Shocktober Revisited: The House By the Cemetery

This review originally appeared in 2010.

The House by the Cemetery is an exercise in futility: the film, made by Lucio Fulci (The Psychic, The New York Ripper) should be a gorehound's delight, with it's quasi-Lovecraftian connection (it forms the "Death" Trilogy with The Beyond and City of the Living Dead / Gates of Hell), brutal kills, and atmospheric setting (just north of Boston, Mass). Instead, the film is a disaster; an unnecessarily convoluted narrative that contradicts itself whenever possible, leaving plot points that go nowhere, characters that serve no purpose, and an ending that raises more "what?"s than anything else.

I don't know how much of this to blame on the fact that the DVD is dubbed and offered no alternate language / subtitle options (IMDB indicates it was filmed in Italian) but I doubt that many of the erratic plot jumps could be saved simply by Fulci's native tongue. From the opening sequence, which spatially misrepresents the Freudstein house, to the final scene and its fabricated Henry James quote, not a whole lot of The House by the Cemetery makes a lot of sense.

Following the strange death of his mentor, Dr. Peterson, Norman Boyle (Paolo Marco) moves his wife Lucy (Katherine MacColl) and son Bob (Giovanni Frezza) from New York to the small town of New Whitby, where Peterson murdered his mistress and hung himself. Staying in the "Freudstein" house - redubbed Oak Mansion by the real estate agent (Dagmar Lassander) - with Ann (Ania Perioni), Bob's babysitter, the Boyle's are beset with strange occurrences, mysterious indoor tombs, and a locked cellar that hides a terrible secret. Will Norman discover the secret of Dr. Freudstein before it's too late? Why did Peterson kill himself? Is Lucy really going insane, or is someone else in the house? And who is Bob's new friend Mae (Silvia Collatina), a girl only he can see who warns him of grave dangers?

Honestly, don't expect any of those questions to be answered. Well, not exactly. By the time anyone figures out what's going on at any point in the film, it's too late for them. Across the board, the plot of The House by the Cemetery makes no effort to address any of the many questions it raises, instead compounding on "twist" after another to the point that none of them mean anything at all. Every single character in the film exists to react to something that happens, and no one (including Dr. Freudstein) actually does anything to set events in place.

The criminal mistake that Fulci makes in The House by the Cemetery is to assume that just because the film is "inspired" by H.P. Lovecraft that he (and co-screenwriters Giorgio Mariuzzo and Dardano Sacchetti) frequently set up plot points that disappear mid-movie, or abruptly change characters in order to suit a "kill" scene. Norman is the subject of an entire subplot that goes nowhere: while following up on Dr. Peterson's research, more than one character mentions that Boyle has been to New Whitby before, has a daughter (not a son), and seem very surprised when he refutes their claims. Even Lucy asks him why it is he has a picture of the Freudstein house (which he makes dubious excuses about).

Ann, the babysitter, also seems to be involved in some conspiratorial pact with Norman, considering the frequency of close-up of Normans eyes, Ann's eyes, and sometimes Lucy, who has no idea what's going on. Ann, after all, goes out of her way to remove the board covering the cellar door, cleans up the blood after Freudstein kills the real estate agent, and seems to have a particular interest in Bob. That is, until she goes down into the cellar and is killed by Freudstein (decapitated, as per a vision Mae has with mannequins). Ann seems so surprised that Freudstein is down in the cellar that it totally undermines the suspicious behavior earlier.

Of course, almost everything is undone. To spoil a great deal for you (if such a thing is possible in a film that goes out of its way not to make sense), Norman doesn't have any connection to the Freudstein house that's ever mentioned, the couple in the beginning aren't Peterson and his mistress, and Mary Freudstein might be Dr. Freudstein and the monster we assumed was Dr. Freudstein is her son Jacob (at least, that is, if the ghost Mary and ghost Mae that take Bob away have anything to do with the quote Fulci made up and attributed to Henry James have anything to do with the story). We also never learn why the Boyles didn't leave the house after the "bat" incident (more on that below), even though they clearly stated they weren't staying.

The cheap and easy solution the trio of screenwriters thought they could get away with was a Lovecraft-esque series of revelations by Peterson that hinted at an increasing madness, leading him to suicide. Unfortunately, within the frame of a slasher narrative - with giallo-inspired murder set-pieces - creeping madness and dread become irrelevant. The two subgenres unfortunately fail to intersect: one demands a protagonist that encounters evil and goes insane, the other requires all characters but one to be killed and for the hero to kill the monster. The House by the Cemetery manages to do neither, instead settling more a muddled "ghost story" ending that just barely closes things out.

