THE WEREWOLF AND THE YETI (La Maldicion de la Bestia, 1975)

The turning of the blowing of the leaves again turns my thoughts toward horror and monsters, and so it's time again to visit with Jacinto Molina and his onscreen alter ego, Paul Naschy. "The Curse of the Beast" is his reboot, authored by himself and directed by M. I. Bonns, of the saga of Waldemar Daninsky, who here turns into a wolfman again for the first time. Anthropologist Daninsky travels to the Himalayas with a team of European scientists in response to seeming photographic evidence of the existence of the legendary Abominable Snowman. The yeti, however, proves to be literally the last of Waldemar's worries. Losing track of an injured comrade, our hapless hero ends up in the clutches of a pair of witches who love him up into a werewolf. The territory actually is infested with witches. One, bearing the totemic name (for Naschy) of Wandessa (Silvia Solar) is the power behind the local warlord, Sekkar Khan (Luis Induni). The Khan is plagued with ulcers on his back, but Wandessa eases his agonies with skin grafts flayed from the backs on captive women. Relief never lasts, so the Khan constantly sends his head minion Temujin (Jose Luis Chinchilla) to fetch more captives, including the members of Daninsky's expedition. Whatever his own problems, Waldemar has got to save the day, though there's something of a selfish motive behind his heroism. He's been told by a local mystic, who unsurprisingly gets killed by the bandits, that the leaves of a certain plant, mixed with the blood of a young woman, will cure lycanthropy. Surprise follows surprise as only a small amount of his girlfriend's blood is needed, and the cure works-- but not before the filmmakers square things up with the audience by pitting werewolf Waldemar in perfunctory fashion against a yeti that appears in the worn, much-edited print I saw as little more than a tall blur. To use Naschy's Universal reference points, what we have here is a little bit of Werewolf of London (the Himalayan origin), a little bit of House of Dracula (the happy ending) and a bit of the old studio's Arabian Nights pictures thrown in, with the usual extra bits of sex and sadism thrown in to satisfy Seventies audiences, though not so many for me as in an uncut print. It's far from Naschy's best, but I like the way his imagination ran rampant here in directions I didn't anticipate. And of course this was not the end of Waldemar or his curse, but it's nice to see that in one part of the multiverse things turned out all right for him.

INQUISICION (1976)

If no one expects the Spanish Inquisition, how is anyone gonna deal with the French Inquisition? That's the challenge of Jacinto Molina's directorial debut, a vehicle for his on-screen alter ego, Paul Naschy. Filmed in Spain while longtime dictator Francisco Franco was still dead, the production probably was careful not to give Spanish Catholicism a bad name. Naschy plays itinerant judge Bernard de Fossey, a hammer to witches who takes too much pleasure in his work. He struggles to suppress the sexual arousal he feels reading accounts of witches consorting with the Devil, and takes his distress out on accused witches who are almost invariably attractive and tortured in the nude. Bernard's not after your typical hag; that would kill his buzz more than he actually wants it killed.

Bernard stirs up hysteria when he arrives in town, especially when the boyfriend of Catherine (Daniel Giordano), a comely local lass, is murdered by hooded highwaymen. Obsessed with getting justice, Catherine consults an actual witch (Tota Alba) who shows her how to get in touch with Satan, who may, if he's in the mood, give her the key to the mystery. It's not quite that mysterious to us, because we've seen how Bernard looks at Catherine -- and veteran Naschy fans may have noticed something familiar about one of the highwayman's leaping attack on the victim. Sure enough, under the influence of a potion -- if not also Satan! -- Catherine envisions Bernard removing the hood. She decides to take the fight to him, fulfilling his own fears of temptation, but events quickly spiral out of either person's control.

One of the subplots in Molina's screenplay follows Renover (Antonio Iranzo), a one-eyed professional informer who spreads rumors of witchcraft out of misogynist resentment of women who won't give the poor scumbag a chance. When his aggressive advances on Catherine's friends end with two women dead and himself mortally wounded, he uses his ante-mortem statement to denounce Catherine and her witchy mentor. Bernard actually has tried to protect Catherine from prosecution but has no choice now but to put her through an ordeal. He seems taken by surprise when Catherine confesses, and then denounces him, after which damning corroborating evidence promptly appears to seal his fate. While Catherine goes to her death screaming in terror, Bernard seems resigned to his fate, if not relieved by it.

