Young Hannah, Queen of the Vampires (1973), by Julio Salvador and Ray Danton

You asked for vampires...you can fang me later.
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Book Club of Desolation #23: Powers of Darkness (1900-1901), by Valdimar Asmundsson and Bram Stoker (?)

In 2014, Icelandic scholar Hans Corneel de Roos was looking over a manuscript from the turn of the 20th Century that at first seemed to merely be an Icelandic translation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, penned by writer Valdimar Asmundsson. However, he started to notice that the manuscript, entitled Makt Myrkranna or Powers of Darkness, made some substantial deviations from Stoker's original text, and it didn't take long to realize that the book was something new entirely, although it was based on Dracula. The resultant text was made available in English with notes by both de Roos and Bram Stoker's great-grandnephew Dacre Stoker. Makt Myrkranna is simultaneously an awesome part of horror fiction history, a superior novel to Stoker's tale, and a suggestion of a possibility I've thought about for a long time: what if there are more books like this one, which serve as alternate versions of more famous works?

The story of Powers of Darkness roughly follows that of Dracula, but it bears repeating for the sake of this review. Jonathan--or excuse me, Thomas Harker is an English real estate agent called out to Transylvania by a mysterious noble named Count Dracula, who is interested in buying property in London. Harker is warned by everyone he encounters along the way that Dracula is pure evil, but he must carry on with his job. You see, Harker is kind of an idiot--even moreso than in Stoker's novel. Dracula is an amiable enough fellow but his castle looks like no one's lived in it properly for centuries. He also gets a hungry look in his eye when he sees Harker cut himself. Pretty standard Stoker stuff so far, but Stoker never mentioned Dracula's triumphant pride in the incestuous of his family, which produces short-lived, stumpy freaks. Nor did he mention Dracula's underground chamber where he and his gorilla-man army sacrifice villagers to Satan. Nor did he mention that Dracula and said gorilla-man army are in league with a conspiracy of noblemen who want to destroy the democratic processes of England to create a world where the serfs serve the nobles again! (I guess Dracula never heard of Wall Street, then.) Will Harker be able to escape Dracula's horrifying fortress to warn his beloved Wilma, or will he be food for Dracula's vampire brides?

"But wait!" you ask. "What about Holmwood and Quincy Morris and Lucy and van Helsing? What about, y'know, the other three-quarters of the novel?" Well, that's the thing about Powers of Darkness: most of the book is Harker trying to survive his weeks in Dracula's castle. There is a second part which features most of the same events as Dracula--the arrival of van Helsing, the vampirism and staking of Lucy/Lucia, the menace hanging over Mina/Wilma, and finally the battle against Dracula and his servants in the shadow of the vampire's castle. Where the end changes is that Dracula's castle crumbles upon his death, and then the nobles who allied themselves with him commit suicide or are murdered, ending his conspiracy. As the introduction and notes posit, this part was likely meant as an outline for what Asmundsson would write later, suggesting that Powers of Darkness in its complete form (assuming that we have today isn't the complete form) would have dwarfed Dracula in length and complexity. As it stands already, Asmundsson's text succeeds at being far scarier than Dracula, perhaps because of its choice to frontload.

Asmundsson understood the Harker parts had the best potential for horror. Dracula's wild, rambling structure gives it the feeling more of an adventure novel than a Gothic piece, which is awkward because it's told, as Powers of Darkness is, through letters and diary entries. It's weird to hear the tale of a frantic carriage chase recounted post-facto in a journal. But the bulk of Powers of Darkness reads like something someone found in Dracula's castle next to Thomas Harker's emaciated corpse--you never know which entry is going to be the last. This is broken only somewhat by the fact that, again, Harker is a massive idiot, as he pointedly does not try to leave the castle until it's nearly too late, even after witnessing Satanic rituals in progress! He is remarkably tolerant of many horrifying supernatural incidents. Sometimes, though, justifying logic breaks through. After all, it's probably more than Harker feels he can't leave the castle, as it's on a high rocky pass in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by wolves and God knows what else. There's also the fact that he came here to do a job, and at least at the beginning, much of his response to the ghoulish things he encountered is a very natural sort of confusion--perhaps he's imagining things, or maybe this is some local custom he as a privileged Londoner doesn't understand. Even if he trusts his instincts when he is sure the supernatural is afoot, he can't exactly return to his boss in England emptyhanded and tell him, "Sorry, the client was a Satanic vampire with a gorilla-man army which he was gonna use to tear down the government, no sale."

Now, this book would not be complete without the introduction and notes it provides. Dacre Stoker's introduction was interesting in its argument that Makt Myrkranna was based on Bram Stoker's private notes, and that Stoker and Asmundsson collaborated in the latter's penning of Powers. He brings up the fact that it was popular for Victorian authors to travel to Iceland, as they admired Iceland's astonishing poetic tradition; he also points out that several details from Powers match with unused story bits from Stoker's notes, such as the "hidden red room" where Dracula performs his evil magic, and the blind-mute woman who serves the vampire. However, I would caution against assuming that works such as these are made with the collaboration of the original author, because certain tropes are universal, and there are such things as coincidences. Respect the fanfic, I guess is what I'm saying. On my first read-through of the introduction I was disappointed that Dacre Stoker generally abstained from praising Asmundsson's individual creativity in the parts of Powers that weren't seemingly based on his great-granduncle's work, but a closer look-through on my part shows the integrity of his investigation. Similarly, I found de Roos' footnotes to be cluttery and intrusive at times, but they form a log of the challenges he ran into in translating early 20th Century Icelandic into English. When I studied linguistics I found the bond between Icelandic and English one of the most fascinating my professors discussed: modern Icelandic and Old English are extremely similar. In fact one of my professors told me that if an Anglo-Saxon time-traveler from pre-Norman England landed in today's Iceland they'd probably be able to have a reasonable conversation with someone there.

Overall, this new edition of Makt Myrkranna is an awesome look at vampire fiction history, and one of what I hope will be many discoveries of other pseudo-classics cloned from books that history remembered better. And, similarly, it's better than the original Dracula. Horror fans can't afford to miss out.

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Orgy of the Dead (1965), by Stephen C. Apostolof and Ed Wood

Does it really need saying that it wouldn't be a proper Spookyween without Ed Wood? No one quite handled the horror genre in the way Ed did. Though he presented his scary stuff in a fashion implying he was being cynical and ironic, Wood actually threw himself into his work and believed himself to be the scribe of hair-raising nightmares--or at least, the custodian of hair-rising nightmares past. His obsession with Bela Lugosi and the Universal Horror movies led him to create films which ended up perpetuating the exaggerated campiness that folks today think all old horror films, Universal included, happened to contain. Once more this is that strange idea of horror as fun--horror as a Halloween children's game. There's virtually nothing actually scary about Orgy of the Dead--in fact it's probably not really about being scary--but it's still a fun watch if you've got both an adult mind and a remnant ribbon of that old Halloween children's spirit.

