La maldición de la bestia

Having just previously watched Paul Naschy's The Werewolf Versus the Vampire Woman and enjoyed the Hell out of that one, I had the same expectation when seeing this other one in which he once again portrays Waldemar Daninsky, the Werewolf. Well, part of me was bored until Waldemar encounters two women in a cave and makes love to them! There's quite a bit of nudity not to mention perhaps a little more gore than I saw in the previous one. To tell the truth, I wasn't as enthralled by this movie as I was with The Werewolf Versus the Vampire Woman. Maybe the increase of those elements I mentioned got to me or maybe having seen mostly werewolf movies for the past two weeks, I may be a little werewolfed out. Or maybe the print was wretched. I will say no way was I completely bored by this movie so that's a plus! So on that note, I say go ahead and watch The Werewolf and the Yeti or the alternate titles of Night of the Howling Beast or La maldicion de la bestia.

In this Spanish horror movie a group of scientists travel to Tibet to try and track down the Yeti. While there one of their team is infected with lycanthropy and periodically turns into a werewolf.

This is my first exposure to the Spanish horror icon Paul Naschy, who stars in the lead role here. Seemingly Naschy made many similar films in a long career. On this basis, his back catalogue could do with further investigation. Despite being a low budget affair, The Werewolf and the Yeti throws a lot of ideas at us and certainly tries to entertain. Aside from the two title monsters there are a pair of cannibal vampire cave-girls, a wicked sorceress and a gang of violent bandits. Sadly, while the werewolf has a prominent part to play in proceedings as he goes round killing bad guys, the Yeti only appears at the beginning and the end. The snowy locations and sets are very nice too and add to the overall atmosphere.

This film's main claim to fame has to be its inclusion on the Video Nasty list. It was even one of the titles that remained on the DPP's hit-list right until the very end and so has an added notoriety. However, it really is quite difficult to work out why this should be, as despite some gory moments this is hardly a shocking film. The skinning sequence is probably the most obviously infamous but it's not particularly graphic. Rather than being nasty, this is more of a silly and schlocky film. It should interest werewolf film fanatics and should also offer something to those who enjoy the racier Euro variants on the Hammer horrors.

Waldemar (Paul Naschy), the renowned adventurer, joins an expedition to find the Yeti in the Himalayas. While hiking the mountains, he is captured by two cannibalistic demon nymphets guarding a remote Buddhist temple and becomes their sex slave.

This film ignores the events from the earlier films "The Fury of the Wolfman" (1970) and "Curse of the Devil" (1972), and provided an all-new origin for Waldemar's lycanthropy, having the curse transmitted by the bites of not one, but two, vampire women! The mix of supernatural creatures is certainly a good deal of fun.

The film was banned in the UK by the BBFC under the Video Recordings Act of 1984 and was featured on the "Video Nasties" list. It has allegedly never been released in the UK. But for us lucky Americans, the film is now available on Blu-ray from Scream! Factory. It is fairly bare bones, with no commentary or other features, but we do get to choose between English and Spanish, which is nice.

While most of the 'Waldemar Daninsky'/'Hombre Lobo' Werewolf flicks starring the great late Spanish Horror legend Paul Naschy cannot really be described as masterpieces, they are all entertaining and have a certain inimitable charm that can only be found in Naschy flicks. Being an enthusiastic Naschy-fan, I must say that "La Maldición De La Bestia" aka. "The Werewolf and the Yeti" (1975) is doubtlessly the most ludicrous and preposterous, and sadly also the least entertaining of the 'Hombre Lobo' flicks that I've seen; and yet it is immensely entertaining and definitely worth watching for my fellow fans of the man.

Usually, Waldemar Daninsky (who recovers from Werewolf-curses and, often, death with every passing film) is turned into a Werewolf by an ancient family curse, or by an unlucky coincidence. In this film, Paul Naschy's most famous character is an adventurer and scientist, who joins an expedition to the Himalayas, in the course of which his colleague's sexy young daughter falls in love with him (of course). He then becomes a werewolf after being held in a Himalayan cave by two sex-hungry and cannibalistic pagan priestesses... "The Werewolf and the Yeti" is highly camp and cheesy (also in comparison to the other "Hombre-Lobo" flick, all of which have a delightful camp factor), and occasionally extremely illogical and confused. In about 90 minutes, the film includes cannibal priestesses, the Werewolf, demonic witch doctors and an insane Himalayan warlord who wants to be Fu Manchu, as well as a Yeti (with minimal screen-time). The first half is pretty tiresome, but the film catches up in the second half with tons of sleaze, gore and genuine nastiness as well as camp fun. The landscapes look as Himalayan as Barcelona, and the whole thing makes little sense, but that does in no way lessen the fun. Paul Naschy is charismatic as always and the female cast members are entirely hot.

Since the film has little to no real suspense or creepiness it is easily the least interesting of Naschy's 'Hombre Lobo' films, but it is nonetheless highly entertaining. The fact that this impossible-to-be-taken-seriously piece of camp fun was on the UK's infamous Video Nasty list of banned films once again shows the idiocy of film censors. Definitely no must-see, but warmly recommended to my fellow Paul Naschy fans.

Here's a wacky adventure-horror film with splats of gore, a few sexy ladies and two famous monsters. Made in the 70's, The Werewolf And The Yeti was banned in Britain during the Video Nasty madness of the 80's for reasons even harder to fathom than usual, and stayed banned.

The yeti attacks some folks in Tibet before the credits have rolled, immediately establishing the pace for the film: fast! Within minutes the good guys have thrown together a major expedition and are trekking through the Tibetan mountains in an attempt to find out what weird stuff is going on up there. The answer is complicated. The superstitious sherpas won't stop raving about demons in this land, but the real problem is the shrine-guarding vampire women who like a bit of male-straddling on the one hand and snarling like hyenas as they fight over bloody entrails on the other. The hero does manage to escape from this delicate web of sex and violence, but not before he's been afflicted with the curse of werewolfism! As if life isn't complicated enough, the yeti's still at large and evil raiders are starting to attack folks indiscriminately all over the mountains. This all makes for the sensation of as much action as it sounds like it would. Somehow the film achieves a consistently tense feel, more by the portentous way that everyone talks about the situations they're in than by the actual portrayal of those situations. This isn't to downplay the considerable amount of action that there is, including gunfights, swashbuckling, dungeon torture and monster combat. But I do regard this likable film as a triumph of what's good about exploitation - getting maximum cinematic effect out of modest resources. Technically it's good too. I don't know if some mountain stuff was shot day for night, but the intense blue scenes in the snow are atmospheric, as is the oft-scary score. Note however that the use of 'Scotland The Brave' on the soundtrack over establishing shots of England is of a different kind of scary, as is a lot of the dubbed dialogue.

Macroscopic logic isn't The Werewolf And The Yeti's strong point, but few films throw together as many elements as this one does and still achieve something basically coherent, fun and with good exploitation bang for your buck. Seeing this film made me wish they still made stuff like this today.