Does The House by the Cemetery have anything going for it? Well, as this is a Lucio Fulci film, the blood flows freely and the gore is at least worth some of your time*. While there's nothing as inventive or disturbing as Zombi 2, The New York Ripper, or Cat in the Brain, the Freudstein makeup is pretty cool, if entirely spoiled by the DVD cover. The kills alternate between simple giallo-esque stabbings (the real estate agent, the girl at the beginning) to full on exposed brains and heads decapitated slowly with a kitchen knife.

In particular, there's a sequence where the Boyle family goes into the basement for the first time and are attacked by a bat that starts unintentionally funny and grows increasingly violent, especially when Norman stabs the bat and it begins bleeding profusely, but doesn't die. Also of note: Mae's hallucination (vision?) of a mannequin that looks like Ann losing its head - complete with very real looking tendons and blood - adds a nightmarish quality early in the film. Alas, it promises more than The House by the Cemetery can deliver, so enjoy it while you can. The movie itself isn't really worth the time it takes to watch, especially when Fulci has so many better films to offer.



* How much of your time? Certainly not the 87 minutes it takes to watch the film, but I'm sure there's some "gore" compilation from the film on YouTube that'll save you wondering what you missed.

Shocktober Revisited: The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman

 Review originally appeared in 2010

After two successive Horror Fests of promising to screen The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman and not delivering, I decided it was at least time to give you, the reader, some idea of what it was you were missing out on, and to promise you that it WILL play during the Greensboro Summerfest Massacre Part IV, because it deserves a full fest audience to be properly appreciated. In the meantime, please enjoy a taste of werewolf on vampire action. Kind of.

Fair warning: the Cap'n and the Cranpire deliberately chose to watch the edited, re-titled, dubbed version of Werewolf Shadow (La Noche de Walpurgis), in part because of the ludicrous American trailer that promised more than any movie could deliver, which (of course) was the case. To be fair, we did check out the actual film (also credited to director León Klimovsky), and aside from 9 additional minutes of footage and slightly better color timing (more on this later), I sincerely believe the difference would be negligible.

Waldemar Daninsky (Paul Naschy) is a reputed werewolf killed in a small village in the north of France. During his autopsy, the coroners remove the silver bullets from his heart, bringing Daninsky back to life, free to roam the night in search of new victims. Meanwhile, college student Elvira (Gaby Fuchs) and her friend Genevieve (Barbara Capell) are searching for the burial place of Countess Wandesa Dárvula de Nadasdy (Patty Shepard), a reputed witch and / or vampire from the 15th century. When their car runs out of gas near a country estate, Genevieve and Elvira meet Waldemar and his sister Elizabeth (Yelena Samarina), who suffered a mental breakdown after the death of their parents. Waldemar has also been seeking the tomb of de Nadasdy, because the silver crossed used to kill her can end his lycanthropy once and for all. But when Genevieve accidentally awakens the Countess and falls victim to her bloodlust, can Waldemar and Elvira stop the vampire from killing again before Walpurgis, when the Devil rises to claim the Earth?

As you might have noticed, that's quite a lot of plot for an 85 minute movie, especially one with so much down time before serious plot advancement. Unless the moon has some magical properties in the north of France, at least three months pass between when Waldemar first rises and when the title characters battle. As a non-werewolf, Waldemar chases off the Countess twice, but if you're expecting an epic showdown like the trailer promises, don't hold your breath.

From the moment that Genevieve cuts herself and accidentally drips blood into the Countess's corpse mouth to the point that Walpurgis apparently occurs, two months of story time passes. In fact, other than doing a cursory search of the graveyard where the Countess is hiding, Elvira and Waldemar do nothing to try to stop her until Walpurgis. It isn't until Elvira's boyfriend Inspector Marcel (Andrés Resino) arrives that anything happens involving the Countess at all in the second half of the film. Most of the time, vampire Genevieve is stalking around, until a non-wolf Waldemar kills her.

At this point, I'm going to drift away from the plot, which drags considerably in the second half of the film. There's some reasonably nice set-up involving Elvira and Genevieve realizing something amiss at the Daninsky estate, even if lapses in logic about why they can't leave or how isolated they are from the village compound to an almost laughable degree. The problem is less with story gaffes than it is with the day-for-night photography, a normally half-effective movie technique that fails miserably in The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman.

