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Groovy European Werewolves, Continued...

The movie ends with the battle royale that is the movie's title: the werewolf versus the vampire woman. The two actually wrestle in a dirty old crypt -- a guy with yak-hair glued to his face and a gal in a full-length black lace dress complete with nun-style wimple. The battle is about as scary, and as realistic, as Godzilla versus Mothra.

You may be wondering how Waldemar became a werewolf to begin with. That is actually revealed in this movie's sequel, Fury of the Wolf Man (1972). In the beginning, the narrator tell us, "When the heliotrope starts growing among rough rocks, and the full moon shines at night in a certain area of the Earth, a man turns into a wolf!" Hmmm, kind of sounds like what the old Gypsy woman Melava, played by scrappy little Maria Ouspenskaya, used to say in the old Universal Wolf Man movies: "Even a man that is pure in heart, and says his prayers by night, may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright." (Old Gypsy women say the darnedst things!)

The plot of Fury borrows heavily from another Universal monster movie, Werewolf of London, in that a trip to Tibet and a bite from a Yeti turns our hero into a fanged fiend with a year's worth of five o'clock shadow. The funny thing is, Paul Naschy's werewolf movies don't have interconnecting plots. Each one is a stand-alone story -- the only thing they have in common is that Naschy turns nasty.

Werewolf Woman But when all is said and done, no European werewolf movie from the Sixties and Seventies is weirder or wilder than Italy's Werewolf Woman (1976). Mamma mia! While the others are all very lusty, this one is downright sex-obsessed. The movie opens with a close-up of a pretty blonde woman screaming. Then she begins dancing, completely nude, in a circle of fire within a forest clearing. She dances all the way through the opening credits and then turns into... Werewolf Woman!

Werewolf Woman has a human face with a dog nose, red eyes, crooked teeth and plenty of drool. Her body is covered with dark-blonde fur, including her breasts, which have unusually long brown nipples. Werewolf Woman -- let's call her W.W. for short -- is chased by villagers in olden-day garb and in a few minutes, she splits a man's head open with an axe -- and then the movie cuts to a bedroom where that same woman, in a modern-day negligee, is screaming in her bed. Evidently that freaky musical number was just a dream, in which she remembered a scene from her previous life.

We learn that W.W. was once brutally raped, and so is having emotional difficulties. She begins seducing and attacking men, ripping out their throats with her teeth. She is institutionalized, but is soon freed by another patient who's an insatiable nymphomaniac. W.W. thanks the nympho by killing her on the spot.

W.W. runs amok, seducing and killing, and the police are always a day late and a dollar short in their pursuit. W.W. finally meets a nice guy and falls in love. We know it's love because she is able to resist the urge to stab him to death with scissors. Isn't that sweet? But then she is raped by three brawny studs who all kind of look like the Marlboro Man, and that's when hell really breaks loose.

Sex, violence, nude fireside dancing, bumbling police officers, a dog-nosed wolf-woman... Really, what more could you possibly want from a horror movie? Well, a plot maybe... but still, you have to give Werewolf Woman big points for its unbridled enthusiasm.

Next time you're out renting or buying movies to watch at home, see if you can dig up one of these groovy old European werewolf movies. They're pretty lively, and ten time more entertaining those most of the CGI monster movies being churned out these days.

If you don't watch any of these movies, remember: I am prepared to get a complete investigation underway, even though you don't live in my jurisdiction!

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