La marca del Hombre-lobo / The Mark of the Wolf Man / Frankenstein's Bloody Terror / Hell's Creatures

This is the first film in the Waldemar Daninsky cycle. It could also have been the last, had its success not prompted Paul Naschy to bring his creation back from the dead after he apparently killed by the traditional silver bullet at the film's close.

Like other great horror cycles, this move isn't particularly objectionable insofar as Naschy would develop the character and the mythos as the series went on.

As it is, for the first film in a series Mark of the Wolf Man presents a curious combination of elements that at times seems less indebted to its direct model of Universal's The Wolf Man than the monster rallies which followed it.

For while the film shows how Daninsky became infected with the curse of lycanthropy it also features vampires, albeit masquerading as humans and offering to help treat his condition. The only one of the triumvirate of classic monsters thus absent is Frankenstein's monster. Amusingly, however, the film was released in the US as Frankenstein's Bloody Terror. Being obliged to deliver a Frankenstein film and having a film without either the monster or his creatror, the distributors added in an animated title sequence which purported to explain how the Frankenstein family had been cursed with lycanthropy and became the Wolfsteins.


Part of this is true






This, however, isn't

We begin with a ballroom sequence that nicely establishes its romantic aspects along with the fact that there was a decent budget for the film, some prints of which were actually release in 70mm and with stereo sound.

A masked ball is being thrown for the engagement of Countess von Aarenberg to Rudolph Weismann, with all the local nobility and bourgeois in attendance. Daninsky dances with the countess, who is instantly enchanted by his enigmatic if somewhat sinister presence.


Zurakowska and Naschy...


and the guy playing Rudolph

The next day they are formally introduced at an antique shop before meeting by chance in the grounds of Wolfstein Castle. Daninsky, who explains he often retreats there for peace and quiet, tells the Countess and Rudolph the history of the Castle and the Wolfsteins. Imre Wolfstein was cursed with lycanthropy and, as such, could only be truly killed by being shot with a silver bullet by a woman who truly loved him. As he was stabbed through the heart with a silver dagger, Imre is not truly dead, only prevented from rising from his tomb.

Rudolph is sceptical and drives off with the Countess, forcing a gypsy wagon into a ditch as he unthinkingly speeds past them.

Daninsky helps the gypsy couple get back on the road, but with a storm brewing they ask if there is anywhere they might shelter for the night. Despite its history, Daninsky suggests Wolfstein Castle.


The gypsies approach the castle

The gypsies get drunk on the vintages in the Wolfstein's cellars, find the family tomb and pull the silver dagger out of Imre Wolfstein's remains. He thus comes back to life and kills them, followed by a couple of peasants.

Learning of the latter deaths the locals organise a hunt. During this Daninsky and Rudolph happen upon Imre. Daninsky manages to plunge the silver dagger back into the werewolf's heart to save Rudolph, but is himself bitten. The distinctive star-shape of the wound, the mark of the wolf man, tells him that is fated to become a werewolf himself.


Imre Wolfstein, back from the dead

Rudolph agree to help Daninsky, who tries to keep his distance and his secret from the Countess. Predictably he does not succeed. Going through Imre Wolfstein's papers, the Countess then discovers a forty-year old letter from one Doctor Janos Mikhelov, intimating that he might have found a cure.

It seems like a long shot, but is also the only promising avenue that the trio have found, with Daninsky becoming increasingly despondent that the only cure for his condition is to be a silver bullet.

They thus make contact with Dr Mikhelov – or rather his son. He agrees to assist Daninsky and arrives with his wife, Wandesa. The thing is that far from being the benevolent figures Daninsky was hoping for, they are in fact vampires intent on using him and Imre for their own nefarious purposes...


The vampires


Daninsky transforming

There is a lot to like about The Mark of the Wolfman: The cast, which includes Rosanna Yanni, Dyanik Zurakowska and Julian Ugarte alongside Naschy; the impressive sets and production design; stylised, painterly compositions and cinematography in the vein of Mario Bava or Jack Asher, and a score that is often more than just serviceable and which sometimes even approaches the heights of Krysztof Komeda's work on Dance of the Vampires.


