User Reviews

Finally! I've been searching and searching for a Paul Naschy film that appeals to me. And I'm so happy to have discovered one. After sitting through some less than stellar offerings like Vengeance of the Zombies and Dr. Jekyll vs. the Werewolf, I've finally found a winner. I won't go so far as to proclaim it as one of the best horror movies I've ever seen, but Frankenstein's Bloody Terror is a whole lot of fun and easily the best Naschy film I've so far run across.

To begin with, Frankenstein's Bloody Terror has absolutely nothing to do with either the good doctor or his creation. It seems that an American distributor was promised a Frankenstein movie, but was given a werewolf film instead. Undaunted, the distributor decided to stick with the Frankenstein name he probably had already worked into advertising. Thus Frankenstein's Bloody Terror becomes a werewolf/vampire slugfest.

Frankenstein's Bloody Terror is something of a historical movie for horror fans. It marks the first time Naschy would play Waldemar Daninsky and his cursed alter-ego that Naschy turned into something of a cottage industry. In this one, the residents of a small village blame a series of deaths on wolves. Daninsky joins a hunting party and is bitten, not by a wolf, but by a werewolf before he is able to subdue the creature. It's not long before Daninsky goes through a strange and painful metamorphosis that turns him into a snarling beast himself. A friend, looking to help Daninsky, turns to a doctor who has written extensively on the subject. But it turns out that this is no ordinary "mad" doctor. It seems the doctor and his wife are in reality blood sucking vampires. Before you know it, they've got Daninsky chained to a wall while they prey on his friends. Can Daninsky free himself and save those dear to him? And if he does save his friends from the vampires, who's going to save them from him?

As I said in my opening, Frankenstein's Bloody Terror is a lot of fun. It's hard not to have a good time with the over-the-top storyline and action. The movie actually gives you two werewolves for the price of one. Their battle is a blast and a real highlight of the movie for me. This monster free-for-all is reminiscent of some of Universal's monster mashes from the 40s, only a little more graphic in its presentation. The film has a marvelous Hammer-esquire look to it with vivid colors and period sets. The use of colored gels is a nice touch to the lighting in many scenes. I really liked Naschy's werewolf make-up. It's a little more "wild" than it would be in latter Daninsky films. The supporting cast is good with Rosanna Yanni as a gypsy woman being the most well known.

If you're looking for a sophisticated sort of horror movie with a deep, philosophical meaning that sticks with you long after it ends, Frankenstein's Bloody Terror is probably not the movie you're looking for. But if you're just looking to be entertained and have a good time, it's hard to go wrong with Frankenstein's Bloody Terror. Now that I've found a Naschy film I enjoy, I'm even more excited to discover the rest of his work.

Here we have the first in the Hombre Lobo series that made Paul Naschy, uh, famous. I admire Paul's desire to want to play a werewolf so often. I do wish, however, that he developed the special effects. He just looks slightly more savage than Lon Chaney Jr.'s version. I feel this film, in particular, is more suited to a 1950's audience.

You have the usual Gothic trappings here: creepy old castle, gypsies, curses, strange bloodlines, werewolves, vampires, but....no Frankenstein or his monster! Instead, you get some nonsense about the Wolfstein clan. Exactly how that happens is rather interesting. It's like you ask for a Mercedes-Benz. I place one in front of you when you get your driver's license. Then, I drive it away, and have a Yugo towed to the same parking spot and say "It's still a car. Have fun!" So, while we were "terrified" by Frankenstein, in all his incarnations, now we have Wolfstein! That's basically how the story intro begins. Like, it's almost the same thing! Don't complain! Ha. Well, I'm actually fine with not having a Frankenstein monster in this film. This is one of those creaky old clunkers that is long on plot and short of wolf-outs. However, you do get something I bet kids would have liked back in the day: two werewolves fighting(I don't know how many times that happened in films before this one) then you have a werewolf tackling not one but two hissing vampires.

Let me break it down for you. Boy meets girl. Girl meets Waldemar. Girl thinks Waldemar is hotter(who wouldn't?). Gypsies screw around in a castle and accidentally bring an old werewolf to life. Waldemar gets bit, thus begins his hirsute problems. While looking for a cure that doesn't involve death, two strangers show up, claiming they will help Waldemar, boy, and girl. But, they are just vampires, natch! Without spoiling the ending, yeesh, you have a fairly OK fight between Waldemar and the old grey wolfman, then a horrid laughable chase between the annoying man-vamp with all his cape twirling and hissing(seriously, he has like no powers other than biting and hypnotism--he literally and figuratively sucks) and Waldemar.

