ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Robert Freese has been a staff writer for Videoscope Magazine since 1998. He also contributes to Drive-in Asylum. 

Beautiful, young Justine (Shirley Corrigan) travels with her much older new husband to visit the final resting place of his parents. There, a trio of trouble making brothers attack and kill her husband before Waldemar Daninsky (Paul Naschy) shows up, busts some heads, kills two of the thugs and saves Justine, who passes out.

She awakens in Daninsky’s castle to an old housekeeper watching over her, who assures her she is safe (The village people refer to the residents of the “Black Castle” as, “a witch and the Devil himself.”).

Whenever the full moon peeks out from behind the dark clouds, Daninsky turns into a werewolf and noshes on whoever is unlucky enough to be out. When Justine learns of Daninsky’s touch of lycanthropy, she convinces him to return to modern London with her to meet a friend who might be able to help him out, Dr. Henry Jekyll (Jack Taylor).

Running late for his first appointment to see the doc, a power outage traps Daninsky in a clinic elevator with a pretty, young nurse (It’s “El Hombre Lobo of London” time after Daninsky transforms into the werewolf inside the elevator, feasts on the nurse and escapes the clinic after the elevator doors are finally pried open.).

Dr. Jekyll’s master plan is to shoot Daninsky up with his grandfather’s famous elixir and allow the Mr. Hyde part of Danindky’s psyche to overpower and overthrow the werewolf part. Once the Hyde persona is fully in control, Jekyll will inject an antidote into him and presto-chango, Daninisky is cured from being a werewolf. 

Everything works until Jekyll’s jealous assistant Sandra (Mirta Miller) double crosses him and re-injects Daninsky with the Hyde juice. Seems she loves the doctor, but he only has eyes for Justine, who now loves Daninsky, so Sandra figures she will use Mr. Hyde to torture Justine, which he does, with a big grin on his face while he does it. What Sandra doesn’t figure on is Mr. Hyde being a bigger psychopath than she is, and soon we got Mr. Hyde practically skipping through Soho looking for prostitutes to decimate and destroy.

Dr. Jekyll vs. the Werewolf (aka Doctor Jekyll y el Hombre Lobo) is a perfect example of the kind of movie they no longer make. Naschy, writing the screenplay under his real name, Jacinto Molina, fills his plot with so much story, pathos, soap opera drama and gratuitous monster attacks, no true monster fan will be able to resist its charms (Among the best moments is a scene where Mr. Hyde wanders into a hip Soho disco, only to change back into Daninsky, then change into El Hombre Lobo and clean the place out!).

Jack Taylor is pretty great as the sketchy Doc Jekyll and Mirta Miller seems to be having a good time playing the true villain of the piece. When Naschy portrays Mr. Hyde he does so with a sinister grin and a hairpiece that recalls not so much Fredric March or Spencer Tracy, but more Bugs Bunny from the 1955 short “Hyde and Hare.”

The earnestness Naschy puts into all his monster portrayals is truly the work of a master craftsman and he always seems to be having the time of his life in his creature features (Naschy should certainly be considered one of the true icons of horror, alongside other greats as Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney, Jr., Vincent Price, Barbra Steele, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.).

Naschy fans are split on the order of his El Hombre Lobo/Daninsky series, as the second film, 1968’s The Nights of the Wolf Man is a lost film (Naschy himself never recalled seeing it, but did remember going to Paris for a week to shoot his scenes.). Dr. Jekyll vs. the Werewolf is the fifth film to see actual release in the series, but the sixth film in the series, including the lost second chapter.

I watched the version available from Code Red (on a double feature disc with Vampires Night Orgy). While most sources peg the running time at 96 minutes, the Code Red version runs 88 minutes, as opposed to the edited, 72 minute version included on the Pure Terror collection (It’s safe to say this truncated version is missing buckets of brutal sadism, gratuitous nudity and abundant monster violence.).

Regardless of what version you watch, Dr. Jekyll vs. the Werewolf is a treat, made by a man who truly loved his monsters for fans who share that love.

There’s something to be said about the last movie on a multiple film bill late night at a foggy drive-in. You’re half-awake, you’re probably trying to sober up and you might be the only one not sleeping. It feels like you’re surrounded by others but still discovering a movie for yourself for what could be the first time. That’s how I got to experience Graveyard of Horror, or as it’s also called, Necrophagus and The Butcher of Binbrook.

It’s written and directed by Miguel Madrid, whose film The Killer of Dolls has just been unearthed and re-released by Mondo Macabro.

Michael Sherrington travels via train to his ancestral castle, where he soon learns that his wife has died giving birth to his son. Then, we meet way too many characters for one movie, such as his brother, who seems to have become a mad scientist who buried himself alive and is being fed blood all to prove a point; various sisters-in-law who all like to argue and cheat on their husbands, Michael’s monther and two lcoal doctors who are keeping things from our hero. Oh yeah, there are also some graverobbers or thieves or somebody wearing Halloween masks skulking outside.

