La casa del terror

House of Terror (1959)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Mexican horror film has a group of thieves stealing a mummy (Lon Chaney, Jr.) and handing it over to a weird scientist. The scientist removes the mummy's bandages, which causes it to turn into a werewolf (also played by Chaney). This is the complete, unedited Spanish film but clips of this were used in Jerry Warren's American film Face of the Screaming Werewolf. This version I had to view without subtitles so I'm sure I missed some of the jokes going on inside the museum but even with the lack of subs the film wasn't too bad, although I prefer the American version due to how crazy it is.

"La Casa del Terror" was a 1959 Mexican production that managed to wrangle Lon Chaney himself to repeat two characterizations he was best remembered for during his Universal days, The Mummy and The Wolf Man, a special credit for his third billing. Only available in Spanish without subtitles, it remains watchable enough, and is perhaps preferable to its Americanized version from hack director Jerry Warren, 1964's "Face of the Screaming Werewolf," which basically used only Chaney's scenes, combined with an opening culled from "The Aztec Mummy" (1957), totaling only 60 minutes. "La Casa del Terror" in original comedic form ran 82 minutes, introducing mad scientist Yerye Beirute and his two assistants, who steal bodies for experimentation, the unsuccessful results winding up posing as wax figures ala Vincent Price's "House of Wax." Top billed Tin Tan only slows things down with his boring antics as museum caretaker with nagging girlfriend Yolanda Varela. At the 22 minute mark, Beirute learns about the exhibit of Mummy Lon Chaney, which he soon kidnaps, his electrical gadgetry turning the corpse into a normal looking fellow dressed in black. Thinking they've failed the scientists depart, after which a bolt of lightning brings Chaney to startled life, gazing at the moon outside the window, and promptly transforming into The Wolf Man in spirited Universal fashion, though looking more like Bud Westmore than Jack Pierce. For the remainder of the film, we alternate between the hirsute Chaney's wanderings, eventually kidnapping Yolanda for himself, and dreary footage of everyone else. Twice Chaney is allowed some comic business, the first when he catches his mirror reflection, echoing Glenn Strange in "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein," and knocking over our sadly lacking hero, who winds up clinging to a building clock like Harold Lloyd in "Safety Last" (a stuntman rather than Chaney most likely carries the heroine up the wall). It's not the most dignified dual role, in Spanish and given no dialogue, but Chaney still ably conveys the tragedy involved with the werewolf curse, and at age 53 still makes for a feral monster, looking forward in its surprisingly bloody way to Paul Naschy just 8 years away in "Frankenstein's Bloody Terror" aka "La Marca del Hombre Lobo." This long unseen horror comedy sadly marked the last feature to reprise Lon's 'Baby,' The Wolf Man, his Mummy getting shortchanged in less than a minute on screen, the actor donning the makeup one final time for the 1962 ROUTE 66 Halloween episode "Lizard's Leg and Owlet's Wing," doing The Wolf Man, The Mummy, and his father's Hunchback. After completing this obscurity in Mexico, Chaney then journeyed to Sweden to host the equally little seen teleseries 13 DEMON STREET.

A totally daft horror/comedy from Mexico that exists only in its original Spanish language version, but that hardly matters -- even if you don't understand what they're saying, the film is a hoot. Lon Chaney starts off playing a rather rotund mummy (in makeup that looks like a second-grade class attacked him with their paste jars) who is stolen during a press conference by a mad doctor, played by Boris Karloff-lookalike Yerye Beirut. The mummy miraculously gets revived and essentially turns into Larry Talbot, right down to the black clothes, and therefore into a wolf man (he is actually announced as "el homre lobo" while still in mummy form at the press conference, though no one appears particularly suprrised at this). Now add in a scared wax-museum caretaker (the funny German Valdes, aka "Tin-Tan"), wax figures that are really dead bodies, ala "House of Wax," spooky graveyard shots, a secret laboratory, a hirsuit Chaney chasing Tin-Tan around the lab, ala "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein," a musical number (why not?) and a King Kong-like finale that has the werewolf climbing up the side of a building with the girl over his shoulder, and you have a film that manages to be like a lot of others, but at the same time unlike any other. Chaney's wolf man makeup is fairly good -- certainly better than the mummy makeup -- and his silent performance (apparently he didn't speak Spanish, either) provides occasional echoes of his younger, better days at Universal.