Orgy of the Dead doesn't burden itself with needy troubles like plot, but since you asked, there are a few incidents here and there. Bob and Shirley are a couple driving through an unfamiliar area. Bob is a famous writer, who is apparently out on the road in search of inspiration. "Most of my books are based off of fact or legend," he says. "That's why they sell in the top spots!" Anyway, Bob's a dumbass, so he ends up driving too fast and goes off the road, ending up in an old cemetery. It is this cemetery which is ruled by "the Emperor," played by Criswell. The Emperor orders numerous dead folk to rise from the grave and dance for him, erotically, if possible. This includes "the woman who died by fire" and "she who loved gold." Then, without warning, a woman in cat footy-pajamas comes out, with holes cut in the pajamas for her tits and booty. We follow a parade of ethnic stereotype dancers, who are commented on by a werewolf and American-accented mummy. This long string of ostensibly erotic dances continues until at long last it comes time for the two intruders to be sacrificed. But then day comes, turning the Emperor and his minions to skeletons, leaving our heroes believing it was naught but a dream.

So yes, this movie is largely about well-proportioned ladies jiggling. Ed Wood presents us this sea of T&A using the only platform he knows--remember, the dude couldn't make a movie about trans rights without putting Bela Lugosi in the vicinity of smoky test tubes and creepy shadows. So of course this movie is "actually" about the secrets of the world of the dead, and their bizarre ceremonies under the full moon when they walk the Earth. Obviously. The thing is, I think old Eddie forgot that he was hired to write sexploitation first and horror second. For while Wood was a master of sleaze, he was primarily a master of dialogue that no one but he found intimidating. That's why we keep cutting from the naked woman on screen to a mummy who says bullshit like: "Back in my days of ancient Egypt, snakes were the stuff of nightmares!" Uh, in contrast to today's harmless snakes, which no one is afraid of?

You watch Ed Wood-penned movies for the writing. Because Lord did that man suck at dialogue. Somehow, however, he is still better at it than Harry Stephen Keeler, and, depending on the day, George Lucas. I've provided a few snippets here and there, but honestly, every single fucking line is pure fucking gold. Somehow, even the most relevant speeches collapse into untamed non sequitur. We critics sometimes complain about having too little material--and sometimes, there are those moments where we're forced to complain about having too much material. I swear to God, Wood's writing is like its own dialect of English or something. Someday we'll find an island of pudgy white guys dressed in angora sweaters, and that's all they'll speak in. Let's try to tackle the line, "She was a zombie in life...so too must she walk as a zombie in death!" What?! A zombie in life?! I mean, technically, voodoo zombies are drugged, hypnotized living people, but still, even those kinds of zombies have been referred to commonly as "the living dead" since the '30s. As far as I'm concerned, most folks in 1965 would have thought you had to die to become a zombie. No, I suspect this is some of Wood's patented social soapboxing. Wood is criticizing this lady's social behavior--she was a social zombie. At least, that's how I read it, and having now read a couple books of Wood's prose on top of seeing most of his movies, I feel I have solid insight. But it's Ed Wood. There is no fucking canon.

Criswell makes this movie lovely. Seeing him in color is a trip and a half. I don't know if he looked  this out of it in Plan 9 from Outer Space, but he's trying pretty hard to hide his age at this point. He has what I call Trump Bags--gross little white rings around his eyes where his obvious fake tan halts its orangeness. His performance varies. Sometimes he's having the time of his life, others he's clearly baffled by the syntax of what he's been asked to say, and a lot of the time he just wishes he was doing bullshit mentalism on TV again. I wonder how much the nudity he was actually present for. I can see someone with a career like his trying to stay away from that. He's joined by a woman who is not Vampira, but is made up to look like her. (No, she isn't Elvira, either.) She does a very good job, a better job than Vampira probably could have done. It is a misplaced acting extravaganza.

So much of Orgy of the Dead is dedicated to tedious and occasionally offensive stripteases that it may drive the ordinary viewer mad. I can't even argue that it's the best Ed Wood movie, as I am much more impressed with Glen or Glenda. But it is an amusing and baffling entry into the Wood corpus, and even if horror wasn't the point of emphasis, it's suitably "spooky" enough for us to celebrate with it this month.

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The Love Captive (1969), by Larry Crane

I meant to do this back before I did All Women Are Bad. After all, this was my first Larry Crane movie, and All Women, my second. I mean, All Women Were Bad caught me so off-guard that I couldn't resist. And after that, I always found myself thinking that I had already done this one, just because it's so essential to me that certainly I wouldn't go on without it. But then I smartened up a bit and reminded myself that I have this thing called a search bar and I can, as it were, see what reviews I've already done. And sure enough, I haven't done The Love Captive yet. Let's just get started...we've waited long enough.

Always trust a movie that features "Night on Bald Mountain." Always double-trust a movie that opens with "Night on Bald Mountain." So does The Love Captive commence, before referring itself to our protagonist, a nameless woman who wanders around Greenwich Village. The narrator talks over her wanderings, giving us information on the weird and wild world of Greenwich entertainment, both high- and lowbrow. This narrator condemns movies like Andy Warhol's Flesh and nervously suggests the lady may be a hooker. But that doesn't stop him from creeping on her as she undresses in a hotel room. Eventually our protagonist finds herself in Manzini's Museum of the Macabre, and then the movie really gets going. A fast-paced exploration into Inquisition torture devices, Houdini memorabilia, and vampire coffins ensues, and we jump from brief glimpses of lunatic-painted portraits to extensive fire-eating shows. It's all very overwhelming and wonderful, and if you have a trace of carnival spirit in you, the ridiculous showmanship and spectacle of the whole affair will give you warm fuzzies. Then, our lead is locked inside the Museum after dark, with the intent of making off with a Houdini straitjacket, but she has a surprise in store for her. At night the Museum's werewolves come out! After experiencing a night of terror, she comes back up to her hotel room and has sex with a dude. Then, lesbianism happens. And then, another lady seduces the Museum owner to take it over from him. A dude's junk flaps around in front of the camera, and we conclude.

The Love Captive functions better less as a "movie" and more like a box full of film clips of varying degrees of watchability. Like a lot of B&W sexploitation, you'll want to mosey around the general unappealing softcore fucking, skipping instead to the bizarre travelogue-style footage, and the riveting sideshow touring. The movie is less a "slice-of-life" film and more like a scrapbook laced in with odd tangential Tall Tales. Things that didn't really happen on the vacation, but would have improved it. It may actually also be a slice-of-life film, but for Greenwich Village circa 1969. Y'know, the place and time white hipsters love fetishizing? Well, I guess I can kind of get it. It's hard to resist attractions like Manzini's Museum, or a gift shop that sells a shirt that reads "GODDAMN YOU, CHARLIE BROWN."