From the beginning of the film, it's almost impossible to tell whether it's supposed to be day or night time unless someone says so directly. Unfortunately, when it's clear the sun is shining an a coroner says "It's very dark out tonight," you're going to laugh. The producers of this American version didn't bother to tint the "night" scenes, so most of the time spent watching The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman is devoted to figuring out what time of day it's supposed to be. Usually you won't know until a) they cut to a shot of the moon, b) you see the vampires, or c) someone is holding a lamp / lantern or car lights are on. All or most of the film was made in broad daylight, which adds an unintentionally comic tone to the "horror."

(It is fair to note that Werewolf Shadow, which is a remastered version of the film - unlike the heavily scratched, frame jumping Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman - addresses the day for night by tinting the scenes blue, but it still isn't terribly convincing.)

For entertainment value, I would recommend watching The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman with a crowd; despite the overly languid pace of the film in actually delivering the supernatural smackdown, the over-serious tone of the film is rendered into comedy gold because of the cost-cutting of the American version, including the dubbing of characters, even in cases where it seems clear they're speaking English (like Genevieve). Paul Naschy (who co-wrote the film) is trying to make Waldemar Daninsky a tortured, Larry Talbot-esque character, but the dubbing, coupled with a physical similarity to Marlon Brando, rob him of any pathos.

For a film that promises witchcraft, vampires, a werewolf, and the Devil, The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman is surprisingly tame. The violence is limited to light gore as a result of Waldemar scratching his victims or some blood dripping from Elvira's neck. The film cautiously hints at nudity, only to pull back before exposing any flesh (and if you're thinking "well, maybe in the Werewolf Shadow cut," I'm afraid not. Those 9 minutes are devoted to Marcel's search for Elvira in the village).

On top of all of this, I have to point out the English title cards, which are so clearly not part of the film that it hardly surprised me when the score cut out abruptly, replaced by what sounded like the sound of a projector running. The title cards appear over artificially frozen images from the film that were inserted over the actual titles. The effect is jarring, intrusive, and ultimately lends a cheap, exploitative tone to an otherwise marginal horror film, despite the claim on the DVD that Werewolf Shadow is "now recognized as a milestone film in international horror history." It's certainly a fun movie to have on, but in any incarnation, The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman works best in a party atmosphere.

"D" is for Django

 Django (1966) is the sequel to Takeshi Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django (2007) and has the distinction of not being one of the many Django knock-offs released between 1967 and 2012. Nah, I'm just pulling your chain, at least about the first part. It is true that Sukiyaki Western Django is ultimately a prequel, but I doubt that Sergio Corbucci (Super Fuzz) really planned for his Spaghetti Western about revenge, gold, and shooting Mexicans was meant to be based on a movie starring Japanese actors speaking phonetic English and Quentin Tarantino talking like he was being dubbed by a Japanese Quentin Tarantino impersonator.

  Anyway, I knew that Django existed for a while, but I'd only ever seen it made reference to, usually in documentaries like The Spaghetti West. I had seen Sukiyaki Western Django and I knew the story, so I was excited to hear that Tarantino was going to make a Django knock-off*, but it was weird that not many people I knew had heard of the original. Well, I figured it was high time for me to see it so that I could impart some wisdom to you good folks, and just maybe you'd watch Django, too.

(For the record, I watched the dubbed version because it was the only one available, so I'm not going to try to comment on performances. Everybody's voices were pretty bad, especially Django's. I'll try to watch the subtitled one when I can.)

 Django isn't really a classic in the way that Fistful of Dollars is, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have its charm. If it's remembered for anything, it's for having a great theme song and an even better gimmick for its title character.

 Franco Nero (Django Unchained) is Django, and we meet him trudging through the desert, dragging a coffin behind him. The theme song hints at loss and of love and I guess it's safe to assume that there's somebody in that coffin, so one can be forgiven when he later tells somebody that it's his friend, "Django." Long story, but we do get half an explanation later. Stick around and I'll share it with you.

 Django comes across Maria (Loredana Nusciak), who is being whipped by Mexican bandits for trying to escape them. Before Django does anything about it, the bandits are wiped out by soldiers who then indicate that they want to kill Maria, so Django brutally murders all of them. One of them even falls into quicksand, which is a pretty nasty way to go but it turns out is mostly foreshadowing the last act of the film. Django takes Maria into town, and into a saloon / brothel run by Nathaniel (Ángel Álvarez), who explains that she is not welcome, but our hero doesn't care.

