Fury of the Wolfman (1970)

Reviewed on Sep 19, 2001 under Horror |

Directed by Jose Maria Zabalza
Written by “Jacinto Molina” (Paul Naschy)
Starring
- Paul Naschy
- Perla Cristal
- Veronica Lujan
- Mark Stevens

Paul Naschy. What can we say about Paul Naschy? Probably, we could call him the Spanish answer to Lon Chaney Jr. Except that at least a few of Chaney’s Wolfman movies were good.

What we have here is another of Naschy’s countless and largely interchangeable werewolf movies. In a move that I’ve never really been able to understand, whenever Naschy plays a werewolf, the character’s name is always Waldemar Daninsky. The character can be completely different, of course (compare the 16th-century count in The Craving to his character here). But it’s always the same name. I dunno.

This time out, Waldemar Daninsky is actually Professor Daninsky, a genius in something brain-related. Oddly enough, that specialty got him onto a Tibetan expedition recently, where he was the only survivor of an avalanche. And he got bitten by something big’n'hairy. The monks who nursed him back to health advised him to look after the wound on his chest; if it ever adopted the shape of a pentagram, well, there’s a little box that holds the cure.

Tough day at the office, huh?

All of this is given to us in patchy flashbacks as the returned Professor Daninsky tries to settle back into his normal academic life. On the one hand, there’s his wife Erica; on the other, there’s his co-worker Dr. Lola (Perla Cristal), an ice-queen who used to have a thing going with Waldemar, and who’s at work on a means to control the human will through the use of “chemotrodes.” Pretty normal existence, as far as I’m concerned. Oh, and that scar is developing an ominous shape — although that’s a pentagon, not a pentagram. Leave it to Tibetan yeti-werewolves to get their geometry screwed up…

Unfortunately, Waldemar gets an anonymous note that his wife is having an affair; he’s so incensed as he drives home on the windy mountain path (his house is an old creepy mansion in the mountains — why, don’t all university professors pull down that kind of salary?) that he ends up in an off-screen wreck. It’s not all his fault, though; his wife’s boyfriend has tampered with his brakes. That’s not really a sure-fire way to kill someone off, though, even if he is tearing like hell around hairpin turns, so the bloodied Waldemar shows up first at Lola’s house (which she shares with her hesitant student Karen), then makes his way home.

Naturally Erica, thinking him dead, is less-than-thrilled to see him — and she gets even less ecstatic when the full moon comes out, and Waldemar gets all hairy through the magic of time lapse photography. He kills her with a single bite to the neck, and does the same when her boyfriend wanders in, then stumbles out into the storm, loping oh-so-wolfishly, until he stupidly grabs hold of a downed power wire and deep-fries himself. (Amusingly, the rain of the storm soaks through his white dress shirt, showing clearly that, though he’s very hairy around the head and hands, the areas under his shirt are practically baby-smooth.)

Now imagine this with Bitter Beer Face.

Naturally, the professor is declared dead, but thanks to the fact that he had confided in Lola, she knows better; someone with his “condition” needs more than that to snuff it. So she has his pseudo-corpse dug up (apparently they don’t embalm in Spain) and controls him via those funky chemotrodes. She and the reluctant Karen transport his body to Lola’s ancestral home, Wolfstein Castle. This is even more appropriate a locale that Waldemar’s creepy pad, since Lola’s got the place decked out with spiral staircases and chains and candles and suits of armor. I tell you, I really should have pursued my higher degree…

Daninsky spends much of the rest of the month strapped to a bed with electrodes taped to his forehead as Lola deepens her control over him. But meanwhile, Karen’s boyfriend Bill (Mark Stevens) starts to get suspicious, and wouldn’t you know it, he’s a reporter. (You knew there had to be a nosy reporter in here somewhere, right?) He gets into one of those love/hate relationships with the cops investigating the murders of Erica and her boyfriend, and starts nosing around in Dr. Lola’s affairs, because she’s, you know, an uppity Woman of Science.