Everything about this is so sloppy and weird that it probably is a vacation home-video edited into a sexploitation feature. The hucksters and fucksters of the '60s were desperate enough to do that--it would make them money, after all. Everything is rushed and clipped together. Plotlines vanish and are replaced with alternative circumstances. Various people all dub each other with bad impressions of each others' voices. The music is the same '60s sexploitation library cues every Something Weird fan has heard before and again. It's a marvelous headtrip that I do think only the '60s could produce. Nothing makes sense, and yet everything comes together. I watched Zardoz for the first time recently and this movie is still weirder than fucking Zardoz.

The movie shares this mutant home-video commonality not with A Clockwork Blue...more like the coy, quasi-dignified chuckles of The Hand of Pleasure. The narrator is hilarious. I love voiceovers from movies from this time. They were usually put in to help cut costs, and they really show how slack and alien the scripts for these movies were. This is the history of economics in slow motion--porn grunge seen first hand. This movie, both for its content and its context, is an anthropological dream.

Now I'm starting to get too far up my own ass--I do that when I'm happy. This movie has relieved of me, once again, the weary tensions of our plane. It is my Land of Cockaigne, my Arcadia, my Blue-Rock Candy Mountains. In more serious terms, however, it's yet another record of a crazed brain. It is another gate into the sort of madness that is sometimes necessary to crack open the ice that sheathes creativity. It is another marker by which we understand that the world we take for granted is not always what it seems, and how that's a marvelous and lovely thing. Too often are we Captives of our Hate. We should be Captives of Love instead.

And this movie is so captivating. In good ways and bad. So check it out when you can.

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The Rider of the Skulls (1965), by Alfredo Salazar

This is not a B-Western, I swear! A B-Western, as far as I know, is usually defined as being a Western made between the '20s and '50s which was not an A-feature. And, usually, the B-Western proper is bred only in the United States. The Western market changed after the 1950s to a more Italian focus, but The Rider of the Skulls is a Mexican production. And, like a lot of horror films made in Mexico over the last hundred years (to say nothing of the other movies written and directed by Alfredo Salazar), Rider of the Skulls is stunningly offbeat, being probably one of the weirdest Weird Westerns out there.

A werewolf prowls the Mexican countryside, under the control of a witch. He wears a flannel shirt, as is required by all Mexican werewolves, and his mask is pretty goddamn amazing. Eventually, one of the families subjected to the horror of the werewolf--including Don Luis and his wife, plus their son Perico and cowardly butler Cleofas--encounter the Rider of the Skulls, a masked gunfighter whose parents were killed by bandits. He patrols Mexico in search of supernatural evils to dispatch, such as the witch and the werewolf. The witch reveals to the Rider that the werewolf is Don Luis, after she shows off her abilities to summon a zombie, and the Rider is forced to kill him. (If you think it's a spoiler that I reveal that werewolf's identity, well...let's just say that if you want to hide the fact that your freshly introduced character is a werewolf, don't have their wife introduce them by saying that they recently became mysteriously ornery.) He adopts the now-orphaned Perico, as Don Luis killed his wife whilst werewolfing, and he takes on Cleofas as his comic relief sidekick.

The movie doesn't end with the death of the werewolf. In fact, we're just getting started...because now our heroic trio has to take down a vampire! This vampire has an even more amazing mask, and transforms into the fakest movie bat of all time--faker, even, than The Devil Bat. He seeks a girl named Maria to be his companion, and he nearly succeeds in turning her into another of the undead before he too is dispatched by the Rider.

But even that isn't the end of the movie, as the Rider, Perico, and Cleofas discover in the next town they ride up on is haunted by the goddamn Headless Horseman! (Little south of Tarrytown, isn't it?) And best of all, the Headless Horseman's animate severed head is represented by the most amazing mask we've seen so far. Said head turns up in the hands of a woman, whom it beseeches, "Please return me to my body." Upon having his noggin restored, however, the Horseman makes the mistake of cursing out God Himself...not even his robed skeleton minions are that dumb. And you'd better believe that the fury of the Lord comes through the blade of the Rider of the Skulls!

Anthology films are usually dangerous territory, as a lot of critics will tell you. For some reason there's a propensity for anthologies to always have that one segment that fucks up really, really badly, and as such we critical folk walk into them with trepidation. But I dunno...it seems like I've had a lot of really good luck with anthology films recently. Night Train to Terror was a glorious mess, Alien Zone was better than I expected, and my rewatch of Tales from the Quadead Zone went swimmingly. The Rider of the Skulls is definitely an anthology film, and that works tremendously to its benefit. An anthology film, I've realized, can theoretically pack more trashy goodness into its runtime by merit of having the chance to stack its craziness on top of itself. Just as you catch your breath from what came before, something new comes along and plows over you like a bullet train. This is yet another movie that I can almost review just by summarizing it.

If I had to say anything about it to give, y'know, an actual critical opinion, it would be that I really appreciate how it plays with the sort of stories it's dealing with. I can't say that I have ever seen a werewolf, for example, who transforms by first turning into a skeleton, and then being built back up into wolf form. Also, it's really nice to see a werewolf movie that remembers that there usually aren't thirty full moons in a row. The vampire meanwhile has that mask, which makes him look like a bat/human hybrid, but he also spends a lot of his screentime trying to defeat his foes by punching them. And as I mentioned before, the Headless Horseman has his two skeleton sidekicks, which is an interesting addition to the Headless Horseman story. It makes him feel more portentous, and I'm always happy to see skeletons in movies.

Probably cut from episodes of a kid's TV show, or maybe three other movies, The Rider of the Skulls is a three-headed nightmare of a Western, feeling like what would happen if the Blue Demon or El Santo started riding a horse and carrying a six-shooter. Deconstructing its own tropes, but only accidentally, the movie shows the power of low-budget Mexican horror, being one of the best examples of such that I've seen. Make it yours.

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Face of the Screaming Werewolf (1964), by Gilberto Solares, Rafael Portillo, and Jerry Warren

I must be at the absolute end of my rope if I'm starting to actually enjoy Jerry Warren movies. There are Ed Wood fans, of course, and Jess Franco fans...even James Bryan and Jean Rollin fans. But in all my years I've met few people who have told me they appreciated the films of Jerry Warren. Warren's fame these days comes from the many films he "made" from films originally shot in Mexico, to which he added his own scenes and dubbing. He and K. Gordon Murray were the kings of this Mexican import racket, though Warren also made films of his own, including the legitimately atrocious Wild World of Batwoman. Despite my completely rational hatred for Batwoman, I found that Teenage Zombies, of all things, was not a horrible experience, and I intend to check out Frankenstein Island at some point. But my introduction last year to today's film, an example of Warren's Mexican hybridizing called Face of the Screaming Werewolf, was a revelation in trash filmmaking. In fact, I considered it to be the best movie I saw in 2016. Now, to most that's probably just a sign of how utterly trashy 2016 was, but all the same, I think Face of the Screaming Werewolf is a movie that deserves another look, if anything because it was as baffling as the year I saw it in.

