Spanish Horrors

I celebrated Halloween by watching a double bill of The Werewolf Vs The Vampire Woman and The Werewolf and the Yeti, two seventies Spanish horror films featuring legendary Spanish horror star Paul Naschy.  The problem with discussing such films is that I only see them in poorly edited, poor quality prints with dubious dubbing, making it very difficult to judge their artistic merits.  But hey, I got to watch them for free on You Tube, (they're pretty difficult to obtain any other way these days), so who am I to complain about their quality?  The thing to remember is that, despite the quality, or lack thereof, of the available English language versions of these movies, on their original release they were hugely popular in their native Spain and other Spanish language markets, not to mention the rest of continental Europe.  As alluded to earlier, their star, Paul Naschy (real name Jacinto Molina, a former weight lifter) was incredibly popular and, in Spain, a horror star of the same magnitude as Boris Karloff, Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee.  Although perhaps the English-speaking Horror star he most resembled was Lon Chaney Jr - both in build and the kind of roles he became famous for playing.

Indeed, Naschy claimed that his first experience of horror films was Universal's 1943 'Monster Mash' Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, featuring Chaney as the Wolfman.  The influence of this film on Naschy's subsequent film-making career was significant: not only did he become most famous for playing a werewolf named Waldemar Daninsky (whose wolf man make up is very similar to that worn by Chaney in the Universal horror series), but his films frequently involved multiple monsters, who inevitably end up battling to the death.  Despite having been aware of Naschy for decades now, until recently I'd never had the opportunity to watch one of his films.  This was 1970s Assignment Terror in which he played multiple monsters (like Chaney) including Waldemar the Wolfman.  Unfortunately it was a very poor quality print, which made it impossible to properly judge the film on its own merits.  It was also somewhat atypical of the Daninsky series, featuring him only as a supporting character.  Werewolf Vs The Vampire Woman and The Werewolf and the Yeti were far more typical.  Naschy as Waldemar Daninsky is very much the central character of both films and is played surprisingly sympathetically by Naschy - as much victim as monster and, at times a romantic hero.  What's obvious watching both movies is the influence of the early Hammer Gothic horrors on them, with both their colour photography and musical scores reminiscent of the British films.

An interesting aspect of the Waldemar Daninsky films is that there is very little continuity between them apart from the lead character being a werewolf named Waldemar Daninsky - each one seems to ignore the previous film and start afresh, with new biographical details for Waldemar and even a new origin for his lycanthropy each time.  Sometimes he's a count living in a castle, sometimes he's a college professor or an explorer.  Sometimes his affliction is the result of being bitten by another werewolf, or sometimes a Yeti, other times it is the result of a witch's curse.  Specifically in these two films, in the first he's a count living in a castle in France and mention is made of a Yeti's bite being the cause of his lycanthropy, whilst in the second he's an explorer who becomes a werewolf not, as you might logically assume, as the result of a Yeti attack, but after being cursed by a pair of cannibalistic vampire women who capture him after he gets lost in the Himalayas whilst searching for the Yeti.  Interestingly, this latter film is quite self contained, with Waldemar becoming a werewolf part way through the film and, at the end, after a digression involving brutal Tibetan bandits, is cured of his lycanthropy by the application of a rare Tibetan flower, (shades of 1935's Werewolf of London, which used a similar plot device).   The first film is less adventure story and more pure horror, owing much in terms of style and content to seventies Hammer horrors like The Vampire Lovers and Countess Dracula, with a Countess Bathory-inspired vampire who enslaves various female characters.  It also opens as if it is a direct sequel to a previous movie with a pre-title sequence showing Waldemar being accidentally revived by doctors during a post-mortem, (although in the film directly before it in the sequence, Waldemar has an entirely different background story).

As I said, the quality of the prints I saw makes any kind of meaningful criticism of these films near impossible.  What is clear is that Naschy (who often wrote and sometimes directed these films) doesn't believe that less is more.  Multiple monsters and proliferating sub-plots involving a plethora of minor characters are the order of the day.  Unfortunately, these do tend to slow down the action and obscure the main thrust of the films' narratives, (although the jumpy editing of the English language versions might well contribute to these problems).  Moreover, Naschy, rather like Lon Chaney Jr is a workmanlike actor, giving solid, rather than inspired performances as Waldemar the wolf man.  Nevertheless, as previously noted, he brings a great deal of sympathy to his portrayal of the ill-fated Waldemar.  Ultimately, the films are surprisingly well made and very entertaining pieces of pulp horror.  Certainly no worse than most of the horror films emanating from either the UK or US in the same period.  Hopefully, at some point, I'll be able to view better versions of some of Naschy's films in order to give a proper appraisal.