ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Mark Rochester is a librarian. Mad about movies and books and film soundtracks. His favorite film is The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. He recently reviewed Death Played the Flute for us.

Made by Columbia Pictures on a low, wartime budget, Cry of the Werewolf (1944), also known as Daughter of the Werewolf, is a notch or two down in quality and entertainment from the fabulous Universal horror films of the 30’s and 40’s. For one thing,  there is the cast – there are no A-listers or even B-listers here. Top billed, as the Gypsy Princess and werewolf, is Nina Foch, the Dutch-born actress who went on to have a distinguished career in Hollywood, starring in An American in Paris (1951) and getting an Oscar nomination for Executive Suite (1954).  But Cry of the Werewolf was only her second movie and her unpolished performance here is both unconvincing and uneven.  Extremely stiff in his debut movie (the first of, thankfully, just three movies he made) is Stephen Crane, as Professor Morris, son of the eminent Dr Morris who is killed at the start of the movie by the werewolf Princess after he discovers her secret.  Equally as poor as Crane is Danish actress Osa Massen as the ‘love interest’ – however, with her ‘foreign’ accent and long curly locks, her Simone Simon look ties in nicely with the other obvious influences of Cat People (1942) on this movie, most notably in its use of shadows.  Sturdier performances come further down the pecking order, in particular from Barton MacLane, who as the bullish police chief, provides some of the movie’s better moments with his (often comical) investigation of the series of weremurders.

Unfortunately, as a murder mystery, or whodunit, this film flunks badly.  Right from the first ten minutes we know who the werewolf is….the film gives it all away. The film is also very low on atmosphere and excitement. One of the few really good moments comes midway through the film when the Professor is stalked by the werewolf in the records room of a mortuary – effective use of lighting and stock music creating a memorable, shadowy scene only matched by the last five minutes of the film when the police and then the Professor are attacked by the werewolf.

Fans of horror movies will probably be most disappointed by the ‘transformation’ sequences of this movie.  Werewolf films are, in some ways, measured by the scenes in which the human turns into a wolf or back again, and the wonderful make-up that transforms an actor into a werewolf. Jack Pierce famously did the brilliant wolfman makeup in The Wolf Man (1941) and the underrated Werewolf of London (1935) – and it is a shame that someone with his talent could not have worked on Cry of the Werewolf,  because the result would have been totally different.  Instead, probably for budgetary reasons, as a substitute for a transformation, we just get to see Foch’s shadow replaced by that of a wolf shadow, and, instead of seeing a hairy, snarling half-woman half-wolf, we get, as our werewolf, an actual wolf that looks suspiciously like an Alsatian dog.

Although it is hard not to be disappointed with Cry of the Werewolf,  if you are a fan of old horror movies and go into it not expecting too much you will probably not be too miffed – and it is only an hour long.

Points of interest  – 1. During the opening credits we see a wolf snarling and chewing at something – maybe a bone?  No. If you look closer, you can see an elastic band around its jaws, put there to make it look fiercer.   2. Actor Stephen Crane infamously married actress Lana Turner twice – in 1942, and then again in 1943 after the first marriage had to be annulled due to Crane’s bigamy.  3.  Although female werewolves are fairly commonplace in movies nowadays, Foch was one of the first female werewolves on screen, with the honour of the first going to Phyllis Gordon in first-ever werewolf movie, The Werewolf (1913).

You can watch this on YouTube.

Sarah has no mother and unlike other kids her age is only focused on school, college, her future career and the financial markets. Her babysitter Nellie is carefree and happy to be alive, just excited to see where life takes her. Sarah’s Wall Street father pays her to join her for the summer and life changes for both of them.

Paul Check wrote, produced, directed and stars — as Sarah’s father — in this film. He worked on Wall Street in Mortgage-Backed Securities as a quantitative modeler, strategist, analyst, risk manager and portfolio manager, so all of the financials in this movie are probably really well-researched. And he made this a family affair by having his daughter Marie play the lead role, Sarah. She has great chemistry with Tinuke Adetunji, who plays Nellie, possibly because she really was babysat by her when she was younger.

Rounded Corners has been playing at select theaters. If you want to know more, check out the official site and official Facebook page.