For an actor-turned-director Naschy/Molina was unusually self-effacing. I don't know how many people knew that Naschy and Molina, who'd already written many Naschy pictures, were one and the same, but I'd expect exploitation film producers not to take chances and tout director Naschy as the next Cornell Wilde or something similar. Make what you will of his creative split personality, but Inquisicion is clearly an ambitious work for a first-time director. Visually it's quite attractive in the way of many Euro horror films that take advantage of ancient locations, but also effectively expressionist in cinematographer Miguel Fernandez Mila's use of lurid reds in Catherine's vision of the Sabbat (with Bernard as the Devil) and Bernard's vision of Catherine as a crimson temptress. As a writer, Molina plots things fairly well, though his conclusion, with Catherine's denunciation following Renover's fatal encounter, feels anticlimactic, if only because we expect something more hair-raising from Paul Naschy. That he closes the film that way suggests that, despite the sleaze of the torture scenes, Molina saw this as something more than the typical Naschy vehicle.

Naschy's film is a late entry in a continental cycle of witchfinding pictures, a subset of a larger "history of cruelty" genre. While its torture scenes put it in the exploitation category alongside pictures like Jess Franco's Bloody Judge, Inquisicion sustains a more subtle ambiguity on the subject of witchcraft and the devil. The old witch is plainly a witch in the most mundane sense, knowledgeable about potions and such, but we're left to judge for ourselves, prompted by the film's one voice of reason, whether Catherine saw the Devil or not -- or whether Bernard even was in on killing Catherine's lover. Our only evidence for his guilt is Catherine's vision, the authority of which we're forced to question. If Catherine's community is cursed by anything, it's by a common human malice and hypocrisy that consumes clergy and laypeople alike. Overall it's an impressive debut, though it came a little too late in the history of Spanish horror for Naschy to build on it as he might have had he stepped up a few years earlier. It still goes down as one of both Molina and Naschy's best efforts.

DVR Diary: FRANKENSTEIN'S BLOODY TERROR (La Marca del Hombre Lobo, 1968)

The coming of all-digital television and the allotment of extra digital channels to existing local stations has resulted in more people discovering old movies the old way: on commercial TV, interrupted by ads, possibly further edited for time and formatted to fit the screen. In the last year or so, my local cable service has added three channels that occupy local stations' digital space. Grit is an action-oriented channel split between westerns and more recent shoot 'em-ups. Get.TV is a less genre-specific channel that showcases the Sony Pictures library, along with a bloc of vintage western TV shows. Most intriguing of the lot is Comet, which aims to cover more psychotronic territory. While the name says science fiction, Comet also shows horror films dating back at least to the 1950s, and it was on Comet that I finally got around to seeing Paul Naschy's first appearance as the accursed Waldemar Daninsky, el Hombre Lobo. The only difference between seeing it on Comet and catching it on an independent station some weekend thirty years ago is that Comet happened to have a widescreen print of the American edition of this 70 mm extravaganza, which played in 3-D during its original European release.

Readers of this blog probably know how Enrique Lopez Egiuluz's film got its inaccurate American name. U.S. distributor Independent International was committed to deliver a Frankenstein picture to theaters, namely Al Adamson's legendary Dracula vs. Frankenstein, but the picture wasn't ready, apparently due to legal reasons. So I-I  slapped a new title on the Spanish film -- the end credits offer yet another title, Hell's Creatures -- and added a prologue explaining how the Frankenstein family had been cursed with lycanthropy for its unholy experiments and renamed Wolfstein, thus explaining how the film's Imre Wolfstein is a werewolf. Ironically, a later Daninsky film, released in some places as Dracula vs. Frankenstein, was retitled Assignment Terror for the U.S.in deference to the Adamson film. More confusing still, the Hammer production Horror of Frankenstein was released in some U.S. markets as Frankenstein's Bloody Terror! Check out the Gadsden Times for January 31, 1972 on the Google News Archive if you don't believe me.

Naschy was the onscreen alter ego, adopted to win over this film's anticipated German audience, of screenwriter Jacinto Molina, heretofore little more than a bit player in movies and a big fan of the Universal horror cycle. Molina/Naschy's career project was to revitalize Universal tropes with a modern, adult Euro sensibility. Waldemar Daninsky is his take on Larry Talbot, albeit more dangerous as man and wolf. His opening scene, in which he appears at a costume party in a mephistophelean red outfit, is a warning that, however charming Daninsky may be, he's someone dangerous to know. And that's before Imre Wolfstein, recently resurrected by fools removing a stake from his heart, transmits his curse to the Polish Count. While Naschy does the Talbot torment thing well, screenwriter Molina spares himself the "they won't believe me" misery Lon Chaney's Larry often endured. Daninsky has won friends who see plainly what has happened to him and are eager to help him beat the curse. Their research turns up a potential expert on curing lycanthropy whose work was thirty years in the past. The expert's son arrives by train with his female assistant and one large wooden crate. He is, in fact, the expert himself (Julian Ugarte), a vampire who revives Imre yet again, imprisons Waldemar, and plans to make Waldemar's friends his undead thralls.