 In fact, Django is kind of a jerk to Nathaniel and all of the ladies who work there. He drags the coffin inside and makes a mess and later kills a bunch of guys and tells Nathaniel to "clean it up, but don't touch my coffin." He's a pretty presumptuous guy, if you ask me. He's also pretty cruel to Maria, and it turns out there's no real rhyme or reason behind it. I don't know that I want to pull for him yet, but everybody else is pretty much a scumbag too.

 The town is one of those "neutral areas for two opposing factions" that you see in movies like these (and also Yojimbo, where Leone "borrowed" most of Fistful from): there are the Mexican bandits, controlled by General Hugo Rodriguez (José Bódalo), and the soldiers of Major Jackson (Eduardo Fajardo), who hates Mexicans almost as much as he hates Yankees. His soldiers wear home-made red hoods and carry a burning cross when they come for Django. Sounds kind of familiar, but I can't tell why...

 Major Jackson is mad because Django keeps killing his men (but sparing Jackson) but he's also wary after finding out that the "friend" in Django's coffin is a machine gun that wipes out his posse. Jackson is a pretty rotten guy - he gets his kicks out of letting Mexicans out of a pen and shooting them with a rifle as they run away, so we know he has to die eventually.

 Rodriguez and his bandits aren't much better: they catch one of Jackson's men, Brother Johnathan (Gino Pernice) trying to escape town, so they cut off his ear and make him eat it. If that wasn't bad enough, Rodriguez shoots him in the back as he walks away, so I guess Django will just play both sides against each other or something like that. I mean, I've seen this movie before, and Corbucci already gave away the secret of the coffin thirty minutes in, so what's left to surprise us?

 Well, plenty, it turns out: Django IS working for one side, but he never works for the other, and the side that thinks are his friends end up just being muscle for a robbery the titular character has in mind. Poor Maria keeps getting dragged into this because she ran away from Jackson's men and to the bandits, then realized that was even worse and tried to escape, so everybody wants her dead. Even the other prostitutes (whores?) get into a mud fight over whether it's Maria's fault that Django is killing everybody. In my estimation it's not really her fault that he saves her and brings her back when he didn't know that's where she was running from, but maybe I'm not privy to some inside information.

 There's some gold thieving and some shoot-outs and some betrayals (surprisingly not who you think) and then some frontier justice and more quicksand (this time it's Django's coffin, which has been filled with gold) and a final shootout at the cemetery. Django tells Nathaniel and later Maria that he lost somebody a while ago, when he "was too far away to help" and it looks like he's wearing a uniform under all of those heavy coats. But it's not clear if Jackson was responsible for it - Django seems to hate him but it's never clear what exactly he did - but vengeance must be served.

 I like the aesthetic of this "Old West": yes, there's a lot of dry landscapes, but the town is constantly wet and muddy and cold. There's a continued thread that any water you see in this area has to be disgusting or slimy or quicksand, which is a nice change of pace from dust and sand everywhere. Django's plan, while convoluted, has some pretty clever twists and turns, even if it's never clear why he's doing it. I guess he vaguely references being able to buy off who he was in order to start a new life, but I'm pretty sure the people he'd be paying off were the same assholes he just robbed and ran away from. Oh well, the final show down is pretty cool, and he does it without functioning hands.

 Nero would play Django again in 1987, but in the mean time people continued making Django movies - kind of like the Spaghetti Western equivalent of Asylum Studios - so you have lots of options. Still, this is arguably the best of them, I'm going to go out on a limb and say, but I'd be happy to be proved wrong. It just seems like no knock-off is going to topple the original. I mean, even Tarantino knew better than to leave Franco Nero out of his shameless tie-in to the series...

 * I guess the respectable term for when QT does it is "homage."

Horror Fest V Day One: The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue

The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (also known as Don't Open the Window or Let Sleeping Corpses Lie) is a highly regarded zombie film from Spanish director Jorge Grau. The film has a strong ecological message and hints at fear of nuclear technology and radiation "polluting" the countryside. While I feel it drags its heels too long to establish a zombie threat, when the time comes to bring the gore, Grau delivers, and the film is atmospheric enough to merit a recommendation.