A trivia note: Footage from "La Casa del Terror" was cut into a mid-sixties Jerry Warren mess called "Face of the Screaming Werewolf," and a recent book on the notorious Ed Wood, Jr. states that it was Wood who directed Chaney dragging the girl up the side of a building in full werewolf regalia. A subsequent book on Chaney rationalized that claim by postulating that it had to be Warren, not Wood, who really directed the scene. But the sequence is there in the original Mexican version, which was filmed five years before Warren shot his new scenes for "Screaming Werewolf."

By 1960 the films starring both Germán Valdés "Tin Tan" and Lon Chaney, Jr. were far from their better work. Valdés, a very good comedian, singer and dancer, had reached his peak during the late 1940s with comedies as "Calabacitas tiernas" and "El rey del barrio", both directed by Gilberto Martínez Solares. Chaney, as all the fans of fantastic cinema know, had been one of the stars of Universal classic horror films, and had proved his dramatic skills in "Of Mice and Men" and "High Noon." Reunited, they try to inject a bit of life to this vehicle but the results are rather below average. Playing a watchman who is constantly drowsy, an aging Tin Tan spends most of the projection time dozing; and Chaney (with evident signs of illness and the effects of alcohol abuse, at 54) tiredly reprises the acrobatics of the werewolf, and fills the gaps evoking the torment of Lawrence Talbot. He first appears as the ancient mummy of a ruthless Egyptian ruler who was cursed by one of his victims, and turned into a werewolf whenever the moon was full. The mummy is stolen by a mad scientist who fronts his experiments to bring the dead back to life, with the wax museum where Casimiro (Tin Tan) snoozes. Then the film turns into a rehash of "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein", while Paquita, the female lead (Yolanda Varela, who spends the whole movie literally working, as a waitress and a receptionist), the scientist and his two assistants almost play it straight. There is a feeble attempt at absurd comedy, with the character of a crazy psychologist (in whose clinic Casimiro and Paquita work in the afternoons) and one of his patients, played by Oscar Ortiz de Pinedo and Consuelo Guerrero de Luna as a stuttering patient (a part that strangely was not given to Vitola, a regular in the Tin Tan/Martínez Solares comedies.) Presumably Fernando Méndez (director of the classic "Ladrón de cadáveres", "El vampiro" and "Misterios de ultratumba") contributed to the script of the film, produced by his son. But there is nothing new here: as have been said, a bit of "King Kong", and a bit of "Safety Last" in the last reel, when one might be as sleepy as Casimiro.

Mexican comedian, Tin-Tan, made a number of spoofs of Hollywood genre movies including La Casa del Terror (1960) and El Fantasma de la Opereta (1960). (Both are available on excellent DVD discs). The House of Terror is generally the one that fans go for, because it co-stars none other than Lon Chaney, Jr., as the Mummy who turns into a Werewolf! Lon could not speak Spanish, so he was given no dialogue, but he does seem to be doing his own panting and growling. And he has quite a lot of action footage, although it is Tin-Tan of course who romances the pretty girl (in this case, the lovely Yolanda Varela, whose career, alas, was drawing to a close. She married this film's producer, Fernando de Fuentes, Jr., and virtually retired). Director and co-writer Gilberto Martinez Solares, in collaboration with his brother photographer, Raul Martinez Solares, has brought off some nice action and tingling atmospheric effects, but Tin-Tan's material is somewhat below par. He spends half the film asleep – though these scenes are ten times funnier than some of his boring "comedy" routines, particularly an elongated sequence with a stammering Consuelo Guerrero de Luna.