We open in media res with a bunch of scientists hypnotizing a lady. This hypnosis scene goes on for way, way too long, like most scenes in Face's 59-minute runtime. But we learn that in a past life, this lady was an Aztec priestess of some kind who may be connected to a mummy who I guess these scientists are looking for. They go to this pyramid and find not one but two mummies. One of them is a legitimate Aztec mummy (composed of stock footage of one of this movie's halves, 1957's La Momia Azteca), the other is apparently a much more recent addition to the pyramid. According to a news report, this other mummy--played by Lon Chaney, Jr.--was given "an exchange of fluids" from the mummy to "achieve an apparent sense of death." Note that this intriguing plot thread is never followed up on; but it was probably added in to explain why the Chaney!mummy later appears wearing Larry Talbot's plaid shirt and slacks. This mummy is freed of his wrappings by a rival gang of scientists who steal the mummy from an exhibition and attempt to bring it back to life in their laboratory/wax museum for reasons that are never explained. With me yet? Well, get ready for the shock of your life, when the Talbot!mummy does come back to life, only for the revivificated Chaney to transform into a werewolf under the full moon! This movie ain't called Face of the Screaming Mummy, after all. The Chaney scenes come from La Casa del terror, which from what I know originally played the Chaney role for laughs, a parody of his Universal work. So now there is a killer mummy running around but also a werewolf. Will our heroes prevail? Are there heroes? Will any of these plot threads come to a head in some way?

I've learned I simultaneously enjoy and despise writing reviews about movies which I consider to be the favorites of my favorites. Usually, they're movies where the synopsis should be able to stand for itself, but every time I review one of them I feel like I've done an inadequate job. C'est la vie pour une ecrivaine...but I still want to make people watch these things. I like to imagine, however, that my summary of Face of the Screaming Werewolf is probably sufficient to convey the flavor of this film to you. It is a mess, possibly one of the messiest films I've ever seen. Its continuity is like confetti; it's like Harry Stephen Keeler's web philosophy given Frankensteinian life, with a million tangents that exist solely because life is nothing but millions of tangents. Never mind the fact that few among us (read: me) actually enjoy consuming media that applies that weird maximalist slice-of-life madness to genre fiction like mysteries or horror. Face is not born of deliberate action, instead being a product of the strange energies that arise from the Burroughsian cutup method. Warren has taken two serviceable movies and made a nonsense film so artless that it's become artsy again.

I love movies that make you constantly ask "why?" and "what?" This is a feature of great good movies as well as great trash movies. When you watch The Wicker Man, for instance, you constantly ask, "Why is everyone is this village acting so strangely?" and "What happened to Rowan?" But in Face of the Screaming Werewolf, you will just keep asking "why...?" and "what...?" with no continuation past that initial word. Constantly. Why do the scientists need to use the girl's past life memories to guide their way to an above-ground tomb? Why would someone "exchange fluids" with a mummy or force someone through the process--when a mummy should be desiccated and therefore have no fluids to speak of? Why do the other scientists steal the mummy? Why do they try to bring it back to life, and where did they learn the methods of doing so? Why do filmmakers keep thinking the Aztecs had the same assignations to their mummies and pyramids as did the Egyptians?

What sort of body would provide funding for a research team interested in bringing back the dead, especially the very old, very organ-deprived dead? What sort of equipment requires hooking up cables to a stone sarcophagus and filling it with dry ice fog while annoying sirens go off? What sort of scientists run a horror wax museum on the side? What are the other two tubes on the three-chambered person-sized centrifuge they put Lon Chaney into for? What kind of werewolf can be killed by being clubbed in the head with a torch?! I could go on.

If you want to go into how the two movies clash, you need look no further than tone. Really, we're looking at three different movies here. There are the Jerry Warren scenes in the minority, which have drastically different film quality, which largely consist of various characters providing stapling exposition. Then there are the Lon Chaney scenes, which are pretty spot-on imitations of the Universal Wolf Man movies--pretty standard fare. But we also have the scenes clipped from La Momia Azteca, which are impressively chilling, making stunning use of shadow and lighting to make their admittedly disturbing mummy makeup even spookier. If I thought I could bear the rigors of old Popoca again, I'd actually be willing to give the source material of this film a try. The only thing ruining the creeps are the inserts of Warren's actors mugging into the camera.

Face of the Screaming Werewolf is truly one of the most inept and cheap films of all time, but that makes it special in my mind. I think it will always be one of my absolute favorites, even if I fly solo in that regard. But as always, I encourage people to let the under-an-hour-runtime magic light their way.

"It Might Even Horrify You": A Retrospective on Universal Horror, Part 3 (The Wolf Man)

The Wolfman--a tragic victim of a werewolf's bite, marked with the sign of the pentagram. Endlessly throughout this series will you hear the familiar rhyme:

Even a man who is pure at heart

And says his prayers by night

May become a werewolf when the wolfsbane blooms

And the moon shines full and bright

I liked the first one in this series when I was younger, so let's see how this goes! 

(Part One of this Retrospective, and Part Two)

The Wolf Man (1941):

As time goes on we can see that there are tiers to the Universal Horror films--I would consider Son of Frankenstein as A-tier, The Ghost of Frankenstein as B-tier, and Bride of Frankenstein as WTF-tier. With The Wolf Man being another A-tier contender, it seems as if my previous suspicions of Universal were misplaced. I know what I have yet ahead of me, but fortunately this one is good enough to keep me feeling nice for awhile.

Larry Talbot is the prodigal son of a wealthy Welsh family. His father, Sir John Talbot, was grooming Larry's brother John Jr. for the position of running the House of Talbot, but unfortunately John the younger died in a hunting accident. Larry has returned home to learn the ways of tending to the old house. Using his father's telescope, Larry sees a beautiful woman, Gwen, and decides to go into town to be sort of creepy to her. Larry, played by Lon Chaney Jr., is charming but damn if he isn't creepy to Gwen by today's standards. Despite his shortcomings, Gwen begins to fall for him, and we can feel sympathetic when he is attacked by a wolf...actually a werewolf, a Romani man named Bela, played by Bela Lugosi. Larry clubs the werewolf to death with the wolf's head cane he bought from Gwen shop, but he is bitten, and soon, he inherits the curse of the werewolf. We follow Larry as he tries to both hide and solve his curse, before he turns on those closest to him, with the aid of Bela's mother Maleva.

