The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman (1970), by Leon Klimovsky

Variety, as they say, is the spice of life. And that's what leads me to both do this review today and to condemn its subject. I felt an obligation to review this movie a week after reviewing the book that was supposed to be this film's novelization. And following that obligation has kept me off this blog's main focus, which is focusing on my favorite ("A-List") trash movies. The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman, the fifth of Spanish actor Paul Naschy's movies starring werewolf Waldemar Daninsky, is not one of my favorites, even if I did like a few moments of it. Overall, however, I want to rip it apart, because I don't get to do that enough up here, though I have reason to be fair as well.

Waldemar Daninsky is resurrected by a coroner who refuses to believe his assistant's tale of werewolves. After both men and a nameless woman are butchered by the werewolf Daninsky, we cut to our two protagonists, students named Elvira and Genevieve, who are looking for Countess Wandessa de Nadasdy. They never say why they want to find her, but they are soon led to the castle of the revived Daninsky. Sound familiar? Mercifully, the similarities to Leo Guild's book run out here. The two ladies are briefly assaulted by Waldemar's crazy lesbian sister, before discovering the Countess's tomb. One of the girls accidentally cuts herself and spills blood on the corpse, a la Black Sunday, bringing the vampire back to life, briefly as a mummified dried-out ghoul like the Templars from The Blind Dead (which this movie predates). From there, we lose steam as characters walk around and talk about details we already know about vampires, werewolves, and Waldemar Daninsky. Namely that he is a werewolf who can only be saved by true love. Daninsky's...neighbor? chauffeur? tries to kidnap one of the girls, who has become the werewolf's lover and thus the key to his salvation, but this nameless creeper-man is killed in one of the few werewolf scenes in this werewolf movie. I'm saying the word "werewolf" a lot, and so let me just say that the werewolf does indeed vs. the vampire woman. We can't see a single frame of it because this is a '70s horror movie and the concept of lighting something is foreign and impossible. There is an interesting enough final shot of Elvira and her original boyfriend walking away from the corpses of the monsters.

One issue that about the Daninsky series that I've read and heard fairly often is that Paul Naschy never let his world grow. Sure, he did some fun twists, like the one where Daninsky has a run-in with Dr. Jekyll and becomes a werewolf/Mr. Hyde fusion. But usually, he's still endlessly trying to mine the nuggets of Universal Horror's veins, copying rather than pastiching, deconstructing, or reimagining. I'm a brat spoiled on postmodernism, of course, but in this case I justify myself with the assertion that the Universal films are old now. Very, very old. Before you say that I do not understand these movies because I didn't grow up with them...I did. I remember being entertained by the sequels to The Mummy, being bored by the Larry Talbot movies, and hating Frankenstein. My opinion might change if I watched them again, but they are slow, slow movies. Certainly, the ideas would have seemed dramatic and novel in previous decades, but Seinfeld Syndrome has taken full effect. What I'm saying is: the Daninsky films are boring because his source material is boring. While Naschy is a skilled actor, and can construct some solid (albeit thin) plots, he moves around cardboard imitations of better movies that were never that cracked-up to begin with.

Naschy homages Black Sunday in this movie. Black Sunday is very Universal-y, but with better (and more numerous) creeps and much more charismatic actors--a lovely fusion between the B&W age of Universal and the updated European grossness of Hammer. Why didn't he draw on more movies like that? I know he apes the Hammer movies at some point but I doubt he ever drew on something legitimately awesome and unique like The Devil Rides Out or The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires. He also really did inspire Amando de Ossorio's evil Templar movies. He could've had Tombs of the Blind Dead but for some reason he always settled for Night of the Seagulls.

It's easy to attack Naschy's movies, and I'm far from the first person to do it. They simply haven't aged well, and because they choose to thrill with familiar childhood symbols relevant to a Universal-loving audience, they provide some lockout for people expecting scares instead of nostalgia. At the same time, the man deserves to be respected as a national icon for Spain and a hero to many, and in any case, he passed away in 2009, so I feel some extra guilt in going after him. Instead, let's talk about how the movie succeeds. Me being me, I had to watch the movie from a trash perspective, and the first half delivers both laughs and sincere intrigue. Boris Karloff's toe-curling charm and Bela Lugosi's inherent goofiness are absent, but the dub actors thankfully make up for it by furthering the demonstration that the English dub community up until the late '90s must have been worked to exhaustion week after week. When Genevieve explains the story of Countess Wandessa, she speaks with the diction and enthusiasm of a Midwestern housewife sharing recipes, even though Wandessa bathed in the blood of virgins, worshiped Satan, and attended "the Sabbath" (yeah, 'cause Satanism is the only faith to practice something called that). The dub actors also pronounce "Waldemar" (which I assumed was said as "Vahl-de-mahr") as "Waldo-mur." This works to Naschy's advantage, because it is hilarious. Elvira's encounter with the apparently-nameless creepy driver is also fun just because it slowly gets more intense until we realize this guy is not only fucked up, but probably a fated victim of the werewolf. Hell, there's even some offensive shit, even besides Waldomur's sister apparently being a lesbian as a result of her mental illness--the first time Genevieve and Elvira suspect that Daninsky is keeping a secret person hidden in the castle is because "only a woman could have set such a lovely table!" The other woman replies: "But when we ate at that table, he only served cold cuts. That's a man's dinner!"