Ugarte's vampire is the weirdest thing in the picture. You know he's bad news before the reveal, as the camera approaches him warily at the lonely train station. Once he's revealed, he proves a strangely frolicsome creature, seducing an intended female victim with a running dance. Here Molina takes no cues from Universal but gives us a vampire whose spirit of amoral play reminded me of Molina's contemporary, Jean Rollin. Treating the vampire that way makes sense on Molina's own terms, however, because it maximizes the contrast between the elegant, almost ethereal vampire and the brute force of the werewolf, played by Naschy as a drooling cannonball of animal fury, especially compared to the greying Imre. The transformed Daninsky swipes at his prey compulsively, swinging his arms like he was throwing haymakers, when he isn't hurling himself at human or undead targets. Even before the makeup goes on, when Waldemar is chained, the former weightlifter Naschy thrashes about so, while an incredible chanting theme for the transformation plays, that you fear for the props. Naschy has always reminded me of John Belushi a little, and if any of you remember Belushi's Weekend Update editorials when work himself into an apoplexy and throw himself to the floor, that's Naschy just getting started. You can see how he became a horror star here; Naschy as performer and Molina as writer infuse the old tropes with an unprecedented level of energy, while the widescreen cinematography and terrific locations and sets give Daninsky the biggest possible showcase. Frankenstein's Bloody Terror isn't free of the curse of dubbed Euro-horror: bland supporting characters are rendered still more bland by dull dubbing, and either this cut or further cuts imposed by Comet eliminated nearly all of a final fight between Daninsky and Imre. Most of the time, fortunately, the slow bits are redeemed by the pictorial spectacle, even in what looked like an unmastered print. Under even worse broadcast conditions long ago, Frankenstein's Bloody Terror inspired people to seek out more of Naschy's work. It has been a while since I'd seen any Naschy movies, but now I want to get back into the habit.

 

VENGEANCE OF THE ZOMBIES (La Rebelion de las Muertas, 1973)

Paul Naschy's movies are to be appreciated as spectacle or not at all. Dedicated to making himself a horror man on the Anglo-American model, Naschy wrote and/or directed (under his real name of Jacinto Molina) a spree of films designed to establish him as a master character creator in the classical mode. Rebelion de las Muertas, which Leon Klimovsky directed from Molina's script, is a blatant display of his versatility as Naschy plays three roles -- though one (the Devil) appears only in a dream sequence. The point of the film -- though some may dispute whether it actually has one -- is to show off how different Naschy can look. That extends to the eye-blistering variety of costumes he wears in his principal role as the tragic Hindu mystic Krishna. Never mind that Naschy is about as convincing in this role as El Santo might be; the fashions of Paul Naschy are a spectacle in their own right.

The story is unapologetically preposterous. Someone is killing young English girls and turning them into zombies -- the slow, servile sort, not the brain eaters. One such zombie woman attacks Elvira Irving (the eyebrowless "Rommy") but can't finish her despite getting her hands around Elvira's throat. Elvira seeks refuge at the Welsh retreat of her friend Krishna, who we've already seen putting on a show of his spiritual detachment from the mortification of his flesh. Krishna has retreated to Llangfair to achieve further purity, but the house he's acquired has the reputation among the locals as a "devil house" whose erstwhile occupants, the Whatley family, were massacred by peasants for purported Satanic practices centuries earlier. The vivid tales -- dismissed by the otherwise utterly credulous Krishna -- inspire a nightmare of blood sacrifice to an admittedly impressive demon Naschy in Elvira's sleep. But her waking nightmares will prove much worse.

Elvira's friend Dr. Redgrave (Vic Winner) has been called in by New Scotland Yard to assist in the investigation of the murders of young women. The killer's m.o. is a strange melange of voodoo and thugee motifs, which is meant to remind us that Krishna has a collection of thugee weapons and had spent some time in Africa during his spiritual wanderings. We also eventually learn that the victims' families had all spent time in Benares, India, and were there when "something violent, like a killing," happened there -- around the same time when Krishna says he made a hasty departure from Benares for personal reasons to begin his world travels. But some other details of the killings, like the way a morgue security guard has his throat cut by an open beer can, are still more mysterious. And the fact that the real killer, the mastermind who commands the zombies, dresses sort of like Guy Fawkes (or "V for Vendetta," if you prefer), albeit with a different mask for nearly every outing and a familiar barrel-chested physique, makes you wonder even more.

