Rish's Reviews
Recently, on the night of the last full moon, a buddy and I treated ourselves to a marathon of flicks featuring my favourite movie monster, the werewolf. We watched An American Werewolf In London, Wolfen, The Howling, and this one, Curse of the Werewolf, a film I'd heard a lot about but never seen.
This was the worst of the bunch, sadly enough. Hammer produced a great many of its own versions of the classic Universal monster movies (the Draculas, Frankensteins, Mummies), and this was their version of The Wolf Man (or was it Werewolf of London?), shot on lovely sets representing the Spain of yesteryear, nice Technicolor, and reassuring English accents.
So, here's the story: there's a huge-bosomed girl, amazingly attractive, working in the local Spanish castle. Spurning the diseased marques's advances, she is thrown into the dungeon, where she is raped by the old man she has been kind to for the last ten years. He has become hairy and savage due to his (unjust) imprisonment, and she finds herself pregnant with his (wolf?) child. She is found by some nice folks, who raise her child as their own when she dies. But this child is cursed. He grows up to be Oliver Reed (which isn't part of the curse, just unfortunate), and must be locked up when the moon is full. When he goes off to make his fortune, the full moon gets the best of him, and he is unable to prevent the inevitable transformation.
Oliver Reed's performance isn't bad, and you do feel sorry for him, just not as much as some of the other cinematic werewolves I've seen. James Bond's faithful weapons expert Desmond Lewellen has a tiny part, and I know tyranist would have my head (or worse) if I didn't point that out.
Damn, this film was slow, with the most annoying narrator this side of "The Teletubbies." The interminably long, unnecessary prologue is so useless it could basically be summed up in a few lines of dialogue, but then I suppose the movie would've been short a half hour. It's almost not a horror film, with barely any scares and less danger than an infomercial.
The werewolf makeup is lame, a step down from even the 1941 Lon Chaney getup, appearing much more like an ape (to my untrained eye) than a wolf. The stupid superstitions bug me, such as the belief that any baby born on December 25th is evil/cursed. At least the Universal films gave tenuous evidence for the lycanthrope folklore, such as bites and silver, this film was more fairy tale-like and nonsensical, which I suppose might appeal to some, just not to me. I found this film to be highly overrated, and think a lot of praise comes from people who remember the film when it was new and provocative (after all, look at the cleavage!), but haven't seen it in the last thirty years. I wonder what tyranist would make of it.
Line To Remember: Creepy Boy: "It must have been the blood, but it tasted sweet. I wanted to keep on tasting it, but Pepe took it away."
Note: Have any of you out there ever seen Curse of the Queerwolf?

The tyranist's thoughts
I have a bachelor uncle that I love dearly and that occasionally will sit down and watch a movie with me. Usually we watch something science-fiction or fantasy or martial arts since that is where our interests intersect. I recently purchased a set of Hammer horror DVDs on a whim and hadn't gotten around to watching any of them. When my uncle spotted Curse of the Werewolf he declared it the best werewolf movie he'd ever seen and insisted that we watch it immediately.
Werewolf movies aren't my favourite monster movies to begin with, but I do have some favourites and while this one certainly won't be added to that list, I can see where my uncle in an older time might have thought this was a particularly good movie. He had the great fortune of seeing it in the theatre when it was still the '60s and the movie would still have been on the edge of what was possible.
And it wasn't a bad movie. I didn't loathe it the way Rish did. I liked Oliver Reed as the werewolf and I was comfortable with the traditional tragic hero angle. The mythology around how werewolves come to be was relatively unique. Actually, now that I think about it, most of the movies just sort of assume they exist without explaining how they came to be.
It wasn't fantastic, but it was Hammer and it had some of that Hammer charm. There are better werewolf movies and better Hammer movies, but this one is worth a look.