It may be weird for me to say this here, but I liked how this movie was set in contemporary times. Yep, there's a reference from one of the coroners to the Apollo landings. It gives the movie an added dimension to consider that the isolated, backwards provinces that the movie takes place in is part of the world of 1970--it shows that the Old World is still hidden out there, and yes, it has monsters in it. Clearly Elvira and Genevieve weren't letting themselves get caught up in some good ol' Second Wave Feminism back in their home country. They probably vote Republican.

Finally, Naschy's fanboyishness comes to the fore with the pacing of the first half, which serves the film well. So desperate is he to getting around to the werewolf adventures that many sequences that would ordinarily be stretched out seem to have been cut, making it all refreshingly quick. The girls seemed to find Daninsky's castle pretty easily, and the exhuming/resurrection of Wandessa mercifully happens shortly thereafter. This doesn't escape the fact that the last forty minutes of the movie are a wandering, disjointed mess, with barely anything visible on camera and even less actually happening. If the Daninsky movies were twenty or thirty minutes long, I think they'd be masterpieces. But Paul Naschy had to go the full nine yards, for reasons best left to him.

No fault to you if you're untroubled by that. I will not knock a movie that was not made for me. All the same, it would have been nice to expect something a little unfamiliar--something closer to the roving wilderness I like to focus on with this site. That having been said...much more enjoyable than Arthur fucking Scarm.

Book Club of Desolation #7: The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman (1972), by "Arthur M. Scarm"

(New rule: never trust a piece of writing which opens with a paragraph in parentheses.)

Where the fuck did this come from? I'm glad I now know. This book captivated me for several years before I finally broke down and grabbed a copy from Ramble House (the generous blokes who also published my book, Tail of the Lizard King). Experiencing the work for myself, combined with new developments online (for me), reveals that The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman was likely the product of Leo Guild, creator of such musty tomes as The Girl Who Loved Black and Black Bait and Black Streets of Oakland (to say nothing of Street of Hoes). Which, surprise, are racist and sleazy beyond any other '70s pulp I've seen. From what I know, that's a common discovery, even for people with more experience in '70s pulps than me. Brrr. Well, I don't know if the name is "Arthur Scarm" or "Arthur Scram"--apparently in the 1972 edition, probably-Guild is credited with both names. Speaking of 1972: that was two years after the release of the fifth of the endlessly tedious "Waldemar Daninsky" werewolf movies by Spanish director, actor, and super-fan Paul Naschy, originally called Walpurgis Night, but released in the U.S. as The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman. This book was intended as an adaptation of the film to build hype in an American audience. Unfortunately, Leo Guild was brought into the project, and he apparently decided to make this thing his own. And at the time there was no creative vision as hideous as his.

And I will say this: the legends are true. Werewolf vs. Vampire Woman is easily one of the most atrocious things ever published. This is perhaps the farthest I have ever gone in terms of a book and its sheer badness--prose-wise, it's so simplistic that it's almost a children's book, except full of misogyny, rape, and murder. The plot is everywhere, bouncing around through ten different story points in fifteen pages. And there are more tangents than in Tristram Shandy. I can only summarize the plot in a string of scenes, because there is not a shred of seriousness applied to having this be anything but a bunch of random events.

