Month of the Werewolf - Two Comedies and a Biker Flick

 

A few to catch up with from the past few days.

 

 

  First up, La Casa del Terror (The House of Terror, 1960). Jumping backwards in time a little bit, my next werewolf film was meant to be Face of the Screaming Werewolf (1964) which is just a brilliant title. I want to see a film with that title, but just not this particular one as it’s a cut and shut job, like a dodgy car. Two Mexican films were stitched together to create what is said to be an incoherent mess that just takes advantage of the fact that Lon Chaney Jr appeared in one of the two films, while much of the rest of that film was removed. And it’s dubbed, so thaty  knocked it from the list. What remained, though, was an interest in the original film, a Mexican comedy horror in which Chaney appeared, La Casa del Terror.

   A comedy vehicle for German Valdez, popularly known as Tin Tan, appearing as Casimiro, the night guard in a wax museum which also happens to be run by a mad scientist. The filmmakers persuaded Lon Chaney Jr to appear as an obvious Wolf Man imitation, not just any old werewolf, but with the added bonus of him being a Mummy as well, a blend that the US distributors of Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror (1968) failed to achieve. This one embraces the absurdity and tropes of its predecessors, complete with a King Kong reference, as the Wolf Man (clearely not Chaney at this moment) scales a city building with his unconscious damsel over his shoulder, only to reach the top and then use the stairs to get back down again, achieving very little. The villain of the piece, the mad Professor Sebastian (Yerye Beirute), who bears more than a passing resemblance to Boris Karloff, with yet another plan to reanimate corpses to dominate the world.

 

  Above all, this is an obvious vehicle for Tin Tan, who does no favours to the horrid stereotype of Mexicans being lazy and eating too much. Chaney is clearly tired and was not happy with playing a Wolf Man again. His performance veers directly into tragic Talbot territory (literally the same performance) but without any dialogue, and his make-up looks like a poor man’s version of Pierce’s design, which leads to the feeling that the filmmakers wanted to simply have Universal’s character in their film. The only effective horror scene is where he is silently stalking Casimiro’s girlfriend, Paquita (Yolanda Varela), with visual reference to the stalking scene in Cat People (1942), and this continues into her apartment with some nice tension, but it all falls apart when he is revealed to her, featuring a terrible and slow “attack” scene. It’s entertaining enough with an agreeable balance between Tin Tan’s comedy and the horror plotline. But I felt terribly sorry for Chaney here, he's not in good shape and this part does little for any sense of dignity.

 

 

You can’t get much more of an exploitation film by crossing a Biker movie with a Monster movie, but like most exploitation films, that’s all there is here, and there’s not even too much of that. Werewolves on Wheels (1971) has a decent start with obvious Biker movie style; dust trails on the road from a distance, chrome trims, crazy hogs and wild, violent biker gangs. This particular gang seek shelter in appears to be a Satanist temple and are met with surprising hospitality by the Satanists in residence, offered lots of food and drink which turns out to be drugged, so they can have their way with one of the female bikers. Comedian Severn Darden, from both Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972) and Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973), features as the leader of the cult, his face caked in dark make-up. The ritual is interrupted and the bikers attack, only for the girl and her boyfriend and leader of the pack, Adam (Steven Oliver) to become cursed as werewolves.

 

There’s not much in the way of actual werewolves until the end, with an initial attack portrayed either a bit abstractly or just ineptly, as the bikers get picked off one by one at night by their own leader, with things coming to a head as they both transform in front of the gang (conveniently) leading to the film’s fiery climax, which features two dark haired werewolves with a traditional appearance, except we know which one of the girlfriend character because that werewolf has long hair… The poster does not keep its promise of a werewolf on wheels – this does happen at the end, but everything is so dark and poorly edited that it’s impossible to really understand what’s going on. There’s an aimless air to the proceedings which matches the bikers’ lifestyle, and a clear connection to the myth of Circe, with bikers drugged via food by cultists only to be turned into beasts. The finale is meant to be trippy but feels tacked on to simply try ad mess with the audience’s minds. Real bikers used. Local hippies used to play cultists, ironic as hippies blamed for satanism due to Manson family, etc. Technically not great on many levels. I had bene looking forward to this one. That'll learn me...

 

Another comedy, I was positive I had watched The Werewolf of Washington (1973) as a teen but clearly had not remembered much about it. Technically inept, it functions as a satire that is pretty heavy handed, if prescient, treating the ongoing Watergate scandal a good year before Nixon’s resignation. Dean Stockwell plays a press secretary to the US President and is bitten by werewolf while on assignment in Hungary, returning to Washington to become a werewolf who begins to eat and/or maul the President’s enemies. A mostly good cast is squandered on a poor script and direction. The framing during dialogue shots is awful, with a baffling amount of extra headroom above the actors. But it does have its moments, and there are some good performances from Dean Stockwell, Clifton James, and Biff McGuire as the idiotic POTUS. 