As zombie logic goes, you're going to have to dig to find something more nonsensical: apparently, a new form of pest control that emits radiation is also affecting babies in a nearby hospital, as well as re-animating the dead. That's fine, but the method by which the recently deceased "make" other zombies is a bit more complicated: a zombie "bite" won't actually infect somebody, so a zombie needs to anoint a corpse with the blood of the living to pass on the re-animation. Or something like that.

The zombies themselves are doled out slowly, to the point that large stretches of the 92 minute film don't have any undead activity at all. The disjointed nature of the film actually hurts The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue because audiences are allowed to focus on how little sense the story actually makes when held up to even the most basic scrutiny. It borrows loosely from Night of the Living Dead early on (even directly lifting a shot inside of the heroine's car), but fails to capitalize on its predecessors claustrophobic nature, or even its sense of impending doom.

The radiation threat is more of a boogeyman, in that it follows earlier shots of a nuclear power plant in London and is part of an ongoing debate between the protagonists and the scientists conducting the pesticide experiments. One can easily see how an ultra-simplified form of this plot point could be appropriated - along with similar shots of wind blowing through fields - into M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening (although I doubt many fans of The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue would want or leap to make such a comparison).

I will give the film this: I was totally on board that the film was set in rural England, somewhere outside of London. I bought it hook, line, and sinker, and was as surprised as anybody there that the credits listed filming in Madrid. Then I checked on IMDB, and it seems that most - if not all - exterior shooting took place in the UK, so I felt a little better about it. That, and I give the film credit for a thematically appropriate "twist" ending, even if the logic once again falters under inspection.

Horror Fest V Day One: Pieces

"It's Exactly What You Think It Is"

Pieces is an interesting slasher film from 1982 (filmed partially in Boston and partially in Madrid, which accounts for the strange dubbing throughout) that is remembered best for its fairly gruesome violence and its last second twist ending, which I'm going to go out on a limb here and say heavily influenced Lucky McKee's May.

The easy comparison for Pieces is The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, in part because the poster openly acknowledges the similarity in murder weapons. While it is true that the killer in Pieces uses a chainsaw to cut apart his victims, for the first half of the film, his M.O. is very different than that of the cannibal family in the Lone Star State. The hook for Pieces is a good one: in 1942 a young boy murders his mother with an axe, then hacks her up with a handsaw and feigns victim status when the police arrive.

Forty years later, the grown up psychopath begins killing young women on a college campus near where he grew up, but not simply to murder them: he's collecting the "pieces" - corresponding to a jigsaw puzzle repeatedly used as a metaphor - that would create a new "mother" (shades of Psycho). Pieces runs into trouble when the killer apparently has all of the parts he needs but continues to kill - in part to pad out the film's 85 minute running time - and take parts we already know he has. As a result - and this reminds me of the problem I had with Slumber Party Massacre III - the killer gets sloppy towards the end of the film and the logic of his plan collapses.

What Pieces does do well is extend the guessing game of "who's the killer" by placing otherwise easy-to-rule-out characters in exactly the wrong place at the wrong time. There's even a "why are all of our suspects in the same place for the same murder" lineup midway through the movie. Unfortunately, it's clear who isn't the killer before you're sure who is, even if they stack the deck against the Anatomy teacher and the groundskeeper. The police procedural component of the film also drags at times, but is balanced out by the inventive (and graphic) kills.

The ending (which I won't spoil) manages to save most of the faltering third act, although I unfortunately called it, as will anyone who remembers the last shot of May. It makes about as much sense here as it does there, but the shock value ends Pieces on a high note.

Up next: Jorge Grau's The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue!

Blogorium Review: The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman

After two successive Horror Fests of promising to screen The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman and not delivering, I decided it was at least time to give you, the reader, some idea of what it was you were missing out on, and to promise you that it WILL play during the Greensboro Summerfest Massacre Part IV, because it deserves a full fest audience to be properly appreciated. In the meantime, please enjoy a taste of werewolf on vampire action. Kind of.

Fair warning: the Cap'n and the Cranpire deliberately chose to watch the edited, re-titled, dubbed version of Werewolf Shadow (La Noche de Walpurgis), in part because of the ludicrous American trailer that promised more than any movie could deliver, which (of course) was the case. To be fair, we did check out the actual film (also credited to director León Klimovsky), and aside from 9 additional minutes of footage and slightly better color timing (more on this later), I sincerely believe the difference would be negligible.