A werewolf is brought into a morgue. He is named Waldo, which is sorta like Waldemar Daninsky. The idiot coroner removes the silver bullet that killed him, and he comes back to life to kill the coroner and rape his assistant. Because Leo Guild wrote this and he was a fucking asshole, the assistant falls in love with him, as do two students named Genevieve and Elvira (sure, whatever), whom he also beats and rapes. We learn in detail that werewolves have enormous "wangs," and that burning werewolf pubes smell like perfume, which I swear to God is a thing I was forced to read. Genevieve and Elvira were previously searching for a vampire woman named Countess Wandessa "Wanda" de Nadasdy. I would say that's probably a joke on "Danasdy," but this was the name of an actual character from the movie (as were Genevieve and Elvira, I should say). Waldo and the girls finance their long quest using pirate gold that they find in what is total not a contrived sequence, and on this trip, Waldo fucks and murders the girls while trying to destroy Countess Wanda--because werewolves and vampires naturally hate each other, y'see. Harmless nonsense like Waldo using black magic to shrink a woman's breasts is intercut with scenes of Waldo whacking a woman against a wall until the room is splattered with the gory chunks of her body. This is probably the first book I've read which is written by a serial killer. This is followed by Waldo and Wanda forming an on-again/off-again romance culminating in their desire to become movie stars, despite the fact that Wanda has literally never heard the word "acting" before. In the end the two are forced to kill each other, as fate demands, in a scene where lesbianism throws Waldo into a berserk rage which is somehow not his fault.

Actually, if you did want to do a "Too Long; Didn't Read" synopsis of this book, it would be this: Waldo the Werewolf is an abusive, sadistic monster who at no point demonstrates any sort of legitimate affection for anyone around him besides himself, and yet somehow manages to get exactly what he wants with zero consequences, for 130 pages. In this universe, werewolves are boss, and I am not going far at all in saying that men are boss too. The most competent woman in the entire book is, of course, Countess Wanda, but she inevitably falls in love with Waldo and from there on out is a complete airhead. I don't even know why people are compelled to fall in love with Waldo (or do anything besides try to kill him, for that matter), because, well, look at that cover. It probably does a better job of making Waldo look like a werewolf than the actual story does: in the book, Waldo only turns into a werewolf one night out of the year, and every other time, he's just an ordinary dude with a weird garter-belt of fur around his torso, which I unfortunately imagined as the fluffy cock-sock from The Cross of Seven Jewels. Every werewolf apparently has this, in addition to having hollow eye-teeth and an inability to ejaculate.

The book is all about Waldo, and that is a large reason why this book is so repugnant. But this is the A-List; by now, you should know that I have a fascination with the repugnant. The overwhelming amount of violence in this book, both general and sexual, forced me to draw comparisons to Hogg or American Psycho, where the general premise is the same: an evil person, who has virtually no directly-explained motivation, tortures a bunch of usually-faceless, nameless, helpless victims. Now I would like to say that I enjoyed Hogg and American Psycho very much, even if they're not books I can get back to on a regular basis. (Hogg especially.) That's why I was charmed when Waldo kept pulling the thing where he tells someone that he's going to kill them horribly, and because that's not something people usually say in the open to people they just met they assume it was just a joke, until it is too late. But here's the primary issue: the two books I referenced above were well-written. Hogg constructs an atmosphere of its own by having simplistic prose--a product of the narrator being an uneducated child--and it sustains that atmosphere by never repeating its limited vocabulary, never getting stuck in patterns, except when it means to. American Psycho is a nightmarish labyrinth of yuppie faux-eloquence and brand names that keeps topping itself until we simply can't believe it anymore.

The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman, then, is horribly written, and that means that we can't enjoy or endure Waldo in the same way we do Hogg or Patrick Bateman. I will only quote one passage, justifying it as the sole quotation by saying that 1) this is on the very first page; 2) there is no first person narrator behind the first handful of pages; and 3) the entire book is like this. Behold:

Perhaps I should first tell you what a werewolf is like. It was never adequately been described even by a werewolf's bride. [sic]

The most frightening characteristic of a werewolf is that he is completely unreliable. That is made obvious by a toothy smile that flashes on and off like a traffic light with no substance other than evil behind it. It is entirely possible that while you are lulled in passivity, by the werewolf's pleasant smile, he is planning to perform major surgery on you without benefit of doctor or even anesthetic. And the instruments he will probably use will be teeth and nails. 

...hurts, don't it? I think I can rest my case.

Curiosity is what drew me to this book, but don't make my mistake, unless you're interested in seeing every literary convention be as thoroughly mutilated as the characters sadly trapped within its pages. This is a bad one, even for the time and market, and despite my lack of patience for the Waldemar Daninsky series, I would still be willing to check out Walpurgis Night to see if the two are even somewhat similar. If you took out the rape and misogyny, a werewolf movie with the consistency of a Goosebumps book would probably be pretty entertaining. But even the most sluggish and uninspired Daninsky film would be preferable to this.