Did you know that we like Paul Naschy movies here? Oh, you’ve seen us post one of his movies ever few weeks? You know who else likes him and talks about him in this documentary? Just people like John Landis, Joe Dante, Antonio Mayans, Caroline Munro, Javier Aguirre, Jack Taylor, Jorge Crau and Donald. F. Glut.

Beyond hearing how Jacinto Molina Alvarez became Naschy, you also learn how his films fit into the troubled history of 20th century Spain and how his hard work led him to living out his monster movie dreams.

From stories about encounters with the Yakuza while making The Beast and the Magic Sword to what happened to the never released Howl of the Devil and every bit of werewolf-fur covered piece of history in between, this movie is a feast for Naschy fans or anyone wanting to learn more about Spanish horrror.

You can watch this on YouTube.

As a kid, I was thrilled when Laugh-In came back to TV. I’d read about it—I was already a devotee of pop culture—and was excited to see this stream-of-consciousness show for myself. Yes, it was before the internet when we couldn’t just dial up everything we wanted to see instantly.

It may seem dated today — it has to; it was nearly sixty years ago — but at the center of this mad show were two men: Dan Rowan and Dick Martin. They were the everymen who couldn’t keep the wild energy of the show from bursting through the screen. But they were also fascinating people in their own right, who knew that the show was the star.

Dan Rowan spent his childhood years following his parents from town to town as they performed their carnival dancing act. He was orphaned at 11 and spent four years in an orphanage. By the time he was 18, he hitchhiked to Los Angeles, where he got a job in the Paramount mailroom. Soon, he was the youngest writer on the lot.

During World War II, Rowan was a fighter pilot, winning the Distinguished Flying Cross with Oak Leaf Cluster, the Air Medal and the Purple Heart. He returned from action and formed his comedy duo with Martin. He was married three times—to Miss America 1945 runner-up Phyllis J. Mathis, Australian model Adriana Van Ballegooyen and TV spokeswoman Joanna Young—and retired in the early 1980s. He only returned to help celebrate NBC’s 60th anniversary in 1988 by appearing with his comedy partner.

Dick Martin didn’t serve in the war — tuberculosis kept him from combat — but was a young writer as well, working on the radio show Duffy’s Tavern. He started teaming with Martin in 1952, playing nightclubs, hosting NBC’s Colgate Comedy Hour and appearing in the movie Once Upon a Horse Together. He also played Lucille Ball’s neighbor on The Lucy Show before Laugh-In became a big hit. After his partner retired, Martin was a frequent game show guest and TV show director. He was married to singer Peggy Connelly and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls star Dolly Read twice.

Anyways…The Maltese Bippy.

Sam Smith and Ernest Grey (Rowan and Martin) are the producers of nudie cuties — their latest film is Lunar Lust — and they’re forced out of their office for not paying the rent. Somehow, a G-rated movie in 1969 could concern pornography, and no one cared.

They move into Ernest’s house by the cemetery in Long Island, a place where a mutilated corpse has already been found and a woman is frightened by a howling man. Oh yeah, Ernest is also given to barking like a dog.

Somehow, despite not being successful, Ernest can have a housekeeper (Mildred Natwick, Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate). He also has two roommates, the bubbly Robin Sherwood (Carol Lynley, The Poseidon Adventure) and Axel (Leon Askin, Hogan’s Heroes), a Swedish violinist.

Meanwhile, the Ravenswoods next door — Mischa (Fritz Weaver, Creepshow), Carlotta (Julie Newmar!) and Helga (Eddra Gale, Fellini’s 8 1/2) — are vampires who want Ernest to join their pack. Sam thinks they should be a variety act, but the truth is that nearly everyone just wants to search for a giant diamond inside the house. (and more to the point, inside the corpse of the home’s original owner).

Hijinks ensue, and everyone but our heroes perish. But that’s not good enough, so they both present their happy endings to the audience and walk into the sunset together.

