October Horrorshow: Fury of the Wolfman, aka La furia del Hombre Lobo

Spanish horror icon Paul Naschy starred in a dozen werewolf flicks as lycanthropy-stricken Waldemar Daninsky. What’s most amazing about this film series is not that there were a dozen entries, but that they are all unrelated in regards to plot. They are all standalone films, even though the protagonist and tragic hero has the same name in each and is played by the same man. Strange things happen in the world of low-budget filmmaking.

From 1972, Fury of the Wolfman features a screenplay from the aforementioned Naschy, and he also stars as the aforementioned Daninsky. José María Zabalza handled the directing duties.

In this flick, Daninsky is a college professor recently returned from a tragic expedition to the Himalayas. There, the expedition was attacked by a Yeti and Daninsky was the only survivor. But, he is now a wolfman. Using a Yeti as the origin of a werewolf is an idea out of left field, but Naschy and company liked it so much they used it for at least one other film in the series. Continue readingOctober Horrorshow: Fury of the Wolfman, aka La furia del Hombre Lobo”

October Horrorshow: Howl (2015)

When a filmmaker is given a budget of around a million pounds, certain ruthless decisions have to be made when it comes to the production. Where possible, things have to be kept to a minimum, and that can span all the way from sets, to the film’s plot.

Director Paul Hyett had only a million pounds to work with in making Howl, the 2015 werewolf flick from across the pond. Luckily, the screenplay from Mark Huckerby and Nick Ostler is just as sparse as the budget (not surprising, as the two are also credited as associate producers — they were in a position to know they couldn’t write Gone with the Wind). Continue readingOctober Horrorshow: Howl (2015)”

October Horrorshow: The Werewolf of Washington

Writer/director Milton Moses Ginsberg had something to say about the rot infecting Washington D.C. in the early 1970s. It was the time of Watergate, when the president, the attorney general, and all the rest of the president’s men were a pack of felons working to undermine the rule of law. How times have changed. Ginsberg’s response to the constitutional crisis posed by the ongoing criminal conspiracy that was the Nixon administration, was to make a movie satirizing the president. And he chose to make it a werewolf flick. Continue readingOctober Horrorshow: The Werewolf of Washington”

October Hammershow: The Curse of the Werewolf

The Curse of the Werewolf, from 1961, is the tragic tale of a beggar who is imprisoned by a cruel marquis. Then it is the tragic tale of a mute servant girl. Then it is the tragic tale of a young boy who grows up in a rich household with the loving attention of a pair of surrogate parents. Then it is the tragic tale of a young man attempting to make his own way in the world, who falls in love with a woman he cannot have. Then, finally, it is the tragic tale of a man cursed with lycanthropy. I have seen some films with long setups, many of them this month, but the setup in this film is so long and rambling compared to the promise of the title that I was wondering at times if I was watching the wrong movie. Continue readingOctober Hammershow: The Curse of the Werewolf”

October Horrorshow: Dog Soldiers

Horror is a blanket term that encompasses more subgenres of film than any other. It’s a taxonomy based on the types of threats protagonists must overcome. Aliens, slashers, zombies, vampires, ghosts, monsters and all their variations…The list goes on and on and on. Everyone has their favorites and their least favorites. For myself, nothing causes the heebie-jeebies better than a ghost flick, while zombies do a fine job of scratching my post-apocalyptic itch. But, one cannot live on a diet of specters and ghouls alone. Continue readingOctober Horrorshow: Dog Soldiers”