The main tragedy of The Wolf Man is born from the fact that Larry is torn from the life he built for himself in America, and while this tear is based on obligation it still means that he is coming across an unexpected fortune. And yet the trip to obtain this shaky fortune leads him to the threshold of a terrible curse. Chaney does a good job of showing the progress of Larry's desperation--at the end, he is begging his father to lock him up in his room, like the animal he believes he's become. Sir John's refusal to do so leads him to tragedy as well: using the silver cane he bashes his son to death, only realizing the monster's identity when it is too late.

The Wolf Man feels like a legitimate movie, and it is a concise and well-plotted narrative. All of the major performances, and pretty much all of the minor ones, are well-done. Realizing that werewolf stories were not terribly popular prior to this movie's release--even taking the 1935 release of Universal's previous wolf-man effort, Werewolf of London--helps one realize how truly influential this movie was. It's tough to find faults in it, and while I won't watch it often, I'll probably reach for it more than most other films if I feel like a werewolf flick.

Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943):

Two grave robbers have heard tell of valuables that were buried with werewolf Larry Talbot. When they try to steal them they expose Larry's uncorrupted corpse to the light of the full moon, which brings him back from the dead. Of course, the curse of lycanthropy has not left him, and he seeks Maleva, the Romani woman from the previous film. She in turn leads him to the town that contains/borders Castle Frankenstein (variously called Frankenstein, and Vasaria, and basically any number of other names roughly equivalent to the number of Frankenstein films), where she hopes Ludwig Frankenstein will cure him. But Ludwig is dead, and the villagers do not hide that this is a blessing to them. All the same, Larry finds himself in the ice-caves under the ruins of Castle Frankenstein, where he also finds the Monster, trapped in ice. (Did Ludwig install a freezer unit that went rogue when the villagers dynamited the Castle? Why are there ice-caves down below? Were they scared of using the sulfur-pit trick again?) He frees him, assuming for some reason that the Creature can lead him to Frankenstein's supposed werewolf-cure. The Monster is now played by Bela Lugosi, though ironically there is no evidently of Ygor's persona surviving--I can't imagine that being frozen in ice will do a brain any good. While this is a bust Larry nonetheless learns there is another surviving Frankenstein, Elsa. We then have a musical number, because this movie is not very good. Finally Larry finds the notes of Frankenstein, but they are useless to him. It isn't too long before the scientist who chose to help him, Dr. Mannering, becomes fascinated by the Frankenstein Creature, and can't bring himself to destroy it, just like Ludwig Frankenstein. And with Larry still unable to control his transformations, it would seem we're speeding fast into a Monster Mash.

And yet this climax is, like almost everything leading up to it, flat and boring. Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man repeats a lot of stuff we've seen before, and doesn't even have a relevant title. Still going with the idea that the filmmakers know Frankenstein is the scientist/family and not the Monster, yes, Larry does meet Frankenstein, but honestly Elsa is such a non-character that I just don't care--she does nothing to influence the plot and she's only barely teased as a love interest for Larry. I think I conveyed that Ghost of Frankenstein didn't strive to accomplish anything, or even entertain: I was unprepared for the sheer lack of depth that this movie would lay upon me. There's nothing charming or even comically bad here, just the checking-off of boxes: the stop-motion wolf-man transformation sequence, the Frankenstein Monster wrecking things, the cameos of mysterious Romani folk, the hateful villagers, the self-pitying from Larry. Despite not expecting the quality drop this early, I was still expecting exactly this sort of movie when I set out on this quest. It's a shame that The Wolf Man wasn't made earlier--while that would probably subtract from its present quality, it would mean at least that it got sequels that had a chance of being better than this. I've heard nothing but bad things about House of Frankenstein or House of Dracula, except from people who I really don't share film taste with at all, and so I suspect this is the beginning of the end.

In essence, nothing about Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man will entertain you unless you feel like you need more of the raw basics of The Wolf Man and the later Frankenstein films. To which I ask you, why don't you just rewatch those movies?

Weirdly, this movie is said to take place four years after The Wolf Man, meaning that film is actually set in the late 1930s. On a more mortifying note, the filmmakers seem to have forgotten that Elsa was the name of Wolf Frankenstein's wife, meaning that, yep, Wolf married a woman with the same name as his sister. Now, I'm sure that happens--I mean, some guys are going to have sisters and wives named, like, Mary--but suddenly Wolf's sudden embrace of the Frankenstein evil suddenly makes a bit more sense. The man has problems, dude!

House of Frankenstein (1944):

At least Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man gave us room to work up from. Trapped in a German prison are Dr. Niemann (Boris Karloff) and the hunchback Daniel (J. Carroll Naish, aka Dr. Durea from Dracula vs. Frankenstein). Dr. Niemann is a fan of Dr. Frankenstein, having gained his knowledge from his brother, who had been Frankenstein's assistant--they never specify if it's Fritz, Karl, or Ygor. He promises Daniel a new body, and after the two break jail they kill circus-master Bruno Lampini, with Niemann impersonating him. Lampini's death leaves the pair with a dangerous artifact--the skeleton of Dracula, staked through the heart. (Evidently Marya Zeleska didn't do such a good job of burning her father's body as she thought, unless these are the sun-bleached bones of Alucard.) When he's inevitably resurrected--now with the form of John Carradine rather than Bela Lugosi--he forms an alliance with Niemann: Niemann won't stake him, and Dracula will kill the scientists who scorned Niemann. Eventually, however, the village fights back, and Dracula is killed by sunlight before he can reach his coffin. Thus "part one" of the movies ends, and we follow Niemann and Daniel as they travel to Vasaria/Frankenstein/whatever the village from the Frankenstein movies is called. (In this film, Vasaria is a separate town from Frankenstein, when previously those were names for the same town! Doesn't that help clear things up?) Daniel falls in love with a girl named Ilonka, a thing which appears to be mutual despite his hump, while Niemann finds the ice caves under Castle Frankenstein, where both the Monster and Larry Talbot have washed up after falling off a cliff in the last movie, being frozen in ice. Sounds familiar? Also, seriously, where did those ice-caves come from? Anyway, Ilonka ditches Daniel for Larry, after he and the Monster are thawed out, and Niemann and Daniel set about reviving the Monster so that they can finish out Niemann's revenge. And I know this summary is long enough, but I need to describe the particulars of this plan. I'm far from the first to point out how shockingly, hilariously stupid this scheme is, but I will repeat it again so that I can hopefully further signal boost the sheer idiocy this movie veers into:

Niemann plans to trap the brain of one of his enemies in the body of the Frankenstein Monster. He then intends to transplant Larry's brain into the body of the other man he's kidnapped, so that that man will have the curse of lycanthropy. But...that just means that he'll have given one of his enemies a much larger, stronger body. And it also means that he'll just being giving Larry a different body. I mean, unless the Monster's body corrupts the brain in its head and that's why the Monster no longer acts like Ygor, whose brain it has...but that subverts the idea that the Monster is destructive because it has a criminal's brain, suggesting instead that it's the Monster's body which is evil...AH! They just didn't care! They. Just. Didn't. Care!

