Lycantropus: The Moonlight Murders (1997)

Original title: Licántropo: El asesino de la luna llena

The small town of Visaria (which locates the movie right in Universal Horror land, just in the 90s) is beset by a string of terrible murders taking place on nights of the full moon. If not for certain circumstances suggesting human agency, the state of the corpses the killer leaves behind could only be read as animal attacks, as if the victims were mangled by something like a wolf. Well, most of the murders, that is.

I’m sure local bestseller writer Waldemar Daninsky (Paul Naschy), suffering from blackouts, daytime hallucinations concerning the tragic circumstances surrounding his birth, visions of his long murdered romani mother Czinka (Ester Ponce) and their clan’s doom-prophecies sprouting head Bigary (Javier Loyola) who talk much of his curse and how unpleasant their undead state is, and general malaise, has nothing whatsoever to do with anything.

This return of the great Paul Naschy to yet another version of his ever-doomed werewolf (that’s not a spoiler, surely) protagonist Waldemar Daninsky as directed by Francisco Rodríguez Gordillo was meant as a bit of a comeback for the actor, writer, director, producer and monster-lover, after he had to lighten his workload (which in his world meant making only about a movie a year, apparently) for half a decade thanks to massive heart problems and assorted health issues. Unfortunately for Naschy, the film wasn’t terribly well distributed and flopped rather badly.

I can’t help but suspect this had rather a lot to do with changes in fashion that probably simply didn’t make yet another werewolf film with Naschy a terribly great proposition for whatever audience this sort of project still had in Spain. Even Naschy’s more nihilistic 80s films always had an old-fashioned quality surrounding them that has never been the sort of thing to pull in audiences, unless your film takes place in Victorian England and is about some idiots of nobility and wealth, of course.

It can’t have helped the film’s position at the time that it simply isn’t terribly good. Lycantropus certainly does attempt to forgo Naschy’s old, sometimes shoddy, monster movie romp style in favour of something slower and more cerebral and psychological for a change, but the script (of course also by Naschy) isn’t terribly good at it, going through plot points, twists and developments even the less genre savvy audience members will see coming from miles away. We spend an inordinate amount of time with characters of little interest, and waste even more of it until Naschy actually gets to don his wolf garb, which happens so quickly and is over with  even quicker, the film might as well just not have bothered.

It’s not a total wash, at least: the cinematography by Manuel Mateos is often very beautiful, if rather staid and conservative, making things look rather pricier than they often did in Naschy’s prime. The performance of a physically clearly diminished Naschy is fine, too. Age lends him some of the gravitas he never quite could reach in earlier decades, and while his own script doesn’t actually give him enough opportunity to shine, he still makes the best out of it.