These zombies may look friendly, but they're out for revenge and can turn anything into a weapon!

It turns out that Krishna isn't such a master as he tells folks. Despite convulsive fits that make you wonder whether he's going to break out in fur and fangs, he eventually explains to Elvira that he's under the voodoo control of his reckless brother Katanka, who raped and killed a British girl in Benares way back when. Even though "the death was made to look accidental," local Britons promptly attempted to lynch Katanka by burning his house down around him. He escaped with severe burns, an itch for revenge, and a scheme to achieve immortality through voodoo. Katanka means to kill the daughters of the British families who lynched him and attain eternal life by consuming Elvira's blood, with the assistance of some chicken-chopping apparent defector from the Mummenschanz troupe. But if Krishna can break his brother's mental control, Scotland Yard can intervene, and a representative of the international voodoo governing body (really!) can crack down on Katanka's "betrayal," the day might yet be saved....

The auteur theory has done much to enhance the bad movie viewing experience. If you accept Vengeance of the Zombies (which finally hit America around 1980 as Walk of the Dead) for what it is, a Paul Naschy star vehicle and an episode in Molina's creative life, it becomes more compelling precisely for (and not in spite of) the creative shortcomings that are practically an authorial stamp. Molina's quest was to recreate the thrill of his youthful viewing of Universal horror films while translating their archetypes into modern exploitation idiom. His writing often went well beyond the scope of Universal, encompassing more ambitious "history of cruelty" stories and sometimes achieving evocative, atmospheric effects that are sometimes timeless, sometimes indelibly of his own time. His challenge was to find out how many variations he could wring out of his essential theme of a charismatically doomed man, and the effort is often as interesting as the outcome. The point of any given Naschy picture isn't the story as much as Paul's performance, but confronting Naschy is kind of like waging war on terror -- you're either with him or against him. There's pretty much no reason to look at Vengeance if you aren't interested in seeing Naschy do his thing. And even if you "get" Naschy, this particular film is far from his finest hour and a half. Nevertheless, there's something compelling about it in all its tackiness and misplaced musical funkiness that I've found in nearly every Naschy film I've seen: that unselfconscious, practically uncritical ambition that drives the writer and actor to make a spectacle of himself. Some people may watch his films to laugh at him, but for many others Molina, through Naschy, was living their own dream, maybe even dying for their sins. That's how movie cults are made. I don't know if I count as a cultist, but no matter how bad a Naschy film may be on some objective level, I'm always ready to watch him try again.

And here's an English language trailer, uploaded to YouTube by freyacatoct.

PANIC BEATS (Latidos de Panico, 1983)

Growing up in Franco's Spain, Jacinto Molina was steeped in American horror culture. His enthusiasm for Universal Pictures is most obvious in the Waldemar Daninsky werewolf films he wrote (and later directed) for his Paul Naschy alter ego. Latidos de Panico shows a broader American (or Anglo-American) influence, since the core story echoes Patrick Hamilton's play Gaslight, which was made first into a British movie, then into the more famous George Cukor film for M-G-M, which earned Ingrid Bergman her first Oscar. Was the American influence broader still? Could Molina have read translated EC Comics? I have my doubts, but after seeing Panic Beats you'd see why I ask.

Influences aside, Molina's film is a sequel to one of Naschy's most popular movies, Carlos Aured's Horror Rises From the Tomb, for which Molina created the character of Alaric de Marnac, one of his variations on the Gilles de Rais theme. Molina's script and Aured's film borrowed from Mario Bava's Black Sunday the idea of an executed villain's curse coming to fruition centuries later. It also enabled Naschy to play two roles: Alaric and a doomed 20th century descendant. Latidos is a sequel to this film the way any Daninsky film is a sequel to its predecessor. That is, Panic Beats is more a reprise than a continuation of the de Marnac character, an opportunity for Naschy to do again something that had proven cool before, with variations.