Look for a pre-Brady Bunch Robert Reed, David Hurst (the head waiter in Hello, Dolly), character actor Dana Eclar, voiceover actor Alan Oppenheimer, Arthur Batanides  (he was Mr. Kirkland in Police Academy 2, 3, 4 and 6), Jennifer Bishop (who was in the William Grefe movies Mako: The Jaws of Death and Impulse, as well as Al Adamson’s Horror of the Blood Monsters, Jessi’s Girls and The Female Bunch) and Garry Walberg, who played Jack Klugman’s poker buddy Homer “Speed” Deegan on The Odd Couple and his boss Lt. Frank Monahan on Quincy, M.E.

Director Norman Panama wrote White Christmas and 1959’s Li’l Abner. He also directed the Hope and Crosby — with Joan Collins! — film The Road to Hong Kong.

This isn’t a great movie—or even alright—but the TV lover in me appreciated it and found joy in discovering this buried moment in time.

John Hough has some great movies on his directoral history, including Twins of Evil, The Legend of Hell House, The Watcher in the Woods, The Incubus, American Gothic, Escape to Witch Mountain, Return to Witch Mountain and Biggles. Thats a great run. He also made this movie, which attempts to bring The Howling series back to something closer to the first film.

Author Marie Adams keeps having visions of nuns and werewolves attacking her from a fire. It seems like the same imagination that helps her write books is also helping her go crazy. Her husband takes her to a small village of Drago, where a small cottage will be the place that she plans on resting and relaxing away all the terror that she is going through. That would work if she didn’t keep hearing howling in the woods.

Much like the first film, her man can’t stay faithful. The small town is also rife with werewolves, ghosts and visions of the nun. The whole thing ends in a burning church and yes, that same werewolf leaping through the fire.

Well, if anything, this is the only werewolf movie I’ve seen that has a theme song by the lead singer of the Moody Blues. So there’s that.

That said, this is a more faithful version of the book than The Howling. Yet it’s not as good of a movie. Writer and co-producer of the film Clive Turner was originally going o direct, but when the financiers pulled out he had to get Hough on board.

That’s one story. The other is the one that Hough told Fangoria. The script was written by someone named Freddie Rowe and he would also receive notes and messages from him as well as additional pages of the script while making the movie. However, when the director asked for Rowe’s contact information, he was never given it, leading him to suspect Rowe of actually being Clive Turner, who really wanted to be the director of the movie. Seeing as how Rowe only wrote one other movie — Howling V: The Rebirth, which Turner also wrote — that may or may not be true.

Making that story sound even more true is the fact that Turner recut and re-edited the film, adding scenes like the one where the evil werewolf queen Eleanor went bobbing for hot dogs with Marie’s husband.

You can watch this for yourself on Tubi and try and make better sense of it than I did.

Consider this movie a precursor to next week’s deep dive into the horror films of the 2000’s. It’s an example of the creative voices of that era — Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson — whose Scream would lead to a renaissance of horror on screens — and Bob and Harvey Weinstein, whose heavy-handed production often led to films turning into hellish battles.

For example, there’s an entirely different cut of this movie, with two different versions of the werewolves by Rick Baker and KNB replaced with CGI and entire characters — Omar Epps, Skeet Ulrich, Mandy Moore, Heather Langenkamp, Illeana Douglas, Scott Foley, Robert Forster and Corey Feldman are all pretty much exorcised in the cut that ended up being released — being excluded.

The Weinsteins — beyond the numerous scandals — ruined plenty of genre films despite Dimension Films being a studio known for their release. Craven also had a career marked with movies that were taken over by studios and chopped up against his will.

Cursed would be the perfect storm of these two groups working together.

Star Jesse Eisenberg would tell Bloody Disgusting that there were so many reshoots — Judy Greer has said that it felt like they shot the movies for seven years — that they could have made four movies in the time and energy that it took to make this movie. These reshoots took the film from an R-rated film to a more PG-13 friendly version, but along the way, the film’s narrative cohesion was destroyed.

So what’s it all about? It all begins with Mya and Shannon Elizabeth’s characters getting a dark fortune from a gypsy, which comes true moments later. After a car crash with Eisenberg and Christina Ricci’s characters, a wolf comes out of nowhere and devours Elizabeth. As for Mya, she’s soon killed after flirting with Ricci’s boyfriend at a party.

The big reveal of all of this is that said boyfriend — Jake, played by Joshua Jackson — has passed on the curse of the werewolf through sexual contact, turning all of his one-night stands into monsters. The film also claims that the transfer of blood can make one a werewolf as well, which explains how the dog Zipper can become a beast.

