The World of Jerry Warren

 Face of the Screaming Werewolf (1965) is, arguably, the ultimate Jerry Warren picture.  Warren turned his attentions in the sixties from simply directing and producing his own low budget features to re-editing foreign language films, usually adding a few newly shot scenes of American actors to provide English dialogue scenes and often adding a voice over to explain other plot points, then releasing them to the US drive-in market under new English titles.  Most famously, he took Mexican horror film La Momia Azteca (1957) and reedited it into Attack of the Mayan Mummy (1963).  Not satisfied with this, Warren decided to make a few more bucks out of La Momia Azteca by re-diting it again and combining it with parts of another Mexican film he had bought - La Casa Del Terror (1959).  The main attraction for Warren of the latter - a horror comedy starring Mexican comic Tin Tan - was, presumably, the presence of Lon Chaney Jr playing a mummy which, when revived by a mad scientist, turns out to be a werewolf.  I'm guessing that, having cut our most of Tin Tan's role and added in some English language scenes with US actors, Warren found the resultant film running severely short, so added in some sequences from La Momia Azteca, which he already had the rights to.

The finished film - which still only runs just over an hour - is an absolute mess, rarely making any sense in plot terms, with characters appearing and vanishing at random as their respective Mexican footage is used up.  Starting with an archeological expedition inspired by a psychic's visions of a past life whilst under hypnosis, the plot proceeds to the discovery of two mummies - one very much alive, the other inert.  Back in the US, the professor leading the expedition is murdered and the living mummy stolen by a mad scientist who has a secret lab behind a wax museum, (where some unidentified and unexplained dude - actually Tin Tan, hero of La Casa Del Terror, seems to spend his time asleep on a sofa).  In the course of the scientist carrying out some vague experiments on the living mummy, it escapes, goes on a mini-rampage, kidnapping the psychic.  We're then told that they have both been killed having been run over by a car in an unseen incident!  So the scientist steals the other mummy, revives it, at which point it turns into a werewolf.  Eventually, the werewolf/mummy also goes on a rampage.  Luckily, the dude from the wax museum wakes up long enough to beat and burn it  to death, for no particular reason (or so it seems).  Roll closing credits.

You can't help but feel that Warren would have been better off simply redubbing and retitling La Casa Del Terror which, in its original form, at least made a sort of sense.  In the original version, Tin Tan was an attendant at the wax museum, oblivious to the fact that his boss was really a mad scientist who was secretly draining his blood (which is why he's always tired and snoozing on that sofa) for his experiments.  The exhibits in the wax museum are the scientist's failed experiments, covered in wax and Tin Tan goes into action at the end because the girl Lon Chaney's werewolf kidnaps is his girlfriend.  But hey, I suppose Warren's border line unintelligible version is justifiable on the grounds that it gives us two mummies instead of one.  Face of the Screaming Werewolf went out on a double bill with another of Warren's creations, Curse of the Stone Hand, which he had cobbled together from two Chilean films. The great thing about Warren's films are that, regardless of whether they are reworkings of foreign language films or composed of entirely original footage, they always look as if they have been cobbled together out of footage left over from other projects.  Even his last film, Frankenstein Island (1982), shot in colour on a bigger budget than usual, gives the impression that it is at least two other films stuck together, feeling as if it was assembled piece meal, as he went along.  It is, rather like Face of the Screaming Werewolf, entertaining in its ramshackle way.