For those unfamiliar with Gaslight, I can sum up the situation quickly: Paul de Marnac (Naschy)wants to get rid of a sickly wife (Julia Saly) so he can live with another woman and the wife's money. His plan is to scare the wife to death by convincing her that the ancestral home is haunted by the evil spirit of Amalric (Naschy), a wife-murderer who occasionally returns from the grave to lay into unfaithful women with his trusty flail. Molina wisely opens with a stylish sequence establishing Amalric's viciousness. In armor and on horseback, the villain chases a naked woman through a forest before dismounting to beat her to a pulpy death. This is the first of Molina's directorial efforts I've seen, and the opening impressed me. He invests it with more moody artistry than Naschy's previous directors were usually capable of. Those early films have their own raw virtues, reminiscent of the "history of cruelty" films I've been watching lately, but Molina seems to have more control over tone, and that'll serve him especially well at the end.

It's just a matter of time before Paul's plot pays off, and his success moves us away from strict Gaslight territory. In that film the more modest object is to drive the wife insane, and the villain fails. In Panic Beats the modern villain's victory only launches a grim endgame that puts Paul in another league altogether. His comeuppance comes at the hands of his paramour, or more literally from the working electric heater those hands dump into Paul's bathtub. That leaves the femme fatale the winner, if not for the EC ending.

As an actor-director, Molina has to keep the suds and dirty water carefully placed to hide the "full Naschy" from sensitive audiences, if not from actress Pat Ondiviela.

Whether the femme fatale counts as the required unfaithful woman or not, who should show up to pay her a call but Amalric de Marnac in full armor, an embodiment of Paul's revenge from the freshest of graves? Underneath his helmet is a rotting skull, which re-coheres into the familiar fearsome and bearded visage as Amalric's armor steams with rage. He is a silent, remorseless avenger, more like one of EC's gruesome avatars than a self-interested villain. He avenges his descendant with uncompromising finality, and unlike an EC comic, there's no gallows humor to lighten the mood.

Molina shows us Amalric's handiwork in detail, and the shots of the woman's pulped face would seem gratuitous if they didn't somehow seem appropriate instead. Molina controls the tone so that we (maybe I better say I) feel that we need to see this, that we need to see the woman's beauty utterly destroyed by a force beyond the reach of seduction or appeals to mercy. Much of what falls in between the bookending scenes of horror lacks the usual outrages that make me a Naschy fan -- though that bathtub scene is a typical showcase of the actor's sometimes misplaced vanity -- but the beginning and end should be enough to redeem Panic Beats for Euro horror fans.

THE DEVIL'S POSSESSED (El Mariscal del infierno, 1974)

Paul Naschy, the thespian alter ego of writer-director Jacinto Molina, is often called "the Lon Chaney of Spain." There's an appropriate ambiguity to that label. In his most popular character, the tormented werewolf Waldemar Daninsky, Naschy clearly walks in the thorny footsteps of Lon Chaney Jr. In other films, like The Hunchback of the Morgue, his pathetic grotesques are more in the tradition of Chaney Sr. The more Molina took Naschy beyond the conceptual realm of the Universal classic monster mythos, the more his complete body of work came to resemble the broader range of roles of the elder Chaney. Molina wrote the script for director Leon Klimovsky's medieval adventure, crafting for himself the sort of role Chaney Sr. might have played in silent days, albeit with a more modern emphasis on Satanic sleaze, and for extra measure throws in a subtle homage to the great man's most famous role at the end.

An American distributor retitled El Mariscal del infierno to cash in on Seventies Satan fever in the aftermath of The Exorcist, and to pre-empt any assumption that "The Marshall of Hell" was a Spaghetti Western. In medieval Europe, a marshall/mariscal was a high ranking military official and part of the royal household. Such a man was Gilles de Lancre (Naschy), a fictional amalgam of Macbeth and Gilles de Rais, who opens the film by retiring to private life as the lord of his castle and the nearby countryside. He's somewhat disgruntled over failing to get the recognition he feels he deserved, or failing to achieve the greatness he considers his destiny. In retirement, he hopes to win fame as a man of science.

Toward that end, his wife Georgelle (Norma Sebre) has brought "the greatest alchemist ever" into the Lancre household. Playing the Lady Macbeth role, the apparently bamboozled Georgelle encourages Gilles to indulge the alchemist's every demand toward the great project of synthesizing the ars magnus, aka the Philosopher's Stone -- the Sorcerer's Stone to you American muggles. Achieving that will make Gilles, whose greatness is heralded by his falling sickness, worthy to rule all of France. Such a project demands immense and costly resources, including the blood of human sacrifices to Satan. Gilles balks at that idea for about thirty seconds before wifey cajoles him into ordaining murder. From that point, de Lancre becomes the Marshall of Hell and the terror of his land.