The movie gains a few points for atmosphere and set design. Random skeletons strewn about are, well, unusual, I think, but overall the castle set designs are quite good, and Naschy is constantly walking into cobwebs accidentally. This isn't one of those so-bad-it's-good films. I don't think it deserves a lot of ridicule. Maybe watch it alone. You probably won't find many people who will "appreciate" it as you might.

Time to get hairy.

Count Waldemar Daninsky (a solid and sympathetic performance by Spanish horror legend Paul Naschy, who also wrote the script) gets bitten by a werewolf and subsequently suffers from the curse of lycanthropy. He seeks help from Dr. James Mikhelov (a perfectly sinister turn by Julian Ugarte) and his alluring wife Wandessa (ravishing redhead Aurora de Alba), but things go seriously awry when the duo turn out to be vampires. Enrique Lopez Eguiliz's merely okay direction lets the place plod along at a too gradual clip in the rather laborious opening third, but luckily still manages to develop a fair amount of creepy atmosphere and stages the infrequent werewolf attacks with a reasonable amount of flair. In addition, this movie is a bit too tame and tepid; latter entries in the Daninsky series were much racier, more explicit, and hence better. This film does improve as the enjoyably daft story unfolds, with a rousing climax complete with an exciting fight between Waldemar and Dr. Mikhelov and a poignant and tragic downbeat ending. Moreover, there's a bevy of beautiful ladies on hand to keep things watchable: Besides de Alba, we also have lovely blonde Dyanik Zurakowska as the fetching Countess Janice von Aarenbergand and the enticing Rosanna Yanni as fiery gypsy girl Nascha. Both Emilio Foriscot's sumptuous widescreen cinematography and Angel Arteaga's shivery'n'groovy score are up to speed. While it's not one of Naschy's best, this picture is nonetheless worth a watch for Naschy fans.

Paul Naschy's real name was Jacinto Molina, but when German film distributors demanded he have a name that sounded like something native to their country, he took the name Paul from Pope Paul IV and Naschy from a Hungarian athlete.

Naschy had been inspired to make a horror movie since working on the movie Agonizing In Crime a year earlier. Despite several filmmakers trying to dissuade him from making such a film, he persevered and this film would become the first in a long line of werewolf films that would make Naschy famous all over the world.

Originally known as La Marca del Hombre Lobo (The Mark of the Wolfman), this movie is also known as Hell's Creatures: Dracula and the Werewolf, The Nights of Satan and as the title I saw it run as at the Drive-In Super Monster Rama, Frankenstein's Bloody Terror. But wait...isn't this a werewolf movie? Read on, friends. Read on.

The film's American distributor, Independent-International Pictures, had a big problem on their hands. While they also distributed films like All the Colors of the Dark (renamed They're Coming to Get You! in an attempt to get audiences to think it had something to do with Night of the Living Dead), Satan's Sadists, Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll and others, now they needed a second Frankenstein movie and they needed it in a hurry.

That's because producer Sam Sherman already had 400 theaters lined up for the Al Adamson film Dracula vs. Frankenstein and had promised those grindhouses and drive-ins a Frank-centric double feature.

That's why this movie begins with an animated opening sequence that explains that the cursed Frankenstein family has had all manner of issues in their history, but this film will discuss one branch of the family tree that has been cursed with lycanthropy and changed their surname to Wolfstein.

La Marca del Hombre Lobo was originally filmed in Jan Jacobsen's Hi-Fi Stereo 70 3-D format. This led Sherman to hire Linwood Dunn to craft what were reportedly gorgeous 35mm prints that needed to be projected through high-end lenses. The producer even set up a star-studded Hollywood premiere that went to pieces when inferior acrylic lenses were used to show the film. This story feels apocryphal, as I can't see A-listers showing up to celebrate a Paul Naschy movie. But man - if it did happen, how amazing is life?

The hijinks begin when a gypsy couple gets trashed and spends the night in the Wolfstein castle. Their shenanigans lead to the silver cross being removed from the body of Imre Wolfstein, who rises from the dead to kill them and go wild in a nearby village (by going wild, he attacks a few people).

When a hunting party goes to stop what they believe are wolf attacks, Count Waldemar Daninsky (Naschy) is attacked and receives the titular mark of the werewolf. Prayer and friendship aren't enough to stop his curse, so he turns to two experts, Dr. Janos and Wandessa de Mikhelov.

