October Horrors # 6: Jaani Dushman (Rajkumar Kohli, 1979)

Whilst watching this intermittently delightful Bollywood werewolf movie, I was under the impression that what I was witnessing here was a precursor to the definitive mode of masala horror film which the Ramsay Brothers would go on to perfect in their work through the ‘80s and early ‘90s.

I’ve only subsequently realised however that, in making that assumption, my chronology was actually a bit off. In fact, the Ramsays’ first successful horror film, ‘Darwaza’, came out in 1978, meaning that, in all likelihood, ‘Jaani Dushman’ [which translates as something like ‘Beloved Enemy’, if anyone’s bothered] took its inspiration from the surprise popularity of that film - which actually makes a lot of sense, in view of the way that this one awkwardly crow-bars horror/monster elements into the storyline of what would presumably otherwise have been a standard rural / romantic melodrama.*

Certainly, the horror material here has a very Ramsays-esque feel to it, as the werewolf (think Universal-style facial make up, ingeniously combined with a Fozzy Bear-style ‘furry jump suit’ body) terrorises a remote mountain village, snatching red-robed brides from within the curtained palanquins in which they are carried during their traditional bridal procession. Spiriting them away to a dry ice-strewn subterranean temple, he then gets busy menacing them with his claws, and generally charges around freaking out and so forth, surrounded by ornate stone columns and randomly scattered bones.

During the film’s opening sequence, a honeymooning couple travelling through the dark, dark woods in a broken down taxi end up sheltering in a derelict mansion. Therein, the ghost of a deceased nobleman appears, and helpfully fills them in on how he was possessed by the demon spirit which transformed him into the Wolfman, forcing him to murder his unfaithful wife in the aforementioned subterranean temple on their wedding day, or some such. None of which will obtain any relevance to the rest of the film’s narrative for a very, very long time, but nonetheless - it all feels like quintessential Ramsay Bros type business, that’s for damn sure.

Not that Rajkumar Kohli and his colleagues really manage to summon much of the overloaded atmosphere or bombast of the fully-fledged Ramsays productions, sad to say, but they more than make up for it with sheer gusto during ‘Jaani Dushman’s horror scenes, employing a range of lo-fi, in-camera special effects - most notably, primitive matte shots to create the illusion of the Wolfman’s head rotating 360 degrees, ‘Exorcist’-style, along with some absolutely adorable model work, used to depict people and horses jumping across chasms or plummeting off cliffs.

The movie’s finale, wherein our dashing hero (Sunil Dutt), the film’s now-reformed human bad guy (Shatrughan Sinha) and, uh, some other dude, team up to take on the werewolf in an extended tag-team throw down, is also exceptionally good fun - especially once our heroes get some swinging chains on the go, whilst the Wolfman begins trying to crush them by throwing gigantic stone pillars, accompanied by frequent cutaways to Sinha’s kidnapped bride shrieking in highly theatrical terror. Terrific stuff.

Unfortunately however, whereas the Ramsays were proud and unashamed monster-mongers, devoting probably around 60%-70% of the screen-time in their movies to horror, the producers of ‘Jaani Dushman’ seem to have been far more reticent about adopting the tropes of what, up to this point, had been a universally scorned and despised genre within the Indian film industry.

As such, everything I’ve described above comprises at most 40 minutes of the film’s 155 minute run time - the opening plus the conclusion, essentially. Between which, two further hours stretch out, utterly devoid of any reminder that we’re watching a horror movie.

Thankfully from my own POV, there are few things I enjoy more in life than kicking back with a ‘70s Bollywood movie on a rainy afternoon, so, even though this probably rates as second tier masala stuff at best, I still had a pretty good time with it, even though I swiftly found myself losing track of who was supposed to be marrying who, and who was whose brother, or sister, and so on.

So, within these sprawling, werewolf-free hours, we find many under-cranked scenes of people charging around beautiful mountain landscapes on white stallions, many massed brawls and several exciting tests of masculine strength for our hero and his cad-ish, spoiled-son-of-the-local-aristocrat love rival.

There is also an enjoyable sub-plot at one point about a female character whose painted-on moustache apparently convinces everyone she’s a young man, until she gets trapped in a pit with a deadly cobra, and must reveal her true feminine identity. 

And meanwhile, all of the more lady-like ladies look absolutely stunning in their brightly-hued formal / bridal finery and ceremonial jewellery, imbuing the film with an almost psychedelic overload of visual stimuli in places.

(A special shout-out is due here to Sarika Thakur, playing the lower caste orphan girl rescued from rape by Sinha’s aforementioned spoiled brat character, who has a great take-no-shit attitude, and really shines during the dance sequences.)

Speaking of which, Laxmikant-Pyarelal’s musical score for ‘Jaani Dushman’ is… fairly traditional, I would say, largely eschewing the raging synthesizers, disco beats, electric guitars and crazy echo effects which began to make Bollywood music so awesome around this period - as befits the film’s vaguely delineated historical setting, I suppose. The songs are all quite nice though, the staging of the dance routines is as splendid as you’d hope for, and with Lata [Mangeshkar], Asha [Bhosle] and Mohammad Rafi all present and correct on playback duty, who’s complaining?

