’t reveal anything further but really the solution to the mystery has already been revealed through some very ham-fisted plotting.

Apart from its other deficiencies She-Wolf of London suffers from some unfortunate casting choices. No audience is ever going to believe for one moment that Phyllis is really a werewolf - she’s much too insipid and too timid. There are other casting problems as well, especially Sara Haden as Aunt Martha, but since I try not to reveal spoilers I won’t say any more about her. Lloyd Corrigan as Detective Latham is essentially comic relief and he’s not too bad. Don Porter is an adequate and reasonably likeable hero.

George Bricker wrote the screenplay and is therefore largely responsible for this movie’s utter failure. The terrible script combined with the badly miscast female lead really gave director Jean Yarbrough nothing to work with. It’s actually a reasonably well-made movie. Production values are quite high for what was very much a B-movie and there are some effectively atmospheric moments. The scenes in the mist-shrouded park are the kinds of wonderfully artificial scenes, obviously done on a sound stage, that I find to be for me are one of the more enjoyable features of the Universal horror movies of this era. It’s a very bad movie, but it’s a good-looking bad movie.

It’s part of Universal’s Wolf Man Legacy DVD set and the transfer is extremely good. There are no extras, Universal possibly feeling that the less said about this one the better!

Werewolf of London (1935)

Werewolf of London was Universal’s first attempt at a werewolf movie, in 1935. I believe it was not quite the first ever werewolf movie but it was the movie that first presented the werewolf to movie audiences in a fully developed form.

Universal had planned an earlier werewolf film that never got off the ground.

What makes Werewolf of London so interesting is that most of what we think of as werewolf lore was invented by Curt Siodmak in his screenplay for Universal’s 1941 classic The Wolf Man. Werewolf of London presents us with an earlier and slightly different kind of werewolf lore.

Dr Wildred Glennon (Henry Hull) is an English botanist who travels to Tibet in search of an unusual and exceedingly rare plant, the Mariphasa lupino lumino. He is attacked by a mysterious and rather beast-like figure but escapes with nothing more serious than a few cuts.

Back in England he sets to work to study this strange plant. He has built an extraordinary device that mimics the light of the moon and this is going to prove essential since the Mariphasa only blooms in moonlight. He receives a visit from the enigmatic Dr Yogami (Warner Oland) who spins him an outlandish tale of werewolves. Dr Yogami claims that the juice of the Mariphasa plant is the only antidote to a condition known as lycanthrophobia and warns Glennon that two souls are in mortal peril if he is not prepared to share the Mariphasa plant with him. Glennon dismisses all this as nonsense.

Soon however Glennon makes the unpleasant discovery that Yogami’s story might be true after all, and finds that he is indeed turning into a werewolf. The mysterious figure that attacked him in Tibet had been Yogami, and Yogami has now infected Glennon with the lycanthrophobia from which he himself suffers.

Unfortunately the only three blooms of the Mariphasa have been stolen from his laboratory. He remembers Dr Yogami’s warning that the werewolf instinctively seeks to kill that which it most loves, and Glennon fears for the safety of his wife Lisa.

A series of murders now sweeps London, with the victims showing signs of having been mauled by a wild animal. Dr Glennon strives desperately to find a way to escape his fate and to save Lisa but it may be too late.

It has been suggested that this film represents a lost opportunity, and that with a better director and a better cast it could have been a true horror classic. There’s no question that Stuart Walker proves to be a fairly pedestrian director. There’s also no question that it would have been a far better movie had Boris Karloff been cast as Dr Glennon (Universal had in fact planned to a werewolf movie starring Karloff as far back as 1932). Karloff would have brought to the role the right combination of obsessiveness, stubbornness, decency and kindliness, along with real menace as the werewolf. Henry Hull manages the obsessiveness and the stubbornness but he projects very little human warmth and as a result we feel less sympathy for him than we should.

It has also been suggested that Bela Lugosi would have been a better choice to play Dr Yogami. Lugosi in fact would have been perfect for this part but personally I like Warner Oland’s performance a great deal.

Werewolf of London has some major flaws and lacks the dramatic intensity and the sense of tragedy of The Wolf Man. Despite these flaws and despite having received a fairly bad press over the years it also has some very real strengths. The werewolf makeup by Jack Pierce is first-rate and is actually better and more effectively bestial than the makeup he created for The Wolf Man. The early scenes in Tibet are excellent and the first transformation scene is one of the best I’ve ever seen and very cleverly done as Dr Glennon passes behind a series of pillars, each time coming back into view with the transformation more advanced. The moon machine is also very cool.