They turn out to be Satanic vampires and revive Imre, then hold Waldemar's lover Janice and best friend Rudolph in thrall. They seem to be more swingers than vampires, mutually supporting one another's open marriage and need to dominate more docile partners. I'm kidding - they're totally vampires. But really, come on. They're swingers.

At the end, the two werewolves battle, with Waldemar winning, leading to him killing the vampires and being shot by a silver bullet fired by Janice. It really doesn't pay to be a werewolf, you know?

Naschy would follow this film with 1968's film Las Noches del Hombre Lobo. That movie is even stranger than this one because even today, no one is sure that it even exists. Wait...what?

It's true. Even though many refer to it as the second of Naschy's twelve Waldemar Daninsky movies, no one has ever seen this movie. Not even Naschy himself, although he claims that his script was filmed in Paris by director Rene Govar - who has no other known credits. Govar died in a career accident a week after the film was sent to the lab, where it was never paid for and destroyed. Naschy also claimed that he worked with actors Peter Beaumont and Monique Brainville, but no one knows if they existed either.

Supposedly, the film was about a professor who learns that one of his students suffers from lycanthropy, so he uses that student as a method of revenge on his enemies. That also sounds a lot like a later Naschy film, 1970's La Furia del Hombre Lobo (The Fury of the Wolfman).

Most Naschy experts feel like he brought up this film early in his career to pad his resume and make it seem like he was working in foreign markets so that he could appear to be a bigger actor than he was. Nevertheless, it's a strange footnote in his career.

This film starts off hilariously bad. First, there is some little prologue about vampire curses and the Frankenstein family becoming were-wolves--now they are the 'Wolfsteins'! Then, as the film opens, you see a ball--at which point, two men do A LOT of exposition--in other words, through their conversation (which sounds totally fake), they explain all the back story. It's really dumb and a terrible way of film making--and boded very poorly for the rest of the film. Soon, satanism was tossed into the mix. About the only things NOT in the first 3-5 minutes of the film were mummies or zombies and I held on---waiting to see if they, too, would be in the movie! Well, soon two old ladies begin talking--again, it was all exposition. They talked and talked about Count Waldemar Daninsky--telling all about him, his family, etc.. Couldn't SOMEONE in the film have a normal conversation that was NOT telling the audience the back story of various characters?!?! Sloppy....very, very sloppy.

A bit later, a gypsy and his very buxom girlfriend are stranded in the rain. The Count advises them to take cover in a nearby castle--Wolfstein castle! Once there, they begin looking the old and seemingly abandoned home. They take to opening up family tombs and robbing the dead. However, one corpse looks pretty fresh and when they remove the silver cross-like dagger, he comes to life as a wolf-man and kills them. It was a neat scene--at least until the end, when the lady spasmodically writhes like a go-go dancer who is magnetized to the wall!! Pretty dumb.

After these two get torn to pieces, the villagers and the Count go looking for the wolves that supposedly did this grisly deed. The Count is bitten during the hunt...and he's cursed to be a were-guy. Soon we see Count Waldemar turning into a were-wolf--in one of the worst transformation scenes I've seen. "The Were-wolf of London" and "The Wolf-man" did this much better--several decades earlier. His friends try to help him through this, but they seem powerless to do anything.

A bit later, Dr. Janos Mikhelov and his wife arrive. They claim to be able to perhaps cure Waldemar! In the meantime, they chain him up so he can't hurt anyone--a prudent thing that they never seem to get around to doing in other films. BUT, unfortunately, it's not because they are saints. On the contrary, they are satanists who wish to use their unearthly powers to turn Waldemar into a servant of Satan! If this doesn't sound dumb enough, later you learn that the Mikhelovs are, in fact, vampire satanists!!!! And, in a never-ending need to feed and make more vampires, they decide to make the moves on Waldemar's friends. In the end, Waldemar takes on the satanist-vampires and it's, of course, a fight to the death (or at least, death for the undead).

Overall, the story is bizarre and suffers from the kitchen sink approach--they toss everything into the plot and hope it all works. It isn't a terribly inspired approach and the dialog bogs the film down horribly. However, the film does have creepy music and a nice creepy look to it, so for the less demanding horror fan out there, there is probably enough to merit seeing it. All others, though, should stick to the better monster films from Universal and Hammer--they are light-years ahead of this one.