Anyway, Daniel tries to warn Ilonka that Larry is a werewolf, but she freaks out, claiming he's jealous, and calling him ugly. Jesus. This eventually leads to Larry falling in love with Ilonka, but he is mindful of the curse. Then another strange thing happens: Larry says that he must be killed by a silver bullet, which is obvious enough, but he also says that the bullet has to be fired by someone who loves him. That turns out to be what kills him, when Ilonka shoots Larry in self-defense, dying from werewolf-inflicted wounds in the process. A grieving Daniel strangles Niemann, failing to notice the escape of the Monster, which kills him and kidnaps Niemann. The Monster and Niemann escape the inevitable mob of villagers but don't get far, with both of them drowning in quicksand.

House of Frankenstein is better than I've made it sound, though I hope I've conveyed the fact that this movie has so much going on that it at least manages to evade being boring. There are a lot of subplots happening, quite a few of them well-fleshed out, with Daniel's tragic love for Ilonka being one of the best. We have a much better cast than we did last time, with everyone turning in a much better performances, save perhaps Lon Chaney. Sadly, Larry Talbot gets virtually nothing new added to his character, and all of the drama of The Wolf Man has burnt out at this point, so it crushes his character and any chance for an arc completely flat. All the same, Boris Karloff, J. Carroll Naish, and John Carradine turn in wonderful performances, which overcome the expected faults of the movie. These include the wince-worthy moment where an idiot side character expresses his wish to own a set of stocks to "keep the wife in line." (Fuck you, 1940s.) More notably, the movie also suffers from repeating things we've seen before, just with different characters. Instead of Ygor using the Frankenstein Monster as a hitman, here it's Dr. Niemann using Dracula as a hitman. Instead of Larry Talbot thawing the Monster from the ice-caves, it's Niemann thawing out the Monster and Larry. So it goes.

As I said, this movie is entertaining enough as a shitty movie that it's all pretty forgivable. Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man was not effective as a horror movie, but that was to be expected--the horror genre had been largely neutered by the 1940s. But it didn't really work as a monster rally either, and that's probably because it had to serve as the prototype for what this movie would become. Once they had the structure down, they were able to produce something better. I hope they don't squander what they learned...

Obligatory title nitpick: yes, the House of Frankenstein technically appears--if you count the worn-down, blown-up ruins of Castle Frankenstein as an appearance. Really, it's just those weird, weird ice-caves that show up. I can see them using this title to set up a sub-series within the series, the House of Whoever movies, but this is the first of the House movies to appear. Yet another thing they didn't care about, but which I don't care much about either.

House of Dracula (1945):

This is what I came for, yet I was still not prepared. I'm normally loath to reduce my reaction to a film something shallow and pithy, but let's keep this short--if nothing else so that I can get on with my life. House of Dracula sucks. There.

Dr. Edelmann has three peculiar patients: the first is the vampire Count Dracula (John Carradine), who wants to stop being a vampire; the second is Edelmann's own assistant, the hunchback Nina, who wants to stop being a hunchback; and the third is the werewolf Larry Talbot, who wants to stop being a werewolf. No, there is no explanation as to why Dracula and Larry are alive again. We get a wide variety of distractions, mostly consisting of Larry's boring Wolf Man rampages through the countryside. We slowly, slowly find out that Dracula doesn't want Dr. Edelmann to transfuse him his blood to cure his vampirism--he wants to transfuse his blood into Edelmann, so that he becomes this weird sunken-eyed creature who goes back and forth between good and evil. And it is evil!Edelmann who chooses to track down and revive the Frankenstein's Monster. More drawn-out events occur until Edelmann kills Dracula and Nina, Larry (who is cured of his lycanthropy at last) kills Edelmann, and the Monster, more inconsequential than ever, dies as Edelmann's house (which cannot in any way be called a House of Dracula) collapses on him.

I'm of the opinion that every show should be canceled after three seasons. Only rarely have I found exceptions to this: Star Trek: The Next Generation, for example, or The Twilight Zone. Or Doctor Who, which shouldn't have been canceled after 26 seasons. House of Dracula feels like a show on Season Five when Season One wasn't really that great to begin with. We are so far away from the source material at this point that it's hard to sustain interest, and I think no one knew that better than Universal. They didn't really expect this movie to find an audience, I think, and God, does it show. I wrote few notes on the movie (and you can see how much effort I put into recapping the plot), and all I can really say is that at least the vampire effects in it are good. They have it so that John Carradine will drape himself in his cape and then be stop-replaced with a cartoon, which turns into a bat. Why, oh, why, could John Carradine not be in more of this movie? He doesn't give as good of a performance as he did last time around, but he's a great Dracula, which is why people still watch him in Billy the Kid vs. Dracula. 

Other thoughts: um. It was sad when Nina died? But I mean, we ultimately got nothing from her aside from "it's sad that she's a hunchback and doesn't want to be," and that she seemed nice. Er. Uh. Introducing the concept of vampire-blood making one evil is kind of cool? Too bad it ripped off Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde without actually porting those movies in. Um. Hm...God, I really have to reach...

This one broke me, I think: all I have is rambling. I just have one thing to say about it before I try to just forget about it: I really don't get why people would enjoy this one, even taking in the "excuse" of "well, duh, it's bad" that I keep seeing used for a lot of these later Universal pieces. It reuses the ending footage of The Ghost of Frankenstein, for God's sake! I attacked Dracula for assuming idiocy on behalf of the viewer but House of Dracula brings that to an even deeper low. And this isn't even the worst of it. Movies were in sorry shape indeed in 1945 if this was considered passable fodder--a thin, weak clone of a clone of a clone, shittier than a Monogram or Roger Corman movie, barely memorable, barely even bothering to tick the boxes like its predecessors. Now let's see what sort of atrocities 1948 will set upon me.

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948): 

...o-kay. It wasn't that bad.