Oh, and before I forget to mention it, Lola’s also got a dungeon full of crazy people, the dregs of old experiments or something. (It’s never explained.) There are two types: The chained crazies, who are (duh) chained to the walls, and the libertine crazies, who dress like hippies and seem to be having a continuous love-in, either in the same room with the chained crazies or in the next dungeon over. And there’s also a tall silent guy wandering all over the place, who looks like he stole Herbert Lom’s mask from the Hammer version of The Phantom of the Opera.

Apparently, gravesites in Spain start out dingy and decrepit.

Honestly, I’m doing the best I can to relate the plot coherently, but you’ve got to understand what I’m working with here.

Eventually, at the end of the month, Lola dresses up in her best Mad Scientess party garb and enters Waldemar’s cell to whip his transformed butt (I mean, for real — with a big ol’ whip). Then she lets him escape, to do werewolfy things like grope and kill women in the street and bakers in their kitchens (did you know being thrown on a fire will cause you to spit up blood?) and then mosey around the streets like he’s out for a stroll. (Sources say that these strolling scenes were shot with a double, not Naschy. Gee, ya think? Even when he got older and tubbier, Naschy always managed to scramble around like a spider on acid when wolfed out.)

Then he comes back on his own when his rampage is done (chemotrodes? I guess), and he and Karen end up locked in the castle trying to find their way out while Lola goes out shopping or something, and honestly, it’s all getting really murky at this point. I do remember that Waldemar and Karen discover Lola’s secret-but-kept-in-plain-sight diary and discover that she’s still in love with Waldemar, and used the chemotrodes to turn Erica to adultery to punish Waldemar for marrying her. Oh, and Erica, having been sloppily bitten (give Waldemar a break, it was his first wolf-kill), ended up infected before she died, so Lola brings her back the same way she did Waldemar, and there’s a wolf-out fight, and all the crazies are also released to kill Lola’s henchgirls, and both Lola and Waldemar end up dead, Lola having shot him with the silver bullet that was the apparent contents of that little box that the Tibetan monk had provided. Because, you know, in Paul Naschy werewolf movies, it can’t just be a silver bullet; it has to be shot by a woman who loves Waldemar.

This was, of course, before duct tape replaced masking tape as the Mad Science standard.

All clear? Good.

Paul Naschy fan pages (I swear, the things some people will wave a flag for) mention that the Alpha Video release that I saw had the “good parts” edited out. I can only assume that there was some occasion for nudity they’re referring to, but I don’t know that I could call even those bits “good.” The plot is completely bare of impetus, drifting us from one scene to another; they manage to make a sort of sense, but fail to convince the viewer why he should care.

And you can’t blame the edited-out portions of the print for the scenes that are left in, like the one that seems to show that Lola has also been also working on plant-human hybrids (which look like a man sticking his head out of an office plant). When one of the henchgirls discovers them, another one hangs her on a meathook, all while the unfortunate one is screaming, “This can’t be scientific! This can’t be scientific!” (A Paul Naschy flick giving me flashbacks to Godzilla vs. Biollante? Who woulda thought?)

A Mad Scientess guideline: Always wear your foxiest dress on the night of the Big Experiment.

And then there’s the shot of Lola’s classroom at the university: The blackboard is covered with physics equations, there are test tubes on every desk, and she’s prattling on about brain structure and neurology. I’m betting every student is wondering if he wandered into the wrong room.

I suppose that, if you were really desperate about finding a subtext here, you might be able to see some sort of feminist message. Or something. Lola appears only to employ henchgirls (except for the two men who drag Waldemar’s coffin from the grave for her — but since she then kills them and walls them up in the castle, they’re obviously not a real part of the team), while everyone opposing her — Waldemar, Bill the boyfriend, the police captain — are men. But aside from “yup, these is women and thems are men,” there’s not really a lot to be milked from that.

As I mentioned, the Alpha Video print is castigated by some of those Paul Naschy fans for being edited. Honestly, though, I didn’t mind. Somehow, a fully-restored DVD would only show up even further what a forgettable movie this is. At least with a crummy trimmed print featuring goofy dubbing on a former rental SLP cassette, the deficiencies inherent in the movie itself didn’t stand out as badly. Granted, I could have done without the defect in the tape that made the sound spotty for the last ten minutes, but honestly, by that time I was only watching to make sure my Notable Totables were correct.