Enter the hero, Gaston de Malebrache (Guillermo Bredeston), one part Banquo (Gilles's old comrade-in-arms) and one part Robin Hood (the noble-turned-rebel version), retiring in his turn from the wars. He rebuffs an attack by rustics, only to learn that they aren't bandits hunting the rich but rebels who mistook him for the tyrant de Lancre. That doesn't sound like his old pal Gilles, so Gaston sets out to investigate after fending off a gang of Gilles's goons in a tavern that seems to have a trampoline hidden somewhere for our hero to bounce on, Fairbanks style. Gilles himself welcomes his old buddy as a dinner guest, but Georgelle urges him to assassinate the "peril" in their midst. Gaston escapes the attempt and flees, joining the rebels who happen now to be lead, following the death of their original head, by Gaston's attractive cousin Graciela (Graciela Nilson), who helps him overcome the rustics' natural suspicion of another noble.

The sides properly formed, the de Lancres and Malebraches go to war, Gaston scoring first blood by entering the lists in disguise against Gilles in a joust and lancing an eye out. Things go downhill mentally from there for de Lancre. He hears the wailing of his victims in a delirium, resolves to repent his evil, only to order the massacre a party of monks when one of them dares call him out for his crimes. Frustrated at the alchemist's repeated failures, and perhaps finally realizing that the old man's a fraud, he kills the crank but carries on the regimen of torture and sacrifice, convinced that he can attain the ars magnus without wizardly expertise. By the time he faces Gaston for the final showdown, he's convinced that the prize is his, making him immortal and invincible.

Molina's script and Klimovsky's direction suffer from an imbalance that's inevitable when the star elects to play the villain. Their blend of Macbeth and Robin Hood is awkward, since one or the other must be the dominant character. In the end, the film's Robin Hood, Gaston, is a dull if energetic goody-two-shoes, the rebellious appeal of the archetype undercut by the villain's transgressive charisma. The creators probably recognized this by the end and were determined that Gaston should not defeat Gilles in single combat.

Instead, Gilles strikes a decisive blow and is poised to finish his foe when the rest of the rebels appear. As soon as he was surrounded I knew to expect a Throne of Blood homage with Naschy as a Mifunian human pincushion. But the fun thing about Naschy is that his homages are often multilayered, riffing on more than one influence. Molina was a meta-auteur, and spotting the homages adds to the entertainment value of his films. Here he did not disappoint. Gilles defies his enemies, warning them that he has the ars magnus in his clenched fist, with which he can destroy them all and conquer the world. He unclenches his fist -- and there's nothing there. That's Phantom of the Opera all over the place, when Erik is trapped on the bridge and threatens his pursuers with a mini-bomb, only to open his empty hand and laugh, as if his last word will be, "Psyche!" Unlike Erik, Gilles in his final madness actually thinks he has a super-weapon, but the moment and the gesture are Naschy's bow to Lon Chaney Sr. and Rupert Julian across the decades. At least I saw them that way.

Like Dr. Jekyll and the Werewolf, my copy of The Devil's Possessed comes from Mill Creek Entertainment's Pure Terror box set. This time Mill Creek comes closer to the actual thing. IMDB lists the running time of El Mariscal as 95 minutes, while Devil's Possessed comes in at a respectable 89 minutes. Whether that's the difference between a "clothed" and "unclothed" version I can't say, but there is a notable lack of nudity in my copy of a film full of sacrifices to Satan and attractive Euro actresses. Overall, the film has an appropriately grungy look typical of the more realistic, unromanticized portrayal of medieval Europe dating back at least to The Lion in Winter, enhanced by actual ruined locations. I wouldn't be surprised if more money was spent on costumes than on extras, but everybody looks good, and the eyepatch-sporting Gilles of the final section deserves a place in the Naschy Hall of Fame. Even the cinematography comes off respectably in an admittedly compromised presentation; you can see where they were aiming for something like a Caravaggio look in some of the scenes in the bandits' lair.

It sometimes seems as if Naschy was obliged to drool some substance in every picture. Below: Whatever you say to Gilles, don't mention the eyepatch!

The Devil's Possessed is ultimately a little less than the sum of its parts because of the imbalance of power between Naschy and his co-stars. If you have him as a villain but want audiences to root for the hero, you need one made of stronger stuff than Guillermo Bredeston, I'm afraid, and you should probably change the script to introduce the hero first. The emphasis on Naschy, not to mention on sacrifice and torture, marks El Mariscal as a horror film rather than a swashbuckler in the final analysis; it's closest analogue might well be Rowland V. Lee's Tower of London in its volatile genre mix. In any event, this film is admirable for its ambition, even if that ambition isn't fully achieved.

