Dr. Jekyll & The Wolfman (1972)

 

 

Trailer of Dr. Jekyll & The Wolfman

 

 

Author's note: I had misgivings about including this trailer due to its poor  quality

 –it looks like a multi-generational dub from a bad 16mm print–and

due to the fact that it's the product of a company called Cheezy Movies.

 

 

 

Jacinto Molina Alvarez, know professionally as Paul Naschy, has made it known in interviews that the first movie he saw in the theater as a child, or at least the first film he can remember having an impact on him, is Universal's 1943 monster mash Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man. It was clearly inspirational, as this post's spotlight film illustrates, because Naschy spent a great deal of time in the late 60s and throughout the 1970s repurposing the ensemble creature feature concept into entries for his Waldemar Daninsky werewolf pictures. The character of the melancholy Polish Count Waldemar, searching for an end to his lycanthropic affliction, even if it's merely the peace of death, is molded very much from Lon Chaney, Jr's Larry Talbot template. In fact, Naschy was eventually dubbed "The Spanish Lon Chaney," for his performances.

The list of Waldemar Daninsky Hombre Lobo pictures is the stuff of horror and cult film pedantry, as some of his werewolf pictures are official entries in the series, others are unrelated; others may not have actually been made as no one has ever actually seen evidence of them beyond Naschy's own mention of them, but are still part of the list for whatever reason. For practical purposes, Dr. Jekyll & The Wolfman seems to be the fifth existing entry in the official series, for whatever that's worth. The films range in quality and entertainment value, neither mutually exclusive, and this film is middling at best. Not nearly as good (subjectively speaking, of course) as the prior entry, La Noche de Walpurigs (1970), which was run in American drive-ins as The Werewolf Vs The Vampire Woman. Usually–but not always–the films follow Naschy's Daninsky character investigating some arcane potential cure for his condition, which brings him in collision with another creature feature icon, be it a yeti, the aforementioned vampire woman, Frankenstein's monster, or, in the case of this picture, himself as the infamous Mr. Hyde.

Dr. Henry Jekyll (Jack Taylor) and his assistant Sandra (Mirta Miller).

The conceit of the film is that Dr. Jekyll's descendant Dr. Henry Jekyll (Jack Taylor), living in 1970's London, is in his own right a brilliant scientist, reviving his ancestor's experiments in the duality of human nature. The audience is introduced to him at a party for a wealthy business man about to embark on a honeymoon with his young wife; the couple are headed back to the man's home village in the Carpathian mountains. As the couple investigate the crumbling old cemetery where the man's parents are buried, he's attacked and killed by a a gang of thugs. His young wife Justine (Shirley Corrigan) is saved from a similar–or worse–fate, by the intervention of the reclusive Waldemar, who quickly and violently kills the attackers. It seems Waldemar lives in a secluded old castle not far from the grounds, with his aged family caretaker.  As Justine adjusts to the fact that her husband is dead, and that Waldemar saved her life, she agrees to take him back to London with her, to see if her friend Henry Jekyll can do something about is hairy double nature.

Justine (Shirley Corrigan) becomes the object of the s&m affection of Mr. Hyde.

Of course Henry Jekyll agrees to help, not to separate man and werewolf, but to secretly create man and werewolf and Mr. Hyde. This film posits that Mr. Hyde is an entity who exists in the interaction of any man plus Jekyll's infamous formula, not the individual and unique dark side of the original Dr. Henry Jekyll, as suggested in Robert Louis Stevenson's novel. When Daninsky is treated with the formula, he alternates between being moody Waldemar Daninsky, a pasty-faced sadistic Mr. Hyde, and of course, the hyper-salivary wolfman.

 

 Naturally, as with films of all genres and budgets in the 1970s reflecting the changing tastes and values of film-going audiences, exploitable material, particularly in horror and exploitation movies, had to up the ante beyond monsters with name recognition and the shrieking teenagers that dominated the previous two decades. Naschy and director León Klimovsky, who collaborated with each other often, usually brought the goods in spades for that particular audience, and all items on that checklist are present and accounted for in this picture, including ample nudity, lots of bloody violence, and the bound whipping of the female lead. This particularly misogynistic act is, personally, much more difficult to watch than the gore, and why it was shoehorned into most of these pictures either says a great deal about the filmmakers, the audience that demanded it, or both. For better or worse, it's something that one has to become accustomed to when delving into the world of Spanish and Euro-horror of the 1970s. Some argue it's a cinematic response to the fascism of the Spanish government at the time.

 

Waldemar Daninsky (Naschy) in wolf mode.

All in all, the film Dr. Jekyll & The Wolfman is thin soup with some interesting presentation. The werewolf transformation scenes, of which there are many, are particularly fun; including one in an elevator, much to the chagrin of a nurse, and one in a discotheque, where Naschy transforms from Mr. Hyde to Daninsky, then into the wolfman. The syncing of the film cuts to the rhythm of the flashing lights in the disco as the transformation progresses is actually fairly ingeniously executed. While it has moments of oddball charm, there are, in my opinion, far better entries in the Paul Naschy horror library to delve into if you're looking to flirt with 1970s Spanish horror, such as the previously noted El Noche de Walpurgis, and director Amando de Ossorio's initial entry into his Knights Templar series, La noche del terror ciego (The Night Of Blind Terror, released in the US as Tombs Of The Blind Dead).

Dir. - León Klimovsky; Screenplay - Jacinto Molina (Paul Naschy); Music - Anton Garcia Abril; Cinematography - Francicso Fraile; Editor - Petra de Nieva; Producer(s) - Bermudez De Castro.

Starring: Paul Naschy - Count Waldemar Daninsky / The Wolfman / Mr. Hyde, Jack Taylor - Dr. Henry Jekyll, Shirley Corrigan - Justine, Mirta Miller - Sandra.