At a costume party, Rudolph Weissman (Manuel Manzaneque) dances with Countess Janice von Aarenberg (Dianik Zurakowska). A mystery man in a red costume arrives and sweeps the Countess off her feet, much to Rudolph's dismay. The man in red, Waldemar Daninsky (Paul Naschy), is an outcast, being related to Irme Wolfstein, a werewolf who rests eternal in a crypt, impaled on a silver cross.
A gypsy woman (Rosanna Yanni) steals the cross and the werewolf is unleashed. Before he and Rudolph kill the beast, Waldemar is bitten and sure enough during the full moon he transforms into a wolf man. The Countess -- who has fallen in love with Waldemar -- and Rudolph intervene. They chain Waldemar against a wall in the decrepit Wolfstein mansion.
In this film, lycantropy is treated as an incurable disease. Despite this, Rudy and the Countess hire a doctor to cure Waldemar. However, the doctor and his wife are vampires who enslave them! There are soap-opera horror cliches on a large scale. This is also the movie that, for better or worse, kicked off actor-writer Paul Naschy's reign as the king of 1970s Spanish horror. In Europe, it was treated as a true "roadshow" event, filmed in 70mm, stereo sound, and 3-D.
In the U. S., it was released under the title FRANKENSTEIN'S BLOODY TERROR, shorn of its first reel, and became an instant obscurity. Paul Naschy fans claim it's a cult classic, but only handful of people even remember this very seriously-played, pallid reinvention of cliches from old Universal monster movies.
Naschy's interpretation of the wolfman character has its moments, but he borrows heavily from Lon Chaney Jr. And the original WOLF MAN (1941). On the other hand, the art direction is excellent, the acting is above the norm, and there's one outstanding sequence in which the doctor and the vampirized Countess escape from the wolfman by ballet-dancing across the fog-shrouded hills of Madrid.
A gypsy woman (Rosanna Yanni) steals the cross and the werewolf is unleashed. Before he and Rudolph kill the beast, Waldemar is bitten and sure enough during the full moon he transforms into a wolf man. The Countess -- who has fallen in love with Waldemar -- and Rudolph intervene. They chain Waldemar against a wall in the decrepit Wolfstein mansion.
In this film, lycantropy is treated as an incurable disease. Despite this, Rudy and the Countess hire a doctor to cure Waldemar. However, the doctor and his wife are vampires who enslave them! There are soap-opera horror cliches on a large scale. This is also the movie that, for better or worse, kicked off actor-writer Paul Naschy's reign as the king of 1970s Spanish horror. In Europe, it was treated as a true "roadshow" event, filmed in 70mm, stereo sound, and 3-D.
In the U. S., it was released under the title FRANKENSTEIN'S BLOODY TERROR, shorn of its first reel, and became an instant obscurity. Paul Naschy fans claim it's a cult classic, but only handful of people even remember this very seriously-played, pallid reinvention of cliches from old Universal monster movies.
Naschy's interpretation of the wolfman character has its moments, but he borrows heavily from Lon Chaney Jr. And the original WOLF MAN (1941). On the other hand, the art direction is excellent, the acting is above the norm, and there's one outstanding sequence in which the doctor and the vampirized Countess escape from the wolfman by ballet-dancing across the fog-shrouded hills of Madrid.