---

Image Source: Ramble House

Terminator II (1989), by Bruno Mattei

Where would we be without Bruno?

I think I've talked before about how my life hasn't exactly been...normal, as far as movies go. I hate self-exceptionalism and all who believe in it, but ever since my aunt and uncle showed me I Eat Your Skin at the tender age of ten, I have had an issue with prioritizing "good" movies over trash flicks. Off the top of my head, some of the classic movies I have not seen are: The Godfather, The Shawshank Redemption, Saturday Night Fever, GoldenEye, Mean Girls, Breakfast at Tiffany's, American Psycho, Superman III, and last but not least, Aliens. It's worth pointing out that I have seen Terminator and Terminator 2. And now, I have also seen Terminator II. Except Terminator II is not Italian trashmaster Bruno Mattei's attempt at sequelizing James Cameron's robot-action tour-de-force, though Cameron is certainly present here. No, today it is Cameron's Aliens that falls under the auspices of Bruno Mattei and Claudio "Troll 2" Fragasso. At some point in my life, I know I will become a non-loser and watch Aliens, but because of my experiences today, I will have the inverse view of most folks: to me, Aliens will be the pale shadow of Terminator II, the one I saw first. And I think there's a little validity in my point. After all, James Cameron is no Mattei, nor is he any Fragasso--he is too anchored, too straightforward. Let's let the maestro work.

In the not-too-distant future, at a point where Venice has sunk into the sea, a group of Marines is sent into an underground tunnel network/genetics lab. They are joined by one of the mercenaries employed by the owner of the lab, the astonishingly-named Tubular Corporation. Shortly after learning that something with that name exists in this universe, we find out these Marines are called "Megaforce"! After many wonderful lines of dialogue, they learn that the lab was wiped out by a not-Xenomorph created by Tubular to spread some sort of genetic virus that rewrites an organism like computer code. This is also confusingly tied to pollution, a theme that also appears in Rats: Night of Terror ("You mangy beasts! That's how the water gets...POLLUTED!") and Zombi 3. Of course, the Tubular mercenary is revealed to secretly be an evil android, which I know happens in at least one of the Alien movies. And, naturally, once he is revealed to be an android, he starts doing an Ahnold impression, right down to ripping part of his face off a la the eye-removal scene in the first Terminator. There is a happy ending to this one, for both not-Ripley, and the obligatory child-played-by-a-30-year-old.

The typical Mattei/Fragasso nuttiness is all present here. Even outside of casting moms as ten-year-olds, and all of the flimsy rip-offs of other films, and the presumably-stolen soundtrack, there is wave after wave of beautiful scripting that ties it all together. "Alright, you bunch of pussies," says Koster, one of the three women in this film. "I'm back, and I'm kicking ass!" This is the first thing she ever says to us in the movie, so we don't know what she's "back" from. Terminator II's script also echoes Hell of the Living Dead with a scene where people are dying/screaming for help, and everyone around them just sits around and stares at them grimly as they die. In fact, it's even worse than when it happens in Hell, because at least in that movie, the bystanders at least seemed concerned for the people being horribly killed by monsters. I may have mentioned how Zombi 3 seems to be a "lazy" movie--people move, talk, and live slowly, and don't really seem to enjoy putting effort into doing things like "keeping themselves and their friends alive." Perhaps it shows that Bruno himself was slowing down as he aged. Who knows? Who cares? It's entertaining!

I considered writing a big long paragraph about how the second half of it is dull. Guess what, the second half of every Mattei film is dull. It is an unfortunate truth. This is one is duller than the others, probably because it's a pretty chromatically dark film. And because I'm not above cheap shots, I suppose I can say that you'll like this movie if you're a fan of Man of Steel. Zing-o!

As a side-note/conclusion: this is the second bootleg Alien sequel I've seen. I have also watched the obnoxiously boring Alien 2: On Earth, a movie that's apparently received some acclaim recently, enough for it to get a snazzy Blu-Ray release. My copy is a bootleg pulling together two separate bootlegs to ensure the entire thing is in English. I'll probably only be able to get an HD version of Terminator II when all our brains are resurrected in a supercomputer in the future. That's okay. I'll take slime over substance any day, when Bruno is at the helm.