Classic imagery and a beautiful composition

Above all it's the way these pieces fit together as a whole and the overriding sense that not only Naschy but everyone else involved believed in the value of what they were doing. Maybe it wasn't Bunuel, Saura or whoever the ciritics liked. Maybe they had misgivings about aspects of it. Maybe they were just out to collect their pay-cheques. But, if any of this was indeed the case, the point is there is no real evidence of this on screen.

If only more contemporary horror films were like this...

El ojo del huracán / The Eye of the Hurricane / La volpe dalla coda di velluto / Lusty Lovers / Suspicion

Despite its Argento-like Italian title, which translates as The Fox with the Grey Velvet Tail, this 1971 Italian-Spanish co-production is another one of those gialli that is in fact more closely related to the kind of filone entries Umberto Lenzi in particular was putting out a couple of years earlier.

The set-up is straightforward: Despite his pleas that they might be reconciled, Ruth (Analia Gade) is going to divorce Michel (Tony Kendall) and marry the charming Paul (Jean Sorel), whom she met some two months earlier.

Ruth: “Darling, I'm scared”
Paul: “Oh, what of?”
Ruth: “This happiness”

Crucially, Ruth is the one with the money.

Ruth almost crashes her car, with its brake fluid then found to have been drained, then almost drowns when diving as her oxygen tank runs out, with its gauge proving to be faulty.

That Paul had both been driving the car and using the diving gear moments earlier exonerates him from Ruth’s suspicions, which falls upon Michel.

But is all as it seems?

I won't spell it out, N-O, but I'm sure you, dear (intended / implied) reader, can guess...

And what do Paul’s ex-army friend Roland (Maurizio Bonuglia) and the mysterious woman (Rosanna Yanni), who keeps on showing up, have to do with things?

Due to the amount of time spent establishing the dynamics of the relationships between Ruth, Michel and Paul this is a somewhat slow moving giallo initially.

For fully half of the running time we are wondering if there is genuinely a conspiracy and what its nature is.

Then, suddenly, dramatically, the conspiracy is revealed – “Okay, she ought to be asleep by now. Let's go – it's getting late” and everything kicks into high gear.

Things thus become much more tense and interesting, with unpredictable twists and turns along the way to a pleasingly ironic denouement.

José María Forqué's direction is variable, with a non-signifying overuse of the zoom to be counterweighed against some nice compositions – often ones which obscure or problematise the nudity that otherwise presents one of the film's major attractions – symbolic use of the colour yellow and the general beauty of the sun-kissed locales, all nicely captured by cinematographers Alejandro Ulloa and Giovanni Bergamini.

The beauty is enhanced by Piero Umiliani's apt score – thought I must here confess to being somewhat biased when it comes to his work – and the art deco inspired credits, which later also prove to have a diegetic significance in relation to Ruth's art and world, one in which a swan is also significant.

Sorel and Yanni do what is required, being charming and beautiful/bitchy as required, with the latter also the victim of a crass English dub.

Not the best, but not the worst of its (sub-)type.

El jorobado de la Morgue / The Hunchback of the Morgue / Rue Morgue Massacres / The Hunchback of the Rue Morgue

Which Spanish horror star of the 1970s do you think would be the obvious choice to play the Hunchback of the Morgue?

If you answered Paul Naschy / Jacinto Molina, the one-man horror factory who seems to have made it his mission to play each and every monster he could, you would be right - although the question may also be a somewhat easy one in that there really aren't any other Spanish male horror icons of that time.

Naschy imbues his character, named Gotho in apparent reference to the Gothic, with all the familiar traits: He is monstrous, but in a tortured, suffering, Romantic way. His enemies, the normal people who conceal their evil crimes and schemes beneath a virtuous and attractive veneer, are the real monsters.

If Gotho is in the first instance derived from Victor Hugo and Lon Chaney - it is always difficult to say when we are dealing with films that remain far better known than their literary sources - the film as a whole has a distinctly Frankenstein feel to it.

