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.
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