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.
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