And, while the character of the hunchbacked assistant first appeared in James Whale's Frankenstein via Dwight Frye, the film's immediate models seem more Terence Fisher's Frankenstein films, with elements of The Revenge of Frankenstein and Frankenstein Created Woman particularly evident, along with that same general structural opposition between the good and the ugly on the one hand and the evil and the attractive on the other.


Spanish poster for The Hunchback of the Morgue, with obvious classical horror allusions

Though there are also affinities with Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell these may be taken as coincidental rather than deliberate seeing as both films were released in the same year; the same may also be said of the world-weary Dracula of Naschy and director Xavier Aguirre's Count Dracula's Great Love and his namesake in Hammer's The Satanic Rites of Dracula.

The Revenge of Frankenstein also featured a none-too intelligent hunchbacked assistant, Karl, a hospital worker who was promised a new body by Frankenstein in return for his help. Gotho, who works at the Feldkirch Hospital, is made a similar promise by his mad scientist Dr Orla, involving bringing Gotha's terminally ill and now recently deceased loved one, Ilse, back to him. Yet this also foregrounds a romantic subplot more aligned with Frankenstein Created Woman's Christina and Hans - the two young lovers who together eventually constitute that film's severely troubled monster through Frankenstein's intercessions in the natural order of things.

But for all these intertexts - to which we might also add Joe D'Amato's delirious Buio Omega, as another necro-philiac/mantic entry - The Hunchback of the Morgue is also unmistakably a Paul Naschy film.

In Frankenstein Created Woman the unimaginative authorities went after the ill-fated Hans for a crime he did not commit. Here, by contrast, Gotho is guilty of at least some of the crimes he is accused of. Moreover, those defending him do so not out of a sense of justice, as Peter Cushing's progressive Baron Frankenstein did, but rather because of their own self-interest, in Dr Orla, or liberal naïvete, as in the case of Elke, who is in charge of the Feldkirch Women's Reformatory. (Yes, there's even a bit of WIP thrown into the mix.)

As played by Rosanna Yanni, Elke is also your classic Naschy love interest figure, impossibly beautiful and inexplicably drawn to his doomed character like a moth to a flame.

Were it not for the fact that Naschy was already happily married by the time he made most of his films you could almost believe he was operating some sort of casting couch system through them as a means of obtaining the otherwise unobtainable / unattainable.

The presence of the reformatory also serves to remind us that Gotho's crimes might be excused on grounds of his simple-mindedness, and that the film takes place not in some ambiguous 19th century mittel-European Erehwon but in contemporary 1970s Germany.

This location also affords a hint of political commentary via the caverns where Gotho hides out and Dr Orla establishes his secret laboratory. We are told they once used by the Knights Templar in the Middle Ages and more recently saw service during the Second World War.

But, as with Naschy's other non-Spanish set films, it's difficult to determine the extent to which there is an anti-Francoist point to this or whether it was simply taking advantage of the ambiguities that a more distanced foreign setting afforded.

As it is, the most problematic aspects of the film as far as today's audiences and censors are concerned are surely the rumours that a real corpse was used in some of the morgue scenes, along with some real life animal cruelty as some rats get burned alive. In fairness, the scene with the rats also demonstrates Naschy's commitment to his art, inasmuch as he also let himself be attacked by them for the sake of authenticity - De Niro eat your heart out!

[See also The Mark of Naschy's review at http://www.naschy.com/jorobado.html]

Un Omicidio perfetto a termine di legge / Cross Current / Homicidio al límite de la ley

Following a powerboat accident, businessman Marco Breda (Philippe Leroy) is left with a blood clot on the brain and a decidedly negative prognosis, with perhaps a ten per cent chance of a successful operation.

Miraculously, however, Marco pulls through, only to then be diagnosed as suffering from amnesia.

Told that Marco needs peace and quiet to have any hope of recovering his memory Marco’s family and friends gather round him – wife Monica (Elga Andersen), business partner Burt (Ivan Rassimov), rival racer Tommy (Franco Ressel) and typical representative of haute bourgeois beauty Terry (Rosanna Yanni).