All Women Are Bad (1969), by Larry Crane

I've got no luck when it comes to titles. You see, I try to be a little tasteful with the admission of my interest in sleazy trash, but sometimes, some titles are going to present some unfortunate sensibilities when I try to spread the word about Adam Mudman's A-List and the Stuff I Talk About Here. I was able to find an alt-title for the pretty-jarring Ape Rape, but here, there's no wiggle room. I guess people are going to think that I find all women to be bad or something. Well, because this is a site where I talk about the trash movies I found the most entertaining, you can imagine that there must be something of value in a movie called All Women Are Bad. Fortunately, All Women is the creation of Larry "The Love Captive" Crane. The Love Captive (also 1969) was an adventure in the love lives of vampires, werewolves, and egg-shaped dime-museum owners that depicted a surreal, nostalgic version of New York City and its bizarre underbelly. And, like most of the sexploitation flicks of the '60s, it was laden with sexism. And make no mistake, All Women Are Bad is a hateful film--much more so than The Love Captive. It is a twisted product of its time, while still reflecting sentiments we have today. Yet there is so much going on that we can detach ourselves a little bit, and let these awkward biases add to a building sense of tense oddity.

John Steele is a salesman who is happy with his wife. He narrates the entire movie, and he's probably the same narrator that The Love Captive had. Of course, because this is a sexploitation movie, the happiness of his marriage is artificial, and belief in it, sophomoric. He comes home, and as circumstances would have it she is fucking another dude. This leads "poor" John on a quest to escape the memories of his unfaithful spouse, and we slowly learn the probable reasons behind her desire to cheat. John finds sex wherever he goes, which slowly erodes whatever little fragile sanity he already had. He turns out to be not only a misogynist, but a racist, kink-shaming misogynist. He accuses China of bringing over bad cars and bad hookers, and he reacts with horror upon seeing feather- and foot-fetishes, which he claims are the creations of women to enslave men. He shows even greater horror over those two kinks than he does over necrophilia. Of course, his unlikable nature maybe means that he's supposed to be the antagonist of the film. I mean, his name is "John Steele" for Chrissakes. I would hardly sympathize with someone with that name. And yet even as he disintegrates John can't resist a good pun: I think he says "Maybe he'll tickle her fancy" three times in the feather-fetish scene. And of course, like its successor A Clockwork Blue, All Women Are Bad ends with a gag reel that summarizes the entire movie.

The movie succeeds by having great intentional and unintentional achievements. For instance, there is a scene where John suddenly finds himself surrounded by pot smoking hippies. One of them, the leader (described as a "guru"), has an eyepatch. As they succumb to a drug-fueled orgy, the music that plays is the same library cue that runs over the tenser sequences in Nathan Schiff's teeth-grinding Long Island Cannibal Massacre. I should give the movie credit--in 1969, depictions of pot smoking may well have still been the equivalent of showing someone injecting PCP into their eyeballs today, but when I hear this music I think about masked serial killers crushing skulls with hammers in creepy Super 8 tight shots, rather than a bunch of teenagers getting high with a pirate. It creates a humor that I really do hope was on purpose. Even if it wasn't, those accidental moments shine anyway. There's a scene where the actors freeze in place for several seconds, and in the background you can see the shadow of director Crane waving his hand to cut. That was left in.

Anyone who's set out to make a movie for the first time, whether seriously or just for fun, knows what poverty can do. There are some people who are creatively as well as financially bankrupt, who create tedious garbage that nonetheless manages to accumulate some exposure (here's lookin' at you, Birdemic). But other times, ambition meets limitations head-on, and miracles happen. All Women Are Bad is largely made out of stock footage and stock music, crudely sewn together with nonsensical and repetitive dubs. There was no script here. Right at the beginning of the film, John desires some R&R out in the woods, claiming civilization is too cloying for him. He's pretty emphatic that it is indeed the presence of the civilized world that's causing his woes. Once he arrives in nature he immediately feels like he needs to track something down for him to relax completely. After five minutes of running through the woods, babbling such lines as, "If I climbed any higher I would reach the very heavens!", he comes across a factory, "belching pollution into the golden sunlight," which he takes as a sign that his relaxation is contingent on...going back to the city.

Over five minutes is spent on this pointless circular loop. I think I forgot to mention that the movie runs a whole 61 minutes in total.

Which means it's not even a full afternoon. Larry Crane will dance into your life and be gone before you know it. As far as I know, all of his films save for this one and Love Captive are lost, which is a damn shame. Presumably, however, it also spares us the pain of having to dig through the clunkers of his career, as we must for fellow '60s sleaze superstars Barry Mahon and Doris Wishman. Still. The man made a musical called Sugar Daddy...and that one is confirmed destroyed. These tears could fill a river. Don't cry like me--join John and his awful morals and you'll have a gorgeous non-story unlike any other.