Chick (Abbott) and Wilbur (Costello) are two shipping workers who have been charged with delivering crates containing Dracula (Bela Lugosi for the second and final time) and the Frankenstein's Monster. The monsters come to life and escape, with Dracula having befriended the Monster so that he can make him into his slave. Aiding him in this is Dr. Sandra Mornay, Wilbur's girlfriend, who has a perfect brain to transplant into the Monster, one which is so stupid that it will have no choice but to obey Dracula--natch, she is talking about Wilbur, because Lou Costello characters are dumb! Along the way is Larry Talbot, who is a werewolf again (so much for that happy ending, House of Dracula!), and who is hunting Dracula and the Monster. It isn't long before Chick and Wilbur are unwitting captives of what Larry warns them is "the House of Dracula." By the end of it all, Larry and Dracula plunge into the ocean, which apparently kills them, while the Monster dies on a burning pier, but it's not over, because Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man. Well. Not yet, technically, but spoiler alert, Vincent Price is in this movie and it is awesome.

Fortunately, I was spared a miserable experience by my own low expectations. I was primarily used to bad comedy of the '30s and '40s, namely the Ritz Brothers, and as a result I was expecting jokes that I'd heard from my 80-year-old customers at the grocery store on top of heaping loads unbearable slapstick. If anything because the ache of some of the comedy from previous Universal movies, I found this to be pretty funny. I wasn't rolling on the ground or anything--we're talking a hit every ten minutes, tops, and even then not a belly laugh. But Abbott and Costello have a strong sense of how comedy is supposed to work, even if their material doesn't do wonders for me, and God, it is a relief to see someone in a comedy film act like a goddamn comedian after all this time. Practicing and training things like timing, and body language, and delivery, can almost sell all of the material, even the obnoxious screaming--almost every comedian I've seen in the last two years should be taking notes. 

It's interesting to see how the comedy actually betters the horror that the movie occasionally reaches for. Most of this attempt at dramatic atmosphere is through Larry Talbot, who Lon Chaney gives more life than he has in the last two films--making him into sort of a supernatural bounty hunter, one with a curse, even, is a pretty nice step, so of course this is the very last film Larry appears in. Thus far, people have laughed in Larry's face over his request to be chained up whenever a full moon comes, but Bud and Lou are common folk! They're not as tight-assed as all those cops and scientists. They actually do it, though of course they undo it moments later and it is played for surprisingly effective laughs. The movie is not heavy on deconstruction in its parody, but it has its moments.

The monsters get much more to do, and more heft given to their actions, than in House of Dracula, making it a nicer end for the series than that film...though you have to ask how sad it is that a parody of the series served as a better conclusion than its last serious entry. It's as official of a line-up as you could ask for, with Lugosi returning as Dracula, and the Monster being played by Glenn Strange, as he has been since House of Frankenstein, thus giving him as many turns as the Monster as Karloff himself. The focus of course is more on shenanigans than the monsters fighting, and in case you didn't notice I sort of gave up on thematic analysis a few films ago. And I'm still not looking forward to the two remaining Abbott and Costello movies on my list, either, because those are notably closer to when they called it quits. For now, I get to pick up on what that ending leaves us with, and watch something good again. After all, the series isn't quite over--but you'll forgive me for failing to notice our next franchise.

Come back next time to see--or rather not see--the horrors and crimes of the Invisible Man!

---

Image Source: Classic Horror Posters, Wikipedia, Universal Horror Wiki

Dracula vs. Frankenstein (1971), by Al Adamson

I don't know if I've ever seen a bad review of Al Adamson's Dracula vs. Frankenstein. Those that I have seen have usually been by people who watch--ugh--good movies and can't stand anything that suggests that there is a cinematic economic class below that to which they are accustomed; or by folks who have confused it with the 1970s Dracula vs. Frankenstein made by Jess Franco, which is a life-draining experience. Adamson's film is the jewel in a crown which also contains wonders like Brain of Blood--it makes him a fond memory in the mind of trashsters the world over, and indeed, Dracula vs. Frankenstein has a strange archetypical quality about it that really does make it feel like a foundational pillar for trash cinema. As Top Hat is to musical films, Dracula vs. Frankenstein is to movies made by wide-eyed movie nerds with loads of ambition but not a penny to their name. Indeed, estimates suggest it took Adamson five years to make this film due to continuous budgetary issues. Which makes the final flick fascinating indeed--why, it almost feels like a real movie!

Dr. Durea runs a museum of wonders in a tacky seaside carnival. With the assistance of Grazbo, his Little Person carny barker who eats money and Grodim, his brain-damaged bruiser of a lab partner, he ekes out a cheap living privately trying to bring the dead back to life until he runs into Count Dracula. Dracula reveals that Durea is a descendant of the Frankensteins, and that he can help him get revenge on all the scientists who have snubbed him--after all, he has the original Frankenstein's Monster, and he will help Durea bring it back to life. Durea can hardly refuse, but the awful activities of the two will hardly go unnoticed. Friends of some of Grodim's victims begin closing in on Durea, until inevitably all falls apart, and the Monster of Frankenstein turns on the King of Vampires...

With a premise like that--dishonored son of House Frankenstein wants revenge, leading to teamup with and battle against Dracula--does really help sell the idea that this movie belongs somehow, doesn't it? Isn't that the exact plot of one of the later Universal movies? I can never keep them straight, and that's because this film is better than all of them combined. To me, Dracula vs. Frankenstein ends up becoming a paradox: it embodies the exact model of a series of movies that I hate (and I will make it no secret on these pages that I'm not fond of actually watching the Universal monster movies), and yet is one of my favorite movies of all time. I can't ignore the fact that it is bettered by arriving about thirty years too late, and by being an outsider to the studio system, for all its faults and glories. By using the Universal formula in 1971 (or earlier, depending on when Adamson commenced filming), the movie has a touching self-awareness about it that never makes it drop down from celebration to parody. It is indeed a celebration; Adamson, I think, presents himself as a '30s and '40s horror nerd by sheer merit of the film's plot. But in case you don't believe me, then examine this movie's casting decisions. Dr. Durea (pronounced Durray, Duhr-ee-AY, Drury, or Dray variously throughout the film) is J. Carroll Naish, of such Golden Age creepers as Dr. Renault's Secret, The Monster Maker, and House of Frankenstein. Grazbo is Angelo Rossitto, from Freaks and The Corpse Vanishes. And as you may already know, Grodim (or Groton, or Grahtim, or Groban) is the last appearance of Lon Chaney Jr. We also get Forrest J Ackerman, comic book writer/editor/superfan, as a character named Dr. Beaumont (which may be a reference to Edmund Gwenn's character from the 1936 horror film The Walking Dead--IMDB flat out claims they're the same character).

That someone as cheap as Adamson ended up with a cast like this definitely contributes to the memorability of the film. I have my own thoughts on each of them. Naish generally brings in the best performance in the whole damn thing, even when he's clearly reading cue cards, in a way that strangely precedes Marlon Brando's shockingly good work for Island of Dr. Moreau. (I'll get to that film soon enough.) He gives Dr. Durea both serious gravity and a hammy accent that suggests he's having the time of his life with the part. Rossitto has some of the strangest dialogue in the movie and for that I enjoyed his appearance greatly. He also plays a more sadistic "Evil Little Person" stock type in Brain of Blood who also gets some truly excellent stuff to say. That he flat out fucking eats a dollar bill not five minutes into the movie shows that we're in good hands. As for poor Lon Chaney, then: I can't be the first person to comment on how it is sad that the very last thing we see of the star of The Wolf Man in movies, forever...is him falling off a roof like a bag of mashed potatoes. Prior to this all he gets to do is mug and strike an Of Mice and Men impression. After watching this movie for this review, I continue my winter study of Bela Lugosi's career by watching The Black Sleep, an aptly-titled snoozer which features the admittedly impressive teamup of Lugosi with Basil Rathbone, John Carradine, Tor Johnson, and yes, Lon Chaney Jr. And sure enough: Chaney basically plays Grodim in that movie, too. It's really odd that in the early parts of Dracula vs. Frankenstein, which were presumably shot first, Chaney looks no older than he did when Black Sleep came out in 1956, fifteen years prior to this film--and in that movie, he looked roughly the same as he did in The Wolf Man, released fifteen years before that! For someone who hit the booze and cigarettes as hard as Chaney famously did, he was well-preserved, or at least, well-made-up. In the later scenes, Chaney looks a much older and harder man, but that works to his advantage as the film implies and later forgets that he is a werewolf. Constant sweating, grunting, and panting definitely benefits the strain of trying to hold back such a transformation. And finally there is Ackerman; almost a nonentity in the film, he's a fun addition simply because I can thus pretend that this movie takes place in the same universe as Philip Jose Farmer's duology Image of the Beast and Blown, where Uncle Forry is kidnapped by sex aliens.

Whew! I could go on about this movie, but suffice it to say that I can hardly describe the pseudo-grandeur the casting obtains without offering the counterweight of the movie's trashiness. It still looks like a Nathan Schiff movie, and definitely feels like one too (perhaps by way of Waldemar Daninsky). Adamson's scripts feel unfinished, or more properly, nonexistent. We get odd moments where a man says to his girlfriend: "I wish I could hold you in my arms right now." Except...he does so while holding her in his arms, right then. Add that to the fact that none of Dr. Durea's technobabble makes sense from a grammatical or scientific standpoint. There are also several key points which ground this movie firmly in the '70s: namely, there are bikers, and at one point, the bikers try to rape someone. There are also hippies, who get dialogue like, "His body was chopped up all into little pieces! Man, it's a real bummer!" Perhaps it's these elements which further spare the '40s callbacks--they add to the fact that what we're looking at is a living comic book, replete with monsters, mad scientists, and awful haircuts. The dips through trashy weirdness make the film immune to the torrents of boredom, overhype, and insipid Abbot-and-Costello non-jokes of the Universal films it's based on.

Welcome to the A-List in 2017. If this is what my year looks like...I'm glad to be back.

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.

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Image Source: Ramble House

The Cross of Seven Jewels (1987), by Marco Antonio Andolfi

If you were to take Bryan James' Run Coyote Run, mixed it with bootleg Waldemar Daninsky, and featured the Bruno Mattei dub actors, you would get this movie. It is a werewolf movie with a sex cult in it. It's also an action movie with Mafiosi, car chases, and Caspar Gutman impersonators. This is another one of those movies where the writing committee all each liked different genres. It becomes simultaneously spooky, hilarious, and testerone-y to an extreme, even though one of those adjectives isn't exactly real. The plot is somewhat complicated, but here's what I know of it...

Marco (played by director Marco Andolfi) has his jeweled cross stolen by motorcycle bandits while he visits his cousin. Both the theft and the visit are bad because firstly, Marco wants to bang his cousin, and secondly, the cross is the only thing that stops him from transforming into a werewolf! A werewolf who is actually a nude man wearing half a Chewbacca mask. Apparently Marco's lycanthropy is linked to the BDSM sex cult seen at the beginning of the film. Yes, this movie has one of those too. There are many fights with various types of gangsters, some of which involving some badass cops who appear to have been transplanted in from another movie. Ah well. Things become more complicated when the underlings of a Senator show up to retrieve Marco, and when we find out that the werewolf god the cult worships killed Marco's witch mother by exploding her belly. Will the answer lie with "Amnesia the Fortune Teller"?

This movie is over before you know it, even though it also drags. It's full of creative ideas, and no wonder--it, like many other great movies, serves as a glimpse into a weird otherworld. Everything that comes at us in the film is nonsensical and foreign, and it slowly gains momentum as time goes on. In this world, zombie Vatican priests can lead werewolf-worshipping cults involving lots of leather and whipping. That's just how it is. Sometimes it takes a little while to get from idea to idea, but when they all line up it's remarkable just unfettered this movie is.

It is also ludicrously cheap, as evidenced by the Wookiee mask and furry cock-socks on display. I believe the movie went into the drugs that fueled the script, and also into shooting the movie on film. European film is great because even in 1987 they still resisted the VHS scourge (though many Americans did too). Thus this movie seems artsy somehow while also being incredibly sleazy and cheap. This is pretty light stuff, outside of a werewolf rape scene (obligatory, probably), and the cousin-flirting--there's no Joe D'Amato here. It feels actually pretty American, with the action sequence lunacy and with the Universal homage they do, aka the werewolf-makeup transformation sequence with the fades and whatnot. As in those movies, it goes on forever and becomes inane after awhile. It's not nearly as boring as a Daninsky film though.

Insanity is the peril of boredom. That's why so many of us become insane--because our lives are empty. Madness fills our lives in the form of great movies like this one. When we watch these movies, we believe in the impossible, even when we don't believe in what's happening on the screen. We are taken to a fantasy land where the ultimate escapism happens. It turns out at the end of the tunnel of escapism is love.

I love this movie and it reminds me of several other movies, because of course it does. Bruno Mattei's Hell of the Living Dead, William Edwards' Dracula, the Dirty Old Man, Nick Millard's .357 Magnum--these and many others come to mind. That means we're on the right path, probably. That it takes all those movies and adds even more influences to the cocktail is always truly impressive.

This was my first time seeing this movie, but I plan on watching it again sometime soon. Perhaps then I'll have more to say. I would like to apologize now for not having done a Christmas movie, but this movie has a cross in it, which Kirk Cameron would say is an empty Christmas tree. I think I may be getting that mixed up but Kirk Cameron Christmas doesn't play by anyone's rules, least of all Kirk Cameron's. As an aside, I watched God's Not Dead on Christmas. That will not be reviewed on this site because, surprise, it is not fun.

The Cross of Seven Jewels is fun. Go for that instead.