This is my second and final contribution to the Naschy memorial blogathon organized by Mad Mad Mad Mad Movies to mark the anniversary this week of Jacinto Molina's death. I'm just the tip of an iceberg of terrific tributes and reviews all over the blogosphere. To learn more about the man and his work, just follow the links listed at viceducal headquarters. Happy browsing!

DR. JEKYLL AND THE WEREWOLF (1972)

Jacinto Molina died one year ago this week but on film he lives on as Paul Naschy, the last of the old-school horror men, an interpreter of the classic monsters who translated the naive fantasies of Universal Studios into the idiom of Seventies exploitation without losing the original sense of wonder. To mark the anniversary of his passing I'm contributing to a memorial celebration blogathon coordinated by the Vicar of VHS and the Duke of DVD of Mad Mad Mad Mad Movies fame, but I fear that my tribute isn't all it could be. That's because I chose to watch Leon Klimovsky's Dr. Jekyll y el Hombre Lobo in a version provided by Mill Creek Entertainment as part of its new Pure Terror collection. In its original form, the film is 96 minutes long. Mill Creek's version is barely 72 minutes; more than a quarter of its running time is gone, including the opening credits. The remainder is an awkwardly disproportionate film that feels like two separate projects grafted together and leaves you wondering for the longest time when Dr. Jekyll might show up.

We seem to be moving far from Jekyll territory immediately as Imre, an Anglo-Hungarian gentleman, and his new bride Justine take their honeymoon in the old country so Imre can commune with his dead ancestors. A well-off tourist, Imre is an instant target for the local riffraff, and he will go exploring in odd places despite warnings of a monster in a nearby castle. Why worry about monsters, though, when the countryside has plenty of mundane carjackers and rapists to offer? In short order Imre is stabbed to death and Justine is prepped for gang rape. All the while, however, a monster has been watching, but now Waldemar Daninsky has seen enough.

Waldemar Daninsky (Paul Naschy, below) works himself up to the proper state of outrage before intervening to break up a gang rape.

Before you can wonder how long our old friend has been watching -- did he miss the stabbing, or did he suppose the rapists might stop at some point of no harm done? -- the man in the black turtleneck strides into action. With Waldemar around, who needs a werewolf? The man himself can snap ribs with a bear hug and finish his victim with a rock to the face. He doesn't get them all, however, and that means vendetta! Daninsky's faithful leper lackey and his motherly witch of a keeper fall victim to a rapist's vengeance before Waldemar finally chokes the villain out. The werewolf gets his licks in, too.

Ding, dong, the witch's head.

With his friends dead and a widow wanting to go home to England, there's nothing to keep Waldemar in Transylvania anymore. Indeed, Justine just happens to have a friend who might be able to help the poor Pole with that curse thing. The friend is Dr. Henry Jekyll, grandson of the famous fictional physician and inheritor of his research into the isolation and concentration of evil in human form. He's been busy refining granddad's formula, and he has an idea that could help Daninsky. It goes like this: Jekyll will inject Waldemar with granddad's formula just before the next full moon. Daninsky's transformation into Mr. Hyde will counteract the effect of the curse, Hyde's concentrated evil will being stronger than the werewolf's. Once the crisis is past, Jekyll will hit Hyde with the newly improved antidote, restoring a civil Daninsky and curing the curse. Despite a setback when Waldemar is trapped in an elevator at the rise of a full moon, slaughters a nurse, and rages into the night, everyone resolves to carry on with the experiment.

"Why do things happen?" Waldemar waxes philosophic just before tearing a nurse's throat out with his teeth. Below, the werewolf steps out.

It may be an oddity of the dubbing, but you almost get the impression that "Mr. Hyde" is a default villain that anyone who takes the formula will turn into. Jekyll and his assistant Sandra (an homage to the femme fatale/mad scientist/vampire's assistant of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein?) react to their successful transformation of Waldemar into a leering creep with Serverus Snape hair as if they had revived the "historic" Mr. Hyde. And as we'll see, "Hyde" has a decidedly retro fashion sense, when he isn't sporting an unflattering sweatshirt.

Above, "Waldemar's Hyde!" The scientists mean to say that Waldemar is now Mr. Hyde, but he does show plenty of hide in this shot. Below, I saw Waldemar Daninsky in the streets of London, but the hair he wore was funny, through no fault of his own.