Unhappy with the answers he’s getting, Michael digs up his wife’s coffin, which he finds is empty just in time for those graverobbers to knock him out and a monster — none of the budget went to this monster — to attack.

Then, our hero disappears for an hour and all mannner of new plot and surrealism happens. This is either the worst — or the best, if you ask me — movie to watch when coming down from two straight days of horror movies in a secluded wooded drive-in. Anyone awake is going to be baffled and anyone still asleep would barely be able to keep this movie straight in their heads.

I mean, I was watching this movie through a slight fog — both in atmosphere and mental headspace thanks to multiple cans and jugs and bottles of all manner of drinks — and I gotta tell you, what I remember was lots of braying jazz, quick camera zooms that would make Lucio Fucli proud, sepia dream sequences, nausea-inducing handheld shots, editing that simultaneously makes no sense and all the sense in the world, outre camera angles and weird close-ups for no reason. If you ask me — and you did, because you’re reading this — I watched this in the absolute peak conditions by which this film should properly be displayed.

Robert Craig Knievel was the hero of my childhood. After all, who else was brave, insane or dumb enough to attempt more than 75 ramp-to-ramp motorcycle jumps in his life, a life that should have ended way shorter than the 69 hellacious years that he lived on this planet with?

How does one become a daredevil? For Evel — who was given that name by a jail guard — it all started with rodeos, ski jumping and pole vaulting. Upon returning from the army, he started a semi-pro hockey team, the Butte Bombers. In one of their games, where they played against Czechoslovakian Olympic ice hockey team, Even was ejected from the game minutes into the third period and left the stadium. When the Czechoslovakian officials went to collect the money for playing, they learned that it had been stolen.

After the birth of his son, Evel started the Sur-Kill Guide Service, which was really just a front for poaching in Yellowstone National Park. He was arrested for this and then hitchhiked with a 54-inch rack of antlers the whole way to Washington to plead his case.

It was around this time that Evel decided to stop committing crimes — don’t worry, he kept up with them — and get into motorcycle riding. A broken collarbone and reading Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude led to Evel working for the Combined Insurance Company of America, a job he held for a few months until they wouldn’t promote him to vice-president after a few months. Whew Evel! And then a failed Honda dealership led him to work for Don Pomeroy at his motorcycle shop, where the owner’s son Jim taught him how to do a wheelie.

This led Evel to do his first stunt show that he promoted entirely on his own, even serving as his own MC. He did a few wheelies and then jumped a box filled with rattlesnakes and mountain lions. This is where you either say, “This is stupid” or become fascinated. Me? How awesome is it to have a box filled with dangerous wildlife and decide to jump a motorcycle over it? Yep, this is why I was obsessed with Evel as a child.

This led to an obsession with jumping more things — like cars — and the unfortunate side effect of getting hurt nearly every time. He crashed around twenty times — huge, incredibly violent crashes — and his Guinness Book of World Records entry states he suffered 433 bone fractures by the end of 1975.

In Evel’s 1999 autobiography, he published this photo, which showed his many, many broken bones and injuries. You can learn more at http://www.stevemandich.com/evelincarnate/knievelinjuries.htm

Evel crashed at Caesar’s Palace. He crashed jumping Pepsi trucks. He crashed outside the Cow Palace. And then he started dreaming big — he wanted to jump teh Grand Canyon. Why? Take it from the man himself: “I don’t care if they say, “Look, kid, you’re going to drive that thing off the edge of the Canyon and die,” I’m going to do it. I want to be the first. If they’d let me go to the moon, I’d crawl all the way to Cape Kennedy just to do it. I’d like to go to the moon, but I don’t want to be the second man to go there.”

The government would never allow Evel to do this. It’s even a big part of this movie — just look at the posters. Finally, he’d jump Snake River Canyon, an event whose close circuit telecast bombed, almost bankrupting a young Vince McMahon Jr. before he even bought his father’s WWF. He used the Skycycle and nearly drowned when again he failed to make the jump.

A year later, Evel would crash again jumping thirteen buses in front of Wembley Stadium. After the crash, despite breaking his pelvis, Knievel made it to his feet and talked to the crowd, announcing his retirement: “Ladies and gentlemen of this wonderful country, I’ve got to tell you that you are the last people in the world who will ever see me jump. Because I will never, ever, ever jump again. I’m through.” Frank Gifford begged him to go out on a stretcher, but Evel said “I came in walking, I went out walking!”

Of course, Evel was a carnie and kept on pulling off stunts until 1977, when a Jaws inspired leap broke both his arms and nearly blinded a cameraman.

The life of Evel is a complicated story to tell. On one hand, he was an entertainer, out there in a jumpsuit covered with stars and a cape. On the other, he was a man who believed in keeping his word and battling the evils of drugs (a Hell’s Angel threw a tire iron on stage during one of his jumps as he had often battled against the group for being drug dealers and he ended up putting three of them in the hospital). And on another hand, he lost his Ideal Toy and Harley Davidson endorsements when he went wild on Shelly Saltsman, a sