THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF (1961)

"Lovely Poster"

Now dear reader, this was an interesting one. I had been looking forward to rewatching this film for a very long time. I had fond memories of staying up to watch it late at night on Channel 4 when I was a bedroom lurking youth.  Now as a bedroom lurking adult it seemed time to revisit a film which I enjoyed so much I remembered vividly. After watching Hammer’s only werewolf film I discovered something to my horror. Many people are disappointed when watching films through the spectrum of age as time and opinions change. I was not so much disappointed as surprised because this was not the film I remembered.  There was one scene which seemed familiar and the film’s Spanish setting rang bells but nothing else.  My normally infallible memory had failed me spectacularly. I was watching a rather tame film about a man struggling with the beast inside rather than the vivid horror film set in zoo I recalled so lucidly. All roads lead to Wikipedia and I discovered what the problem was. I was not misremembering this film. I was remembering an entirely different film with virtually the same plot, Tyburn Studio’s Legend of the Werewolf.

Once I had got over this confusing disappointment I could actually get back to the film.

One Christmas Day a child is born to a mute runaway. The child’s bastard origins on the Lord’s Day curse him to become a werewolf.  Taken in and raised by the kindly Don Alfredo when he grows up to be a man he leaves home to work in a winery. The temptations of lust overwhelm him and the wolf comes out one full moon.

A rather lacklustre entry into the Hammer canon which start somewhere interesting ends abruptly and goes nowhere in between. In that respect it is very like the A47 between Norwich and Thetford. There is a long winded opening scene of a beggar being locked away by a sadistic aristocrat which rather eludes me. It spends all its time building sympathy for the poor man only to have him commit a rather unpleasant rape at the first opportunity. The product of which is Leon, the boy destined to become a werewolf. I kept getting thrown by the choice of name. Leo as in Lion, for a man who turns into a wolf, which sent me into a right symbolic funk and then realised I was probably the only person in the world who had ever considered that so promptly told me to shut up.  “This is my pet pit bull Lion-O”, but I digress. The film plods along mostly and without much of anything happening. Some Spaniards get drunk and disaster occurs when Leon visits a brothel and the beast runs free. Then at the end the werewolf is shot. That is the film really. To put it briefly;   beggar, rape, baby, wine press  werewolf, dead werewolf. That actually makes it sound more interesting than it is. The best I can say for this film is it is brief.

"You been at the sherry again?"

There are some good points to Curse of the Werewolf. Oliver Reed is wonderful in a relatively early role. He summons the animistic passion of Leon excellently and Clifford Evans is fantastic as Don Alfredo, his adopted father. Warren Mitchell makes an appearance playing a man of indeterminate Hispanic/Middle-eastern ethnicity as he so often did back then.

Terence Fisher’s direction is as ever excellent and the film is really lifted by a fantastic musical score. This is one of the least impressive of Hammer’s golden age of horror films. It is not exactly bad it just never really gets started. The one scene I could remember, of Leon as a child half turned into a werewolf pulling against the bars which imprison him is the scariest scene in the film and was probably why it stuck in my mind.  The rest of it has receded replaced by the seemingly far more interesting Legend of the Werewolf.  Now that is a film I am looking forward to seeing.

WEREWOLF (TV PILOT) 1987

WEREWOLF (TV PILOT)

With vampires back in vogue werewolves have never had much representation beyond film. WEREWOLF was one of the few, an American TV series on the fittingly canid Fox Network in 1987-1988. I had heard of this series for a few years from scant mentions in TV Zone Magazine so it was an unexpected delight when my obsessive trawling of charity shops and market stalls turned up the pilot episode on battered VHS.

Eric Cord is a typically American 30 year old college student whose roommate Ted asks him to kill him after he becomes a werewolf. I doubt this was an intentional metaphor for house sharing but certainly puts the washing-up rota into perspective. After shooting Ted and becoming a werewolf he tries to cure himself by killing the originator of the curse which turned him, a one-eyed, horror cliche of a man called Janos Skorzeny.

Script wise this is actually pretty decent. It betrays its origins as a TV pilot script as it sets up the situation, characters, motive and format all in 80 minutes. It has a pacing to it most modern films can only dream of, with a brevity which reminds me of the very early Universal horror films. It is a cursed by his superpower man-on-the-run format similar to The Incredible Hulk. I suspect the rest of the series involved him drifting from town to town searching for Skorzeny while being chased by a bounty hunter he crosses paths with in the pilot. Unfortunately as he turns into a wolf it does make me think of it as a lychanthropic Littlest Hobo (There's a Moon, that keeps on calling me) which slightly robs it of dramatic tension.

The effects are better than some films but he design work is strange with the werewolves looking more like gorillas than either men or wolves. Skorzeny has a beautifully gross transformation when he literally pulls his skin off which is one of the few instances of that style I can think of. It looks like 90s TV series, all badly mastered film to video transfer and shonky graphics.

The greatest bit in this entire film is the music score. Clearly taking a nod from the Highlander TV series it is all heavy metal and rock noodling.  I have never heard a score entirely composed of a guitar solo but I reveled in how ridiculous it sounds in some places. Axe grinding may be suitable when he turns into werewolf but it is less so when man wanders about a boat marina for a bit.

A nice idea slightly hamstrung by its need to begin a series of episodic adventures. Hopefully we might see a new werewolf series on TV one of these days perhaps merging it with reality TV as The Werewolf Whisperer.