Soon, however, it seems that at least some of them have ulterior motives – but really do you expect anything else from the likes of Rassimov and Ressel – and quite possibly less than his best interests at heart.

Unless, that is, the murder of former gardener Foschi after he had sought a meeting with Marco in order to discuss something was in fact for the amnesiac man's own good; in the convoluted world of the giallo stranger things having happened...


Philippe Leroy, outfitted in stylish polo neck, tries to remember – or to forget...

The biggest difficulty most are likely to have with this 1971 giallo – besides a fuzzy, panned and scanned image – lies in getting past the truly awful title theme and the interminable powerboat racing footage that follows shortly thereafter.


The landscape of the mind, via a paradoxical combination of real and expressive / expressionist architecture and design

Happily, once we’re plunged into the convoluted plot, replete with double-crosses and potentially telling exchanges of dialogue and glances – the difficulty coming, as ever, in sorting out that which is significant from that which we’re meant to believe to be such by generic expectation and / or directorial manipulations – these are easily forgotten.




A blade in the dark and its effect; the gore effect feels out of place, however, and doesn't really convince, especially as one blow from this blade is supposed to have caused it.

Unfortunately, however, so is the enigmatic fragment that is inserted between them, in which an unidentified figure stalks, gun in hand. For, as eventually becomes apparent, this is the beginning that’s supposed to be answered by the end. Unfortunately seeing as the figure in the opening sequence is not wearing gloves and the figure in the closing one is (and black leather ones at that), the connection is somewhat undone by carelessness, failing to have quite the desired impact. (See Bava’s Rabid Dogs for an example of how it should be done, with an ending that throws everything preceding it into an entirely new light and, more importantly, does so in a way that makes sense.)


Classic mirror use – intimations of narcissism and duplicity

More importantly, the ending also evinces an awkwardly handled combination of irony and morality, the former presumably for the Italian side of the co-production in that let’s enjoy these rich, beautiful people doing nasty things to one another sort of way and the latter certainly more in line with the dictates of the Spanish censors of the time.

It’s a particular shame because almost everything in between works well, keeping the viewer engaged with the mystery and wondering what will happen next, stretching credulity – why did the police inspector wait until Marco has arrived home before mentioning the possibility of sabotage; how did the surgeons manage to operate on Marco’s brain without needing to shave his head to give but two – but never breaking it, nor the implicit contract with us, whereby we’re not supposed to question such things. This is, after all, a universe of heightened realism, wherein a stormy night can be relied upon to arrive on cue to add dramatic weight to an already suspenseful (mise en) scene.




An ocular design and what it looks down upon...


and another example of the striking production design, this time let down by the pan and scan

Given director Tonino Ricci’s less than stellar reputation – a reputation which, I must admit, has inhibited me from seeking out more of his work, and so could be unfounded, like that of Umberto Lenzi, whose gialli Cross Current perhaps most resembles in its approach – it seems fair to put the film’s success, such as it is, mainly down to the contributions of his collaborators.


Could you get much more iconic than this? Black gloves and a yellow phone...

Flavio Mogherini’s production designs for the modernist villa are especially outstanding and allow for some striking compositions which veteran cinematographer Cecilio Paniagua makes the most of, while – away from that theme tune, which one would be pleased to hear was in fact the work of another – Giorgio Gaslini’s avant-jazz score, heavy on vocalism and discordance, recalls Morricone’s work on The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and his own on So Sweet So Dead to good effect. (Curiously by way of another Argento connection, this time to Four Flies on Grey Velvet, the film also sees one character meet their demise in slow-motion to a lullaby type theme.)

The cast play their roles as to the manner born. Maybe Ivan Rassimov didn’t have a great range, or at least didn’t get much opportunity to demonstrate it, but he was a master of sinister villainy. Likewise, if Rosanna Yanni was rarely required to be much more than decorative in films of this type, she decorated so beautifully.