Famous doctor Waldemar Daninsky (Paul Naschy) has a small problem. Since he returned as the only survivor of some expedition or the other (you'll have to live with never hearing or seeing any details about anything when watching a Paul Naschy movie) he is cursed with The Curse of the Werewolf (no, what Tibet and werewolves might have to do with each other is never explained either).
Up until now, he has been able to suppress his transformation by pure manly awesomeness (Naschy wrote the script, too, as usual in his body of work), but when he learns that his wife his having an affair, he transforms into a weird looking ape a werewolf and kills them both. To this viewer's glee, Waldi is as clumsy as he is silly looking and has never learned to keep away from electrical current. Which ends his killing spree prematurely.
But don't cheer too soon. His ex-girlfriend Dr. Ilona Elmann (Perla Cristal) is an honest to God mad scientist, and so has nothing better to do than to revive him and use him for experiments involving mind control.
She acts out her hobbies in the cellar of her ancestral home, where she also hides a lot of freaks and semi-freaks.
Of course the dog-faced boy escapes, goes on a very sedate killing spree, returns again(!) and is experimented on and tortured a little longer.
My comments here are for the six minutes shorter, dubbed version of the film contained in one of my Mill Creek box sets, so some of the films faults may not be Paul Naschy's fault alone. Although the uncut Naschy vehicles I have seen aren't a base for optimism.
Most of actor/screenwriter and sometimes director Paul Naschy are talking of the palpable love for classic monster movies that his work exudes like a geeky odor. I can't disagree with that. Actually I think the man loved his classic monster movies so much that all he did was take their important and useless elements, threw them all in a bag and then started to randomly draw them out and write them, with the addition of a bit more blood and sex, down just like he found them, without any thought for sense or style, and without ever trying to do more with them than to reproduce them. In many cases this would lead to movies that at least are exciting or stupidly charming, but somehow Naschy's films always walk the line between the boring and the annoying. I'm not sure why.
The Fury of the Wolf Man itself is even worse. The editing is senseless, most plot points are not thought through in the less, everyone acts so far away from basic human reactions that it is just astounding.
Obviously, the missing scenes in this version don't make these problems any better, but most things here happen only because they have also happened in other (better) films, so comprehensibility wasn't high on the list of priorities for anyone responsible here anyway.
Naschy himself tends to the sort of slightly smug overacting I normally explain as the result of an ego bigger than the actor's talent (see also Tom Cruise, Robin Williams), but here he is the only person not completely made of wood, and I am too thankful to be snarky.
Lastly, and definitely something I can't blame poor Naschy for, the dubbing is quite bad. As if the bored delivery of the dubbing actors wasn't damaging enough, we are also granted one of those dubbing scripts that permanently don't quite make sense. Most of the time you can imagine what is supposed to be meant by the things people say, but it never is what they actually say.
Darling of the Day:
"If there's a killer, there must also be a victim. Our problem now is to find them both."
(See, it's just like a Zen koan. It makes less sense the longer you think about it.)
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