The film’s greatest asset is that it incorporates so many good ideas and while it doesn’t quite do those ideas full justice it’s still a considerably better movie than its reputation would suggest. If you happen to be a real fan of werewolf movies then it’s absolutely essential viewing.

The DVD presentation in Universal’s Wolf Man Legacy set is very impressive.

The Wolf Man (1941)

The Wolf Man was not the first werewolf movie, it was not even Universal’s first werewolf movie, but it was the movie that put werewolves on the map cinematically speaking. It created the template on which most future werewolf movies would be based.

While Universal liked to claim the movie took its inspiration from European folklore the truth is that screenwriter Curt Siodmak made most of it up. In doing so he created the werewolf legend that was to become so familiar.

Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr) is the second son of an English baronet, Sir John Talbot (Claude Rains). Being the second son he could not expect to inherit either the estate or the title and feeling that his father cared little for him he packed his bags and moved to the United States. As a result of the unexpected death of Sir John’s eldest son everything has changed. Larry has returned to the family seat, although perhaps more out of a vague sense of family duty than any great enthusiasm. Nonetheless when Sir John suggests they should forget the past he is prepared to do so and to try to accept his position as heir with good grace.

When he meets Gwen Conliffe (Evelyn Ankers) he starts to feel more enthusiastic about his prospects. He is immediately attracted to her and, although she is engaged to Sir John’s head gamekeeper it’s clear that she fees at least some interest in him as well.

All is going well until fate steps in. He visits a gypsy camp, accompanied by Gwen and Gwen’s friend Jenny Williams. Jenny wants to have her fortune read. The gypsy Bela (Bela Lugosi) becomes very agitated when he looks at her palm and tells her to flee. Moments later Larry sees Jenny attacked by a wolf and goes to rescue her. In doing so he is bitten by the wolf. He kills the wolf but the only body that is found is the body of the gypsy Bela.

Bela was of course a werewolf, and now that is to be Larry’s destiny as well. There is no escape.

The story behind the movie is as interesting as the movie itself. Curt Siodmak’s original script had the Larry Talbot character as an American named Larry Gill who was no relation to Sir John Talbot. He has simply come to Britain to install a telescope. More importantly, this first version suggested that Larry may have simply believed he was a werewolf but left the question as to whether he really transformed into a wolf ambiguous. There are still traces of this early version in the final film. Sir John Talbot believes his son is suffering from a delusion brought on by shock, and that the werewolf is a metaphor for the dark side of the human personality, a metaphor that has become real in Larry’s mind.

While that version could have made an interesting film, and in fact that very idea is the basis for the superb Val Lewton-produced Cat People made at RKO the following year. Universal however made the correct decision to ask Siodmak to rewrite the script to make the werewolf real. That is after all what Universal’s audience would have expected. The Lewton films took a very different approach to horror, but both approaches are valid in their own way.

This is one of Lon Chaney Jr’s finest performances. He makes Larry Talbot a very sympathetic character indeed and this is the key to the movie’s great success. He is the most tragic of all the Universal monsters, a man who has done nothing whatever to deserve his fate. Chaney manages to convey this without resorting to cheap sentimentality.

Claude Rains is excellent as always, the only problem being that I don’t think anybody could possibly believe that Lon Chaney Jr could be his son. Two men more physically dissimilar would be difficult to imagine. Bela Lugosi is shamefully under-utilised but makes the most of his brief screen time.

George Waggner might not have been the world’s most inspired director but he’s competent enough and he certainly understands how to pace a horror film.

Cinematographer Joseph Valentine and art director Jack Otterson combine to make this a visually very satisfying movie. Otterson’s forest set, built on a sound stage, is superb. It look outrageously artificial, giving the movie the feel of a dark fairy tale or a story out of legend. Jack Pierce’s wolf man makeup is the one element that in the past has caused me to have a problem with this movie. It’s not really very wolf-like, but I’ve finally learnt to accept it and to enjoy the movie’s other very considerable strengths.

A movie that works wonderfully well as a horror film but with more emotional punch than most of Universal’s monster flicks.

The DVD from the Wolf Man Legacy set looks very good and includes a documentary and commentary track.