Believe it or not, the experiment works. Jekyll's lab has the best restraints in the business. They hold down the werewolf in an early test, and they hold down Hyde while he whines about his blood boiling and his need to be free. The antidote does its work and Daninsky is himself again. That can't last. Turns out Sandra, also Jekyll's mistress, is jealous of Justine's attention to him. So at the moment of his redeeming triumph, Sandra stabs him in the back and injects the helpless, terrified Waldemar with another dose of Hyde serum. A madder scientist than her mentor, she apparently wants to see Hyde at his full power.

Sandra "hydes" a dagger in Jekyll's back. Get it?

And here we come up against the limitations of the Mill Creek edition of the movie. In that, the reign of terror of Hyde Redux consists of 1) pushing a drunk into the Thames, 2)impaling Sandra on a torture device in a fit of temper and 3)flirting with girls in a bargain-basement discotheque in the dregs of Swinging London. It's a short reign; the Hyde formula is in limited supply, and in time an embarrassed Waldemar finds himself among the go-go dancers just as the full moon cues a nifty stroboscopic transformation scene. That sets up the inevitable showdown as the werewolf targets Justine, who may have learned to love Waldemar enough to kill him....

Above, a Polish werewolf in London. Below, a continuity error: this shot of Shirley Corrigan as Justine comes from much earlier in the picture, but I thought it looked best here.

The Mill Creek version of Dr. Jekyll and the Werewolf is a colorful, picturesque and entertaining ruin. As usual, there's little in the way of continuity with past or future Daninsky movies. Waldemar is a cartoon character who can be rebooted after every fatal outing. His conduct is inconsistent from film to film. In Werewolf Shadow (aka The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman) Daninsky is conscientious about chaining and confining himself during full moon nights. Here, in the first half of the film, he strolls out as if it doesn't matter if he kills or not. Waldemar never quite has the overbearing guilty conscience of his precursor, Universal's Larry Talbot. Sure, he'd like to be cured, but it doesn't really seem to bug him (or his friends, for that matter) as much as it should that he's a mass murderer. If Talbot had had an elevator accident like Waldemar's, you know he'd be demanding to be locked up, or killed, the next morning. Here, Waldemar, Jekyll, Justine and Sandra just seem to shrug the episode off. It seems almost amoral but it may simply be a refusal of self-pity, Naschy the actor distinguishing himself from Lon Chaney Jr. by adopting an air of stoicism rather than despairing self-pity or self-righteous.

I'm reluctant to judge Klimovsky's film on such limited evidence, but I do feel that it retains the odd charm of Naschy's work. My only real complaint is the absence of a worthy antagonist for the werewolf to fight, it being impossible, after all, for Hyde and the Werewolf to fight. A good dream sequence could have taken care of that, however. Anyway, count me among those already won over by Paul Naschy's curious charisma and his commitment to the monster movie tradition. Even in its vivisected form, Dr. Jekyll and the Werewolf didn't damage my regard for the man and his work.

There's more where this came from all over the Internet this week. Look for this sign for a wide variety of Naschiana from fans and critics throughout the blogosphere.

Blogathon Bulletin

As a rule I don't announce review topics ahead of time, but this announcement is about more than just me. I'm going to be participating in two blogathons in upcoming weeks, joining fellow fans in honoring two great character actors and highlighting the range of their work.

First up this week is a blogathon dedicated to the versatile Yaphet Kotto, coordinated by The Goodkind over at the Lost Video Archive. He's been spotlighting Kotto already, but the blogathon begins in earnest on Monday. I'll be doing my part this Thursday with a review of Kotto's foray into slavesploitation in Steve Carver's Drum, the sequel to Richard Fleischer's infamous Mandingo. To make the occasion complete, and to note the passing of producer Dino De Laurentis, I'll have a review of Mandingo itself up in a little bit. Kotto is a key character actor of the Seventies, as this week's blogathon showcase should prove.

As November bleeds into December, horror and exploitation fans will mark the first anniversary of the passing of legendary Spanish horror man Paul Naschy, one of the last of his kind and all the more beloved for that. The commemorative blogathon begins on November 29, and is being organized by the high priest of Naschiania, the Vicar of VHS, and his liege, the Duke of DVD, at Mad Mad Mad Mad Movies. I propose to contribute at least one review for the occasion, having recently bought a Mill Creek box set with two Naschy films that will be new to me. The man also known as writer-director Jacinto Molina was an auteur in the fullest sense, a performer who took creative control of his career almost from the beginning. He invested his work with personality transcending conventional standards of quality in individual films, and the upcoming blogathon should reveal his career as a cumulative work of art.

I'll be watching and reviewing more movies apart from my blogathon duties, but I hope that my contributions to these collective appreciations lead readers to check out the full range of participating blogs and share their love for actors, action and movies.