RETRO ACTIVE: The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman (1971)

What's new is always old, and in this recurring column, I'll be taking a look at the classic genre movies that have influenced today's new releases. In honor of the latest beast-vs.-bloodsucker saga Underworld: Awakening, this week it's León Klimovsky's Spanish monster-mash-up The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman.

Largely unknown stateside except in die-hard horror circles, Paul Naschy was for decades the undisputed maestro of Spanish horror cinema, and few of his many monstrous efforts were ever quite as memorable—or as financially successful—as The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman, aka Werewolf Shadow, one of the leading man's dozen films in which he assumed the role of lycanthrope Waldemar Daninsky. A dashing stud tormented by his beastly curse, Daninsky finds himself forced to face off against an evil bloodsucker in León Klimovsky's rollicking B-movie, which—after an intro in which two doctors debate the possibility of Daninsky being a werewolf, while his silver bullet-riddled corpse lies on a stone slab—places its initial focus on fetching blonde Elvira (Gaby Fuchs). With friend Genevieve (Bárbara Capell) by her side, Elvira travels to the French countryside in search of the tomb of Countess Wandesa (Patty Shepard), a vampiric witch killed during the Inquisition about whom Elvira plans to write an article. That journalistic motivation, however, is as quickly disregarded as is any trace of logic or coherence, beginning with her friend Marcel (Andrés Resino) randomly remarking about a forthcoming trip to Istanbul, "I've seen so many James Bond pictures, by now I know all the tricks."

That out-of-left-field statement is eventually explained by the fact that Marcel is a police officer—a bit of sloppiness that's characteristic of these unintentionally humorous proceedings. Things get even goofier once Elvira meets Daninsky amidst some ruins and, choosing to stay in his nearby home, is semi-molested by his crazy sister Elizabeth (Yelena Samarina), who greets Elvira by strangling her, then beginning to undress and caress her chest, and then smiling like a lunatic. "Try to forget her intrusion," suggests Daninsky about this incident, which he chalks up to his sis being "mentally disturbed" and Elvira shrugs off as no big deal. After another bit of Elizabeth-strangling nonsense, Elvira, Genevieve and Daninsky find Wandesa's tomb, and—knowing that the legend says the vampire can only be resurrected by removing the silver cross jabbed in her chest, and then feeding her blood—proceed to do those very two things. This idiocy is almost as hilarious as a subsequent skirmish in which Elvira is attacked by a robed skeleton-faced fiend, Daninsky stabs the marauder to death, and he then nonchalantly opines to a relaxed Elvira, "We better get back"—the last word on this seemingly traumatic but immediately ignored assault.

"Everything is so strange here, so absurd," says Elvira, summing up any moviegoer's reaction to this madness, which continues to indulge in lesbian titillation via Wandesa giving Genevieve a vaginal gash on her arm and then sucking blood from it, and later still holding hands and dancing in a circle with her new vampire mate. Director Klimovsky's visual sense veers between pedestrian and inspired, with ungainly close-ups and awkward master shots operating side-by-side with a host of memorable images, from Wandesa running in silhouette against a mountain ridge (climaxing with her leaping downward into darkness) to his signature device of shooting his cackling villains in dreamy slo-mo. Lurid colors and moderate gore are also part of the package, as is a supremely cheesy werewolf transformation scene in which Naschy flails about a room, his countenance sprouting hair in a manner that makes Teen Wolf's furry-faced make-up look superb by comparison. More puzzling, though, is that, even after years of suffering with his full moon-instigated affliction, Daninsky doesn't take precautions regarding his mutation—rather, he just allows himself to undergo his physical conversion while not locked in a cell or in one of the many sets of shackles that line the countryside, thereby leading him to thoroughly trash his home when taking wolfy form.

Between Klimovsky's relentless zooms into and out of close-up, terrible ADR work, and Genevieve seducing Elvira with kisses on the top of her chest, The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman manages to repeatedly amplify its foolishness, culminating with Daninsky's mate Pierre (José Marco) delivering one of the most stone-cold bonkers monologues in cinema history: in a car driving Elvira, he bluntly admits "I get angry when people think I'm crazy," then confesses to being a murder suspect, coos about Elvira's beautiful long, red hair, blurts out "You know, I think I could like you" and then, when she doesn't respond, ends things with an offhand "Eh." That scruffy, middle-aged Pierre has a young local girlfriend just furthers the film's picking-stuff-out-of-a-hat illogicality. And though Klimovsky evocatively envisions Satan himself as a spectral shadow crawling along a tomb's wall, his finale is as head-scratching as most everything that preceded it, with the titular battle between Daninsky and Wandesa ultimately amounting to a darkly lit scuffle that ends with laughable abruptness, and is followed by a love-conquers-all closing note that resounds with if-you-say-so silliness.

Posted by ahillis at January 20, 2012 1:37 PM