 

  The Werewolf of Washington clearly uses familiarity with The Wolf Man (1941) as jumping off point for it's script, with clear references to original. Stockwell’s werewolf make-up (presented through the usual dissolve transformation) has a bigger, greyer look to Pierce’s design, but it seems to big on his light frame, although this does give his beast more of a light agility. This werwolf is light on his feet, sneaking around and hanging on to car rooftops.

 

Stockwell has weird but amusing scene with an odd horror homage scene with Michael Dunn as Dr Kiss, a strange scientist who exists beneath the White House, an obvious satire on Henry Kissinger, with suggestion of Frankenstein’s Monster experiment. Stockwell’s werewolf is affectionate towards Dunn, licking him like a dog, but this idea goes nowhere. A cheap, half-baked and wasted opportunity with some garish 1970s interior decoration that’s liable to give headaches; not once does this feel like it takes place inside the White House.

 A word of warning about The Werewolf of Washington - it's available to rent or buy on Amazon Prime streaming. Don't. It has to be one of the worst prints of a film I've ever paid to see. Inexcusable qualoty where hardly a thing can be seen. It's on YouTube if you're that curious.

(More) Houses of Horror, Universally Speaking Part 2

 
House of Dracula (1945) is not great. It’s creaky as hell, but at least there’s more Dracula and he is integral to the plot, until he’s done away with. A film of two distinct halves, for sure. Earl C. Kenton returns to direct one of the last (if not the last) films of Universal’s horror/monster cycle. His direction doesn’t seem quite as assured as his previous entry, House of Frankenstein (1944), and this one seems to resurrect all three monsters without any explanation. When we last saw them, Dracula had come a cropper off a horse drawn coach and shrivelled in the sunshine, the Wolfman was shot "dead" with a silver bullet by his love, and Frankenstein’s monster sank into quicksand. At least we get a little hint of the Monster’s fate when they discover his corpse in a cave, along with the skeleton of Boris Karloff’s Dr Niemann. How they got from quicksand into a rocky cave is…ah, why should we ask? I do ask, why Dracula is even looking for a cure to his vampirism, especially when he has no compunction at seducing another victim and then turning the tables on the doctor trying to cure him.

 Driven by either co-incidence, or the unspoken fact the Onslow Stevens’ Dr Edelman is clearly a magnet for monsters who seek to be free of the respective curses, the film focuses on the good doctor, until a ropey blood transfusion involving Dracula, turns him into more of a Mr Hyde, jumping between good and bad incarnations as he either tries to save Lawrence Talbot (his curse is actually pressure on the brain…) or resurrect Glenn Strange’s Monster. It seems he’s successful with the former, but things go awry when the Monster witnesses Edelman murdering his hunchbacked assistant, Nina (Jane Adams). Scoliosis seems to be quite the rage in Visaria, even if Nina’s own affliction looks remarkably convincing as a real case of scoliosis. In the ensuing chaos, guns are fired and the mob attends with the usual aplomb; Skelton Knaggs (possessor of one the greatest names in film history) gurns and grimaces his way through it as leader of the mob. Universal stalwart, Lionel Atwill, in one of his final roles, gets a dynamic send off when he’s thrust into an electrical circuit, but the castle falls prey to the usual destruction

 

 In terms of the Wolf Man, there is some fun to be had but not as much as usual. What differs is his initial transformation in a police cell is witnessed by the other characters, leaving his curse in no doubt to the others. There is the usual scene of Talbot sitting in a garden, bemoaning his curse as the attractive female lead finds him, sits down and pours pity on him. All getting a bit samey. Chaney first turns up dressed very differently than in previous entries, looking almost like a London spiv from the Second World War, black shirt and white tie and moustache. Story goes that Chaney was drinking a lot during this shoot and got Glenn Strange hammered when he had to lie down in the freezing cold for an extended period (I would presume it's during the scene in the cave where they find the Monster). Convinced booze would warm him up, Chaney slipped him booze throughout the day. Once the scene was in the can, Strange was so pished he couldn't stand up.

 

 Speaking of Strange, Frankenstein’s Monster is given particular short shrift, only coming to life in the film’s final moments. The poster has the same rogue’s gallery as the previous film to invite the audience, just with a few different faces with the same labels. But it feels like it’s all run its course here. The end was surely in sight for the Universal Monsters…

Houses of Horror, Universally Speaking: Part 1.