Well - horror fans with less tolerance than myself for random Bollywood shtick, that’s who. In fact, they will be complaining like fuck by the time we reach the ninety-minute mark with no further werewolf action on the horizon, and they will find little to salve their woes for a good long while thereafter.

So, whilst I would never condone such a wholesale dismissal of one of the world’s most vital and unique pop cinema cultures, I will at least quietly advise more single-minded monster kids in the audience that, if your sole interest here lays in seeing a Bollywood werewolf in action, well - watch the first half hour of ‘Jaani Dushman’, then skip to the final half hour. Nothing that happens in-between was meant for you.

Consumer guide note: I watched ‘Jaani Dushman’ via a DVD put out by the Italian Filmotronik label, purchased in the UK from Strange Vice. It’s a very soft-looking SD transfer with occasional print damage, but thoroughly watchable, with nice colours, and a definite step up from bootleg quality. The film appears to be properly licenced, and the English subtitles are excellent (including translations of the song lyrics, which I always enjoy), so buy with confidence.

And meanwhile, check out this amazing range of artwork I managed to google up for the film:

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* Whilst saying this, I am of course aware that Rajkumar Kohli had already directed an earlier horror film, ‘Nagin’ (1976), which I’ve not yet had a chance to see. Reading around it however suggests that it is likely a rather different kettle of fish to the bloody, monster-centric movies ushered in by ‘Darwaza’ and ‘Jaani Dushman’, so for now I’ll stick by my contention that the former likely influenced the latter.

Hammer House of Horror: Children of the Full Moon (Tom Clegg, 1980)

Up to this point in the series, the otherwise disparate episodes of ‘Hammer House of Horror’ have been united by their complete avoidance of the kind of gothic horror tropes with which the titular studio had become synonymous over the preceding decades.

True, we’ve had a witch episode, and a haunted house episode, but both have taken a rigorously quotidian approach to their subject matter, emphasising their present day settings and prioritising attention-grabbing narrative twists and the disruption of everyday life over the pulpy, escapist grandeur which defined Hammer’s glory days.

Like those episodes (and most others in the series, to be honest), ‘Children of the Full Moon’ centres around the travails of a recently married, contemporary British couple - in this case, smarmy young corporate solicitor Tom (Christopher Cazenove) and his wife Sarah (Celia Gregory), a possessor of no other immediately obvious character traits.

Whilst roaring around the West Country in their BMW in search of a holiday home belonging to Tom’s even-smarmier boss (the great Robert Urquhart, a veteran of ‘The Curse of Frankenstein’ (1956), no less), the young lovers fall victims to a supernatural joy-riding incident which leaves their swanky motor wrapped around a tree in what is, evidently, the middle of bloody nowhere.

This time around however, the fateful misadventures which befall our characters as they stomp off into the forest in search of help bring us such easy pleasures as creaking wrought iron gates surrounded by banks of spot-lit ground fog, dim lights burning in the windows of an imposing gothic revival manor house (Hampden House in Buckinghamshire, location fans may wish to note), shadowy cinematography, ominous howls in the night, axe-wielding folkloric woodcutters, creepy pale-skinned children in Victorian garb, and - as the episode’s title so subtly implies - some honest to goodness werewolves.

All of which proves a hell of a lot of fun, needless to say, even as Murray Smith’s knocked-off-in-a-weekend script remains sloppily predictable throughout.

In particular, it’s an absolute delight to see Diana Dors popping up here as the homely matriarch of the lycanthrope brood, giving it her all as usual, gradually dialling up the glassy-eyed malevolence behind her ingratiating smile and ‘Archers’-worthy Somerset drawl as things become increasingly hairy (pun intended) for our not-especially-likeable yuppie protagonists, perhaps adding a touch of ‘city vs country’ social tension to the thin subject matter in the process.

Sadly, we don’t get to see Diana experiencing a full-on werewolf transformation, but her opposite number (played by Jacob Witkin) eventually does the honours instead, and, in view of the TV drama level production budget and notorious difficulty of achieving decent werewolf effects, I think it must be acknowledged that the make up team here did a fair job.

Nonetheless, regular series director Tom Clegg was probably wise to minimise screen time for the werewolf, keeping the stalking beast safely confined to the darkened woods until the finale, whilst meanwhile allowing the bulk of the episode’s creepitude to instead fall upon the shoulders of wolf-family’s brood of creepy, carnivorous children.

Given that one of them plays the flute, that they have ‘suspicious’ foreign names like Tibor and Eloise, and that they wear incongruous Victorian costumes, M.R. James’ ‘Lost Hearts’ (or more likely, Lawrence Gordon Clark’s 1973 ‘Ghost Stories For Christmas’ adaptation thereof) would seem to be a prime influence here, which is certainly no bad thing.

As noted above, even casual horror fans will find very little to surprise them in the way this story pans out, but in a sense, the very predictability of Smith’s script serves to move the series away from the twist-heavy ‘Tales of the Unexpected’ type yarns which have tended to predominate in earlier episodes, and more towards something approaching good ol’, no nonsense gothic horror (albeit, a contemporary-set variation with a touch of ‘70s b-movie nastiness thrown in for good measure) - a change which I, for one, welcome with open arms.

In fact, if ‘Children of the Full Moon’ had been a segment of an Amicus anthology film from the preceding decade, it would have ranked as a pretty damn good one, which is high praise in this context. Definitely one of my favourite episodes so far in terms of pure entertainment value, even if its artistic merits may be questionable at best.

October Horrors 2019 # 3: Bad Moon (Eric Red, 1996)

So, who’s up for a totally standard ‘90s werewolf movie?

I may not normally have been, but, as any readers who dutifully memorised my 2018 Best First Viewing list may recall, I was completely blown away by Eric Red’s directorial debut ‘Cohen & Tate’ (1988), so, the fact that that guy waded into the midst of American horror’s most boring decade for some lycanthropic hi-jinx certainly piqued my interest.

Ok, so, first off - ‘Bad Moon’, which was adapted for the screen by Red from Wayne Smith’s novel ‘Thor’, isn’t really big on werewolf mythology (cinematic or otherwise), but proably the most interesting thing it does in this regard is to entirely jettison the familiar lore laid down by Curt Siodmak’s script for 1941’s ‘The Wolfman’, and to instead take its inspiration from Stuart Walker’s oft-overlooked Werewolf of London (1935).

Red signals this most obviously by featuring a clip of the latter movie, which is playing on TV in the background at one point (at breakfast time, no less – what kind of wild TV station is this?), but he also echoes Walker’s film by positing the idea of lycanthropy reaching the western world from ‘exotic’ eastern climes when a caucasian interloper has the misfortune to get himself bitten, and also by (briefly) exploring the idea that the victim may try to cure himself using science.

Unfortunately, he also replicates what most critics have deemed to be ‘Werewolf of London’s biggest flaw by short-circuiting the pathos generally expected of the werewolf narrative and instead making the cursed individual an inscrutable, misanthropic ass-hat… but, we’ll get onto that later.

For now, let it merely be noted that things do not exactly get off to a good start. During the pre-credits prologue, we are introduced to Ted (Michael Paré) and his girlfriend Marjorie (Johanna Marlowe), who appear to be intrepid gap year explorer types or something, leading an expedition comprising a bunch of heavily moustached, furry-hatted tracker/guide types who could have come straight from ‘30s Hollywood Central Casting through a back-lot recreation of what I assume to be some unspeakably remote place in Asia minor.

In the midst of a drearily non-explicit hard body sex scene which definitely did not come from ‘30s Hollywood, the couple find themselves interrupted by a bloody, hulking great yeti-like werewolf, which kills the furry-hatted men and rips through the side of their tent. Though Marjorie is torn to pieces in the ensuing melee, Ted, though severely wounded, manages to reach for a rifle and promptly blows the creature’s head off.

All of which, I’ll admit, sounds like a lot of fun on paper, but something about the execution here is just *off*. The film cuts choppily around the werewolf as if worried that the effects simply weren’t up to scratch, and, though the setting and situation is goofy and exploitative in the extreme, it all seems to have been realised in a spirit of mundane, soap opera earnestness. To be frank, for a filmmaker whose earlier work as both a writer and director relied on tightly-wound, hard-boiled drama and careful attention to detail, this is some sloppy, trashy shit right here.

We cut directly to the good old U.S. of A – somewhere in the Great Lakes area I’m assuming, in view of the stirring, National Park scenery and references to nearby Chicago. Janet (Mariel Hemingway) is a high-flying lawyer and single parent, who has recently given up her big city practice, and now lives in an isolated house on the edge of the forest with her young son Brett (Mason Gamble) and the family’s beloved dog, a German Shepherd named Thor.

Shortly after we are introduced to this family unit, Janet receives a call from her estranged brother, who is back in the area after some time away and would like to re-establish contact. It’s Ted from the prologue, of course, and he is now living in a pleasingly retro Airstream trailer parked in a picturesque lakeside beauty spot. When Janet & co visit him, he confesses to his sister that his girlfriend is “gone”, and that he’s “not doing so good”.

Thor, needless to say, doesn’t like Ted one bit, and Brett, whilst snooping around in his trailer, discovers a bunch of mysterious test tubes and lab equipment and…. a big old book about werewolves! (This being a movie of course, he naturally finds this to be frightening and suspicious, rather than just thinking, wow, what a cool book, my Uncle’s into some interesting stuff.)

Before long, the police are cordoning off the area around Ted’s trailer, investigating a spate of mysterious hiker murders apparently involving wild animals, and Ted is once again on the phone to Janet, who invites him to park his trailer out behind her house and come spend some more time with the family.

And thus, the stage is set for an epic territorial battle between Ted’s lupine alter-ego and the protective Thor, who of course is the only family member to initially grasp the nature of Ted’s affliction. Indeed, as the film goes on, Thor increasingly takes on the role of protagonist, with the dog who plays him in close-ups and character scenes (credited as ‘Primo’) delivering a loveable and emotive performance that should have swept the board at the Doggie Oscars, if only they existed.

Not that it is exactly difficult for Primo to overshadow the human cast here, it must be said. Gamble is pretty much yr average Hollywood child actor, but neither Hemingway nor Paré really seem to be able to make anything of the characters they’re playing, or to connect with us in any tangible fashion – which is an issue, given that they’re basically the only human adults in this story.

Paré does his best I suppose, but the inconsistencies in the way his character is written are maddening. In classic Paul Naschy fashion, Ted manfully attempts to keep his wolfen self in check by spending his nights handcuffed to a giant tree, but he also seems pretty careless about ensuring that he actually achieves this before nightfall, and seems dismissive of the accidental carnage which results.

Ted claims that he has moved in with his sister in the hope that, with all else having failed, good old fashioned familial love may cure him of his affliction (and he writes this in his private diary, so we know he means it). But, we never see him reaching out to his sister and nephew or showing any warmth toward them. Instead he remains sullen and withdrawn, and, in the film’s final act, he inexplicably begins acting like a full-on villainous asshole, deceiving and threatening his relatives, goading their dog into attacking him, and triumphantly pissing in the poor mutt’s dog-house to assert his territorial dominance after Thor has been taken away by the police dog handlers.

Why does he do this? Is his “wolf side” affecting his day-time, human behaviour too? Or has he always basically just been a horrible person? Despite being treated to voluminous extracts from his diary, we basically never get into this guy’s head or get a handle on what he’s up to, making it difficult for us to answer these questions, or even to gauge whether he is still fighting, or merely enabling, his own lycanthropy.

As such, it is impossible for us to empathise with him in his plight, as the script – reliant on decades of werewolf tradition – seems to demand. (Actually, Paré’s performance could have worked a lot better if the film had explored the idea that his character may just be a common-or-garden human psychopath, but with the reality of the werewolf always front and centre, thins never really go in that direction.)

In other respects meanwhile, ‘Bad Moon’ seems content to proceed upon what I can only describe as a defiantly unrealistic basis. This is, after all, a film in which an average joe who wants to find out about werewolves in 1996 is forced to resort to a massive, leather-bound grimoire, and in which a local sheriff responds to a case in which a family’s dog is alleged to have torn a man to pieces just outside their driveway not by examining the dog or seeking to gather any forensic evidence, but instead by merely having a quiet word with the owner, suggesting she “might want to think about getting a new hound”. (Small town policing at its finest.)

As if not content with this kind of silliness meanwhile, Red later also gives us a world in which a ten-year-old boy with a pair of wire-cutters can cycle to the local dog pound – whose security arrangements consist solely of a chain-link fence which can be easily scaled by a large dog – and liberate his pet in a matter of minutes.

Of course, such Argento-esque mutations of real world cause-and-effect wouldn’t bother me in the slightest in the context of an exciting, fantastical horror film, but sadly ‘Bad Moon’ struggles too in this regard, and ultimately offers little to distract our attention from its assorted inconsistencies.

Perhaps reflective of its big studio status (the film was backed, and presumably carefully overseen, by Morgan Creek, the production house whose biggest hits included ‘Last of the Mohicans’ and ‘Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves’ amongst others), ‘Bad Moon’ keeps it slow and steady, carefully adhering to the middle of the road. Photography remains bright and clear, framing and lighting are conventional, and colours are muted. No hint of atmosphere or otherworldliness is allowed to accrue, despite the promise offered by the rural locations.

Likewise, Red’s script is largely devoid of the kind of symbolism or psychological / metaphysical thematics which could bring a story like this to life, and the film’s take on werewolf lore remains just as sketchy and ill-defined as the deeply unsatisfactory character relationships. (Despite Ted telling us that his transformations are not limited to full moons and basically occur every night for instance, we’re still treated to regular stock shots of the moon, which, I’m duty-bound to report, remains full for about six consecutive nights or something. Again, we’re in goofy b-movie territory here, however much the film might strive to achieve a tone of earnest, dramatic sobriety.)

Although I’m not familiar with Smith’s source novel, I can well imagine that, in the grand tradition of post-Stephen King horror doorstops, it must surely have been full of digressions and sub-plots and such, which I can in turn suppose must have been ruthlessly excised by Red in order to ensure the story adheres to his trademark narrative minimalism.

In the process of hacking the novel into shape for a ninety minute three-hander though, he seems to have lost the thread of whatever this story was actually supposed to be about, leaving its human characters feeling empty and opaque, and draining the on-screen events of any wider resonance.

In fact, a minimal amount of research reveals that the novel is actually written from the point of view of the dog, which immediately invites a far more interesting set of conflicts than is presented in the film, and also helps explain why Thor is the only character here who actually manages to establish an emotional connection with the audience. (Did I mention that the scene in which he is taken away by the dog-handlers is more harrowing than all the werewolf stuff put together?)

On the plus side, Red’s insistence on using practical effects to realise the werewolf should be commended (it must have been a hard sell in ’96), even if the transformation scenes are marred by some very dated CGI ‘warping’ effects. The film’s finale meanwhile is staged in impressively brutal and uncompromising fashion, delivering on the promise of a German Shepherd vs. werewolf vs. gun-toting mother showdown in a blood-drenched, bone-crunching manner that many studio filmmakers would have understandably bottled on (I mean, just imagine the complexities of throwing actors, animals, animatronic monsters, gore, guns and stunt-work all into the same shot, and actually making it work), reminding us, for a minute or two at least, of ‘Cohen & Tate’s similarly crazed final act.

But, it’s too little too late. Overall, ‘Bad Moon’ just doesn’t work, in spite what I assume must have been Herculean efforts on the part of its crew and director. Admittedly, it does at least make for a pretty great dog movie, and Primo is an f-ing star, so if you’re, say, a big fan of the Lassie movies who wishes they could have been a bit more edgy and hardcore, well, you’re in luck! If you’re looking for a werewolf movie (or indeed a human movie) though, this one is a bit of a bust I’m afraid.

October Horrors # 1: Werewolf of London (Stuart Walker, 1935)

During the Second World War, American studio horror films (and Universal’s efforts in particular) managed to boil themselves down into a set of formulaic clichés that have come to broadly define the idea of “cheesy horror films” in the popular imagination ever since.

That much we know, but the shadow cast by eight subsequent decades of monster movie branding makes it easy to forget that, a full decade before Glenn Strange was stomping about in the Frankenstein get-up and some mad scientist was trying to decide which brains to put where whilst the torch-wielding mob knocked on his door, many of the first wave of American horrors from the early/mid 1930s were far more unpredictable and just-plain-weird than this reductive set of clichés would suggest - and not just the designated classics helmed by Whale, Browning, Freund and Ulmer either.

My theory, y’see, goes that, during the pre-war years, studio directors and writers who found themselves assigned to a horror picture were obliged to strike out in all kinds of tentative new directions, faced as they were with a new, commercially popular genre for which no easily replicable template had yet been established. For a few years at least after the runaway success of ‘Frankenstein’ and ‘Dracula’, the thinking seemed to be that a big part of what pulled the punters in to see these movies was the sheer novelty of their subject matter – that oh-so-bankable “nothing-like-this-seen-before-on-the-screen” factor.

Rather than merely seeking to imitate those earlier hits therefore, Universal and the other studios seemed to want their boys to crank out some genuine ‘Shock of the New’… and mad-as-a-barrel-of-bats pictures like ‘Werewolf of London’ were the inevitable result.

As everybody knows, it was Curt Siodmak’s script for 1941’s ‘The Wolf Man’ that basically laid down the law for all future cinematic werewolves, pretty much inventing the werewolf mythology we now take for granted, and, as such, it feels all the more surprising to go back a further six years and discover that Universal’s first – commercially unsuccessful - stab at a werewolf movie completely ignored the monster’s origins in European folklore, instead pulling together elements of “exotic” orientalist adventure fiction, newly minted Frankensteinian mad science, slight echoes of ‘abominable snowman’ mythos and a hefty dose of Jekyll & Hyde to tell a very different tale of lycanthropy.

Written from scratch by John Colton and producer Robert Harris (was this the first Universal horror that didn’t even pretend to follow any literary antecedent?), we’re essentially talking here about a werewolf story that involves excursions to remote Himalayan valleys, rare night-blooming flowers, sinister underground networks of lycanthropy sufferers, electronically-generated artificial moonlight, hints of faux-Buddhist mysticism, octopus-tentacled man-eating plants, Jack The Ripper-style Victorian London skulduggery, and… well, you get the idea.

It’s all great stuff, and, watching for the first time, I went through most of the film with absolutely no idea where it was all going next -- which is a lovely feeling when it comes to a genre movie made over eighty years ago.

On a more prosaic level meanwhile, another thing ‘Werewolf of London’ has going for it in the weirdness stakes is the casting in the lead role of Henry Hull – a prolific character actor who here delivers a very convincing impression of a granite-jawed, hammer-headed lummox entirely devoid of human feeling.

Seriously, Hull’s character – a pioneering botanist and plant-hunting adventurer - is so rude to everyone he encounters during the film, it’s a miracle he has any friends or supporters at all, let alone a beautiful wife (Valerie Hobson from ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ and ‘Kind Hearts & Coronets’) to ignore and belittle, a whole garden party full of wealthy associates to offend, and a luxuriously appointed mansion house/botanical gardens/laboratory set-up in which to receive them.

Though Hull never becomes an out-right villainous character (in the vein of Peter Cushing’s Frankenstein, or the roles Michael Gough played for Herman Cohen in the ‘60s), he nonetheless comes across as a conceited, self-centred asshole, and much of ‘Werewolf of London’s failure to engage with audiences over the years has retrospectively been blamed on the film’s decision to present them with such an entirely unsympathetic protagonist.

Personally however, I’ve never much cared for this “central character must be sympathetic” jive that critics sometimes fall into, and I very much enjoyed the way that Hull’s perpetually enraged presence makes every conversation in the film feel spectacularly awkward. This allows ‘Werewolf of London’s idle chatter-filled dialogue scenes to side-step the usual blandness and expositional drag, instead filling the movie with pregnant non-sequiturs, uncomfortable silences and “well… I suppose I’d better be going then…” type moments, all of which I found most amusing.

(To be honest, Hull seems like such a goddamned weirdo, it’s easy to believe that few of these emphases were actually present in the script – it’s as if the other actors just had no idea how to react to him.)

Speaking of weirdoes meanwhile, the somewhat more likeable Warner Oland is also on hand as the inscrutable Dr Yogami, essentially offering a slight variation on the Charlie Chan character he played in dozens of sixty minute programmers through the 1930s. Though supposedly a more villainous figure than Hull’s character in terms of the storyline – not to mention racially offensive on more levels than can be calculated without the help of a spreadsheet – Oland’s faux-Asian quack doctor is a veritable teddy bear compared to our leading man, which leads once again to some very strange cognitive dissonance in terms of the way business is conducted on-screen.

Though ‘Werewolf of London’ is nothing special in terms of artistry or atmosphere, Stuart Walker’s direction is breezy and fast-moving, most of the film’s performances are lively and Hull’s transformation into an inadvertently rockabilly-styled wolfman is a hoot (sacrilege though it may be to say so, I think I actually prefer the make-up job here to Jack Pierce’s work on the ’41 Wolf Man). It’s all just such a wonderfully imaginative load of cracked, b-movie fun, it is impossible not to enjoy it on some level – so if you’ve previously overlooked it, I’d definitely recommend giving it a shot at the nearest opportunity.

For a perfect case study in what went wrong with horror movies between the mid ‘30s and mid ‘40s meanwhile, just try contrasting ‘Werewolf of London’ with its quasi-sequel, ‘She Wolf of London’ from 1946 - a sixty minute programmer so utterly lacking in interest that I can honestly believe it was concocted as part of some studio in-joke to try to drive audiences home to bed before the main feature came on.

I was going to do a separate review of ‘She Wolf..’, but… there really is nothing to say. I might just as well review the carpet in my living room. If, like me, you’ve got both of these movies on a double feature disc, please do yourself a favour and just skip the second one entirely. Hell, watch ‘Werewolf of London’ again instead – you’ll be happier that way, trust me.

Toei Trailer Theatre # 1: I AM THE WOLF MAN – PROUD AND GENTLE-HEARTED.

We jump here from Nikkatsu’s trailer department to that of their ‘60s rivals/’70s successors for the title of “Japan’s coolest movie studio”, Toei – basically just in order to give me an excuse to write a few words about ‘Wolf Guy: Enraged Lycanthrope’ (Kazuhiko Yamaguchi, 1975).

I was contemplating a full length review of this remarkable motion picture, but, having revisited it this weekend, I honestly don’t think there is much I can say about the film that will not be made immediately apparent by the act of watching it. (If ever a work of art spoke for itself, etc.)

Essentially I think, ‘Wolf Guy: Enraged Lycanthrope’ represents a kind of platonic ideal of everything a “cult movie” can and should be – all the more-so given that, as with most of Toei’s admirably unpretentious output, it was more than likely knocked out in a couple of weeks for a hypothetical audience of adolescent manga fans and boozed up salarymen, without the slightest notion that it would still be attracting attention over four decades later.

When I first encountered ‘Wolf Guy: Enraged Lycanthrope’ last year, via a slightly iffy fan-subbed download of a Japanese TV broadcast, it blew me away to such an extent that I could barely even take it all in. Returning to it for a second time, I decided to take a slightly more methodical approach and test my initial hypothesis that this is a film in which every single moment of screen time has something awesome happening in it.

Did it pass the test? Well, let's put it like this - there’s a brief scene early in the film, shortly after Sonny Chiba’s character Inugami-san witnesses a member of defunct rock band The Mobs being torn to pieces by an invisible tiger on the streets of Tokyo, when he is taken in for questioning by the police. This scene, which lasts about two minutes, is not especially awesome, although it does attain the level of ‘mildly awesome’ in the fan-subbed version, whose translation has one of the police officers declaring, “A spectral slasher? Seems to be the only explanation!”.

Aside from that, everything else that happens in ‘Wolf Guy: Enraged Lycanthrope’ is categorically, unreservedly awesome. It puts the pedal to the floor right from the outset, and barely lets up for a second.

By the grace of the international film copyright gods, it is also now available in the US and UK as a blu-ray/DVD combo pack from Arrow, so you have NO EXCUSE for failing to verify these findings for yourself.

‘Wolf Guy: Enraged Lycanthrope’ – watch it, live it, love it.

(Ok, perhaps don’t “live it”.)

FRANCO FILES: Dracula: Prisoner of Frankenstein(1972)

 

AKA:

‘Drácula contra Frankenstein’, ‘Die Nacht der offenen Särge’, ‘The Screaming Dead’.

Context:

Incredibly, there was a new Jess Franco film hitting cinemas about once a month during 1972-73 – an astounding work rate, even by the standards of the man who is quite possibly the most prolific feature film director of all-time. For some reason or other, Jess took time out during this period of peak productivity to bang out a couple of slightly uncharacteristic Frankenstein/Dracula ‘monster bash’ movies – whether on the behest of some producer, or just for a change of pace, who knows.

Of these, ‘The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein’ is usually held to be the most noteworthy – in fact it’s one of the wildest pictures Franco ever made - but I think ‘Dracula: Prisoner of Frankenstein’ also has its charms. A slightly more low key effort, its general vibe has a lot in common with the kind of tired, last gasp gothic horrors that independent producers in Europe still seemed to be making in defiance of all reason in the early ‘70s (think ‘Lady Frankenstein’, ‘Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks’, that sort of thing). But, Franco being Franco, he puts a uniquely strange and somnambulant spin on the material, resulting in a movie that is… certainly unlike anything else being offered up by the commercial film industry in 1972.

Content:

You know those scenes that sometimes turn up in ‘70s/’80s horror films, when the characters go to the cinema and watch a schlocky film-within-a-film monster movie (the unspoken implication being that of course OUR smart, modern horror film isn’t like one of those corny old flicks etc etc)..? Well basically, ‘Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein’ plays a lot like a real life, feature length version of the fake footage created for scenes like that. I can’t pretend to know much about how or why the film got made, but it seems like somebody just got on the blower to Franco and ordered a few reels of horror film, so he turned on the sausage machine and churned it out.

Largely plotless and featuring no real dialogue in the opening half hour (and precious little after that), ‘Prisoner of Frankenstein’ exists within that magic moment when the production of genre-based exploitation footage becomes so mindless and automatic that the results emerge as almost entirely abstract, bordering on avant garde. Kind of a zen-like ‘first thought / best thought’ meditation on the proliferation of horror movie imagery through popular culture, perhaps? Or alternatively, just imagine if some joker kept spiking Al Adamson’s coffee with ketamine and you’ll be thinking along the right lines.

In fairness, some kind of a storyline does begin to develop in the second half of the film, communicated largely via a post-production voiceover from Dennis Price’s Dr. Frankenstein. Although his conventional monster seems to be doing quite well for itself, the Baron seems to have an altogether more ambitious scheme in mind this time around. Announcing that he “now rules the great beyond”, Frankenstein has succeeded in attaining dominion over the spirit of Count Dracula (Howard Vernon) and another female vampire (Britt Nichols), intending them to head up a “new and bizarre army, an army of shadows” that he claims will allow “the great beyond” to “overpower the world”. So there ya go. Any questions?

Of this hypothetical army of darkness, the only other member who turns up – perhaps summoned by some gypsy magic, perhaps not – is the Wolfman, and unfortunately for the Baron, he seems largely concerned with just stirring up a ruckus, picking fights with the other monsters as the inevitable flaming torch wielding villagers led by vampire hunter Alberto Dalbes closes in.

Kink:

It’s possible that a stronger cut of this might been assembled for some markets, but there’s certainly very little hint of eroticism in the version I’m watching. A German language cabaret scene, and the subsequent kidnapping of the singer by the Monster, seem like a straight recap of ‘..Dr. Orlof’, with some similarly unsavoury “lady in lingerie tied to the operating table” jive following in turn, but it’s pretty mild stuff by ‘70s standards. Nichols certainly looks great as ‘un chica vampire’, and there’s a marginally kinky moment when Anne Libert (appearing as ‘Primera víctima de Drácula’) takes her leather boots off, but, uh… that’s about it? 1/5

Creepitude:

With any thread of narrative coherence banished to the same “great beyond” that Dr. Frankenstein keeps going on about, most of this film’s run time is spent drifting insensibly through a patchwork of certifiably creepy goings-on.

Bats both real (stock footage?) and laughably unreal (flopping about on strings, perhaps left over from 1970’s ‘Count Dracula’?) are much in evidence, and Howard Vernon seems to be popping up outside windows and doors all over town, white-faced, top-hatted and baring his fangs like some sort of Dracula/Orlof crossover, as intermittent bursts of lightning strike, and prolific Spanish actress Paca Gabaldón freaks out in what I think was her only role for Franco, rocking back and forth humming to herself and shrieking in a room full of by neo-primitive sunflower paintings and straw dollies… (an example of the common Franco motif of occasionally cutting to seemingly unconnected scenes of an unidentified woman experiencing some sort of mental breakdown, perhaps implying that she’s either dreaming the action on screen, or else a prior victim of its antagonists, cf: ‘Lorna the Exorcist’, ‘Nightmares Come At Night’). 

Grumpy looking Alberto Dalbes rides around endlessly in a coach, whipping his horses and looking determined, whilst Dennis Price favours a vintage motor car, in which he cruises around (sometimes with Vernon sharing the back seat) looking thoroughly suspicious in a fur-collared coat and fez. Back at the chateau, he’s got a superb collection of mad scientist gear on the go (lots of flashing lights!), and his own monster to play with (an endearingly dirt-cheap, rubber mask approximation of the Karlof monster, it’s a more traditional creation than ‘Erotic Rites..’ rather bizarre “bodybuilder painted silver” effort).

Probably the film’s strangest scene is the one in which Price resurrects Dracula by draining the blood of the kidnapped cabaret singer into a bell-jar containing a bat (a real one, alarmingly - seeing the poor blighter floundering around as they dribble ‘blood’ all over it is pretty uncomfortable), as lights flicker and the mad scientist machines whir away like happy hour at the Radiophonic Workshop. At the crucial moment, the doc hits the power switch, a fizzing coil overheats, and bat, bell-jar and everything suddenly disappears in a puff of smoke, leaving a fully sized, opera-caped Howard Vernon lying there! Top dollar horror flick craziness.

Soundtrack-wise, Bruno Nicolai’s score from ‘Justine’ is re-used wholesale here, but his bombastic, James Bernard-esque theme actually sounds a lot more comfortable and less irritating in this pulpy, ghoulish context. Elsewhere, a strange backdrop of exaggerated wind sounds, looped animal cries and disembodied melodic humming proves incredibly atmospheric, summoning that eerie, earthy atmosphere that characterises many of the best ‘70s Spanish horror films. 4/5

Pulp Thrills:

Well, let’s see: we’ve got Count Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster and the Wolfman running around, loads of pulsing, flickering mad scientist machinery, a hunchback assistant (named Morpho of course, this time portrayed by some hairy ginger guy), lines like “these two vampires will obey my orders and terror will prevail”, and a final monster bash showdown that aspires to the primitive chutz-pah of a Mexican luchadore movie. Pulp enough for you? 5/5

Altered States:

In the notes I scribbled down whilst re-watching this film to get some screen-grabs, I wrote that at times ‘..Prisoner of Frankenstein’ is “like some retarded version of one of Chris Marker’s travelogue films”. Perhaps not the most eloquent phrase I’ve ever penned, but I can’t think of a better way of communicate this film’s accidental avant garde stylings, as Franco spends his time shakily zooming in on dogs, cats, flocks of birds, window panes, street signs, candlesticks… I know it sounds mental to say this in view of the film’s subject matter, but it’s almost got a documentary/home movie kinda thing going on in places, as if Jess is simply capturing the minutiae of his surroundings for posterity, and monsters and vampires just keep getting in the way.

With almost every shot climaxing in some kind of weird, meandering zoom, zeroing in on some seemingly random detail, this is precisely the kind of slap-dash, zoom-heavy direction that Franco’s detractors have always ridiculed, but once you get used to the technique, it has its own idiosyncratic appeal. Breakin’ all the rules just for the sake of speed and laziness, it allows the film to run free alongside the director’s wavering attention, as his unpredictable camera movements imitate the way one’s eyes might shift back and forth across an unfamiliar scene. It may be the complete opposite of the well-planned, deliberate filmmaking that we’re all taught to respect and aspire to, but here we actually get to witness in real-time the process of the director noticing something or other, thinking “whoa, check that out”, and filling the screen with it, just because he feels like it. The effect is disorientating, and the constant disruption of on-screen space can be near intolerable at first, but the more of these films you watch, the more you’ll learn to love the woozy, displaced feeling that results.

The somnambulant pacing too is something that neophytes are just going to have to roll with if they want to remain conscious beyond the halfway point. Regardless of what transpires in them, Franco films are never exactly ‘fast-paced’ (Stephen Thrower has spoken of him filming according to his own “internal, metabolic tempo”, or something like that), and the way he lets scenes drag and wonder and drift into each other has a tendency to make any sense of logic or connection between the images disappear entirely. Once again here, he manages the unique feat of taking a film in which a huge number of things happen, but almost all of them fall out of the viewer’s mind immediately, leaving us with the impression that we’re stuck in a kind of trance-like, repetitive limbo, as the clock slooowly rolls by. In the best possible way, of course. 4/5

Sight-seeing:

Much of this film appears to be shot around a mist-shrouded hilltop castle overlooking a dilapidated little Spanish town full of narrow, maze-like streets, and, if some of the meandering landscape shots are to be believed,  I think this is actually a single location, rather than a composite of several places. Clearly a GREAT one-stop horror movie shooting destination, it lends the film a huge amount of ready-made atmosphere, and I’m surprised I haven’t seen such a distinctive locale popping up in more gothic horror movies.

Don’t take my word for it though – writing on imdb in November 2000, one ‘Maxorin-2’ commented that:

“This is the horror film with the best castle I've ever seen. It's better than all that castles of the Hammer. Trust me. It's bigger and darker. Very strange and interesting. I've visited it in Alicante, Spain, and it seemed to me that Dracula was walking around. If you want to be scared go on and watch it.”

Duly noted. 4/5

Conclusion:

An utterly disconnected piece of filmmaking, I think ‘Dracula: Prisoner of Frankenstein’ actually makes a good tool for the diagnosis of Franco Fever.

If you’re unafflicted by the malady, then the film’s complete lack of narrative drive or audience involvement, its lethargic pacing and inept, disorientating zooms, will likely prove insufferable, to the extent that you may find yourself furious that this aimless garbage is actually being offered to you as a piece of structured entertainment. And that’s fine. You’re better off that way. Just walk away, put something else in the DVD player. You’ve got a long and fulfilling life ahead of you.

For those of us who’ve already succumbed to the sickness though, it’s too late - this is pure nectar of the gods. Drink it in in all its pointless, zonked out glory, my brethren, and go to a happy place. I’ve watched it three times at the time of writing, and I’ll likely watch it again. In the Church of Franco, we can ALL rule the great beyond.