The Saga of Waldemar Daninsky

Naschy's first Daninsky film, Mark of the Wolf Man, was retitled for the American drive-in audience, so don't expect any Frankenstein in this one. It's actually much better than you'd expect, although the print used for the DVD is not the best.

The movie takes a while to get going, with a clunky love story and not enough Naschy. Eventually he's bitten by a resurrected werewolf ancestor and the fun begins. Naschy's frothing wolf man is terrific. There's some great use of color and atmospheric effects (if only the print were better!) that make up for the deficiencies in character and story.

I will say that the left-turn that the plot takes in the second half was not something I would have expected. Quite enjoyable.

Apparently a lost film today. Some film historians think perhaps it was never completed, but Naschy insists that it was made.

Gives new meaning to mediocre. Gets a tiny bit interesting when Naschy does the werewolf thing. Overall, nothing to recommend.

My second Naschy werewolf viewing, after the superior Night of the Werewolf. A very similar plot, actually: two beautiful young women go into the French mountains to research the local vampire legends. They run across Waldemar Daninsky, the tragic werewolf. One falls in love with him, while the other is bitten by a resurrected vampire. Thick with gothic atmosphere, although not as lush as Night of the Werewolf. If you can get past the bad dubbing, it's worth seeing.

I've read that the Waldemar Daninsky movies don't hold together, continuity-wise, but this one acts fairly well as a prequel to La Noche de Walpurgis/Werewolf Shadow. It offers an origin story for the Daninsky curse in that previous movie (although it doesn't jive with the later Night of the Werewolf). It begins with a Daninsky ancestor tracking down and killing a coven of Satan worshipers in the Dark Ages. Just before the last archetypal witch is burned alive, she promises that someday a descendant of Daninsky will kill one of her kind and then his line will be cursed thereafter. (A little convoluted... why not just curse Daninsky now?) So hundreds of years go by, and 19th century Paul Naschy (did I mention he played the Dark Ages Daninsky, too?) shoots a wolf which turns out to be a man. The local gypsies are outraged and send a pretty volunteer to sneak into the naive Daninsky's bedroom to mark him with the bite of a wolf's skull. The movie then gets dull for a while, unfortunately. An escaped ax-wielding maniac (!) is roaming the hills, and draws the local constabulary off the scent while Daninsky racks up his own body count. There is a huge amount of carnage in this movie, by the way. Werewolf Daninsky bites necks and chests, even crushes a man's head with a rock! There's some experimental editing and wild 70s camera work, but the wolf itself isn't scary. Naschy just isn't as frenzied and frothy as I've seen him before, plus the wolf attack scenes would have benefited from growling sounds and music stings. Too many fights involve a silent werewolf jumping at a victim, and Naschy's body language is rarely animal-like. Too bad, because I liked his intensity in other films.

Night of the Werewolf was written and directed by Naschy himself in 1980, after gothic horror was out of style. This film is gorgeous, though. Much better looking than Hammer's last gothic movies in the 70's. Naschy plays a tormented werewolf under the power of the vampiric Elizabeth Bathory. Certain plot elements, especially the opening scene where a man is executed wearing a mask, seem to be cribbed from Black Sunday. One of my favorite unearthed treasures of the year, and I'm inspired to check out other Naschy films.