Misleading poster - no beard on this film's Hunchback!

 I found House of Frankenstein (1944) to be a bit of a delight. I was cautious after previously only lasting around 10 minutes when watching House of Dracula (1945) a few years ago. Some of my students are fanatical about the current shared Marvel Cinematic Universe - I had great fun and some real nostalgic kicks myself when I saw superheroes from my childhood together in Marvel’s Avengers back in 2012 – and so they have a bit of an awakening when I tell them that it was Universal Pitcures who came up with the idea of a shared universe on film 70 years earlier. House of Frankenstein was to horror icons what Thanos’ hunt for Infinity Stones is to superhero movies. And what brings this film to my werewolf list is the presence of one Lawrence Talbot. The events of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943) are directly referenced here, making this a direct sequel to that the the previous Wolf Man (1941) and this pretty much a set of movies all connected by the life and fate of Chaney's Wolf Man.

Director Earl C. Kenton keeps things moving along nicely, with some engaging direction. Karloff’s own entrance is great, as his arm whips from a prison cell to strangle his jailor. There is a lot of fun to be had here and Kenton knows exactly which world we’re in. There's a great stunt moment where J. Carrol Naish's hunchback falls beneath some loose rocks in a cave, mid-dialogue and wonderfully timed, well into the shot. And of course there's some juicy, fun dialogue through the proceedings as well.

Yes, it’s immensely silly and the part with Dracula seems tacked on to the beginning as he seems to be there to simply get the mob off the tail of Boris Karloff’s splendid Dr Niemann and his sympathetic hunchback assistant, Daniel (J. Carrol Naish). The entire sequence featuring Dracula and his intended victim is interesting but seems like a separate little film of its own, and once the Count is dispatched the other relevant characters, including Universal Horror stalwart Lionel Atwill, are never seen again. I never bought John Carradine as Count Dracula. Maybe it’s the ‘tache. Or the top hat. Or he just doesn;t suit the role? There are some decent shots of his shadow transforming into a bat; it appears this iteration of the Count prefers to use his bat form to feed on the less attractive male characters, like the true vampire bat.

 The evil Dr Neiman seeks to recover the records of the late Dr Frankenstein so he might continue and improve on his work on resurrecting the dead. Or more like a chain reaction of brain transplants – it does get a little bit difficult to remember which brain is going into what body later o in the film, to the irritation of Lon Chaney Jr’s recently defrosted Lawrence Talbot, found alongside the also frozen Frankenstein Monster, this time played by the giant Glenn Strange, who we recently watched in The Mad Monster (1942). I’d spent many years being a bit cynical about Strange as the monster but he does well, certainly better than Lugosi (as of this writing, I am still to see Chaney’s take on the character), evoking more empathy for the Monster than anyone since Karloff. They may have dropped in one or two of Karloff’s snarls from the first two James Whale films. Another cast member from that Poverty Row effort is George Zucco, here playing Professor Lamprini. Or he does for a short scene before Karloff does away with him and assumes his identity. The entire opening sequence of the film does give us some characters which seem to be cast aside early on.

And so, we once again encounter Lawrence Talbot and his impatient desire to die and be free of his curse. His pleas are met with broken promises by Karloff’s mad scientist, while the hunchback Daniel’s gypsy* travelling companion, Ilonka (Elena Verdugo) falls for the tall and tragic “Larry”. Jealousy ensues, with Daniel now developing a hatred of Talbot and the Frankenstein Monster as Neiman’s promise to fix his physical deformity have been cast asunder in favour of darker experiments. A neat little moment where Daniel takes his temper out on the Monster brings back memories of Dwight Frye’s original hunchback assistant, Fritz, torturing Karloff’s Monster in the original Frankenstein (1931). But here, instead of blind hate, there is some understanding of where his violence comes from.

We have an interesting and different take on Talbot’s transformation into the Wolf Man, as we follow his footprints change from human to werewolf in the mud as he takes off into the night. Another full-face transformation is also terrific, with Jack Pierce’s make up looking even better. 

Of course, it all ends in tears, as lovers destroy each other and Daniel is tossed from a window like a ragdoll by the Monster, before the mob chase him down as he carries the wounded Neiman off into the woods, only to be swallowed up by quicksand. Cue credits. A top time has been had. It;s a bit strange how thes emovies often have no coda. Monsters are despatched and then it's immediately all over.

This has also encouraged me to try watching House of Dracula again. Let's see what happens…

 

*Any uses of the word “gypsy” by me in these blog entries are not intended to be offensive but reflect the simple-minded portrayal of Romani culture of the time and tone of the films.