I feel like every time I talk about a Wes Craven movie post-Freddy I have to include the phrases studio interference, reshoots, directorial cut and lost footage. You’d think after his successes — The Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream — he’d be allowed to do whatever he wanted. Instead, we have movies like Deadly Friend and this one, where scripts were tossed out and studio interference led to movies that tarnished his name above the film.

After the success of Cat People, RKO demanded that Val Lewton get started on a sequel. The original director was Gunther von Fritsch, but when he fell behind schedule, Robert Wise took over.

It was the first film for both men. Fritsch would eventually make Body and Soul and Stolen Identity while Wise would win Best Director and Best Picture for both West Side Story and The Sound of Music. Of interest to genre fans would be his films The Body Snatcher, A Game of Death, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, The Andromeda Strain and, of course, The Haunting.

Sharing sets with The Magnificent Ambersons — just as the original Cat People did — this film may be a sequel and have the same cast and characters, but it is a much different movie. Lewton wanted to call it Amy and Her Friend, but the studio wanted to make money.

Lewton invested so much of his time and himself into this movie, basing it on his childhood and own mindset. RKO, on the other hand, was upset that it wasn’t the same movie that Lewton had already made.

Sometime in the past, Irena (Simone Simon) died — see Cat People — and Oliver Reed (Kent Smith, The Cat Creature) moved on to marry Alice Moore (Jane Randolph, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein). Now, he has a six-year-old daughter named Amy (Ann Carter, The Boy with Green Hair) who lives in a dream world. At the center of it is Irena — now a ghost who she only knows from a photograph.

Amy also becomes friends with an aging actress named Julia Farren (Julia Dean, Nightmare Alley) whose daughter Barbara (Elizabeth Russell, who was also implied to be a cat person in the original film) hates her. Barbara also begins to hate the attention that Amy receives from her mother.

The end of this film — with Barabara about to kill the young girl and Irena’s spirit returning to save her — is sheer artistry on celluloid. It astounded me and I still can’t shake the feeling I had as I watched this film.

The theme of this film — everyone believes that Amy is insane because she cannot leave the world of fantasy — was pretty much how Lewton lived as a child. In fact, his wife believed that he never truly came back to the real world as an adult. He also based the tension between Amy and her father on the relationship that he had with his daughter Nina.

You could see this as a holiday movie. You could also see it as a story of what child abuse does. Several therapists used this movie as a teaching tool for years, even asking Lewton why he had such a silly name for such a serious movie.

Shout! Factory has a blu ray of this that I urge you to purchase. This is pure cinema and has my highest recommendation.

Paul Annett mostly directed TV and this is the lone theatrical movie that he directed. It’s one of the few non-anthology releases of Amicus. It’s notable for including a werewolf break, a feature of the film that Annett disliked, saying, “What can I say about it? I hated it. It stopped the film stone dead and I thought it was completely artificial and unnecessary.”

Yes. You have to guess who the werewolf is.

Millionaire Tom Newcliffe (Calvin Lockhart, Hell Up In Harlem) has invited a group of people to his English mansion: his wife Caroline (Marlene Clark, Night of the Cobra Woman, Ganja and Hess), diplomat Arthur Bennington (Charles Gray!), married couple Jan and Davina Gilmore (Michael Gambon and Ciaran Madden), ex-con artist Paul Foote (Tom Chadbon) and archaeologist and a lycanthropy enthusiast Professor Lundgren (Peter Cushing!). Why are they here? One of them is a werewolf. And whoever the beast is…The Beast Must Die.

So who is the werewolf? Why would I go and ruin the werewolf break after Milton Subotsky spent so much time putting it together?

Robert Quarry was originally slated to play the lead, but at the last minute, Amicus went with Lockhart to hope that this movie could take advantage of the success of blaxploitation movies. Somewhere, Vincent Price giggled.

Sadly, this would be the last official Amicus film, even though Madhouse, The Land That Time Forgot, At the Earth’s Core and The People That Time Forgot are considered Amicus movies.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime and Tubi or buy the new re-release from Severin, which has the best quality version of the movie ever released.