Waldemar Daninsky (Paul Naschy) is a reputed werewolf killed in a small village in the north of France. During his autopsy, the coroners remove the silver bullets from his heart, bringing Daninsky back to life, free to roam the night in search of new victims. Meanwhile, college student Elvira (Gaby Fuchs) and her friend Genevieve (Barbara Capell) are searching for the burial place of Countess Wandesa Dárvula de Nadasdy (Patty Shepard), a reputed witch and / or vampire from the 15th century. When their car runs out of gas near a country estate, Genevieve and Elvira meet Waldemar and his sister Elizabeth (Yelena Samarina), who suffered a mental breakdown after the death of their parents. Waldemar has also been seeking the tomb of de Nadasdy, because the silver crossed used to kill her can end his lycanthropy once and for all. But when Genevieve accidentally awakens the Countess and falls victim to her bloodlust, can Waldemar and Elvira stop the vampire from killing again before Walpurgis, when the Devil rises to claim the Earth?

As you might have noticed, that's quite a lot of plot for an 85 minute movie, especially one with so much down time before serious plot advancement. Unless the moon has some magical properties in the north of France, at least three months pass between when Waldemar first rises and when the title characters battle. As a non-werewolf, Waldemar chases off the Countess twice, but if you're expecting an epic showdown like the trailer promises, don't hold your breath.

From the moment that Genevieve cuts herself and accidentally drips blood into the Countess's corpse mouth to the point that Walpurgis apparently occurs, two months of story time passes. In fact, other than doing a cursory search of the graveyard where the Countess is hiding, Elvira and Waldemar do nothing to try to stop her until Walpurgis. It isn't until Elvira's boyfriend Inspector Marcel (Andrés Resino) arrives that anything happens involving the Countess at all in the second half of the film. Most of the time, vampire Genevieve is stalking around, until a non-wolf Waldemar kills her.

At this point, I'm going to drift away from the plot, which drags considerably in the second half of the film. There's some reasonably nice set-up involving Elvira and Genevieve realizing something amiss at the Daninsky estate, even if lapses in logic about why they can't leave or how isolated they are from the village compound to an almost laughable degree. The problem is less with story gaffes than it is with the day-for-night photography, a normally half-effective movie technique that fails miserably in The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman.

From the beginning of the film, it's almost impossible to tell whether it's supposed to be day or night time unless someone says so directly. Unfortunately, when it's clear the sun is shining an a coroner says "It's very dark out tonight," you're going to laugh. The producers of this American version didn't bother to tint the "night" scenes, so most of the time spent watching The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman is devoted to figuring out what time of day it's supposed to be. Usually you won't know until a) they cut to a shot of the moon, b) you see the vampires, or c) someone is holding a lamp / lantern or car lights are on. All or most of the film was made in broad daylight, which adds an unintentionally comic tone to the "horror."

(It is fair to note that Werewolf Shadow, which is a remastered version of the film - unlike the heavily scratched, frame jumping Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman - addresses the day for night by tinting the scenes blue, but it still isn't terribly convincing.)

For entertainment value, I would recommend watching The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman with a crowd; despite the overly languid pace of the film in actually delivering the supernatural smackdown, the over-serious tone of the film is rendered into comedy gold because of the cost-cutting of the American version, including the dubbing of characters, even in cases where it seems clear they're speaking English (like Genevieve). Paul Naschy (who co-wrote the film) is trying to make Waldemar Daninsky a tortured, Larry Talbot-esque character, but the dubbing, coupled with a physical similarity to Marlon Brando, rob him of any pathos.

For a film that promises witchcraft, vampires, a werewolf, and the Devil, The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman is surprisingly tame. The violence is limited to light gore as a result of Waldemar scratching his victims or some blood dripping from Elvira's neck. The film cautiously hints at nudity, only to pull back before exposing any flesh (and if you're thinking "well, maybe in the Werewolf Shadow cut," I'm afraid not. Those 9 minutes are devoted to Marcel's search for Elvira in the village).

On top of all of this, I have to point out the English title cards, which are so clearly not part of the film that it hardly surprised me when the score cut out abruptly, replaced by what sounded like the sound of a projector running. The title cards appear over artificially frozen images from the film that were inserted over the actual titles. The effect is jarring, intrusive, and ultimately lends a cheap, exploitative tone to an otherwise marginal horror film, despite the claim on the DVD that Werewolf Shadow is "now recognized as a milestone film in international horror history." It's certainly a fun movie to have on, but in any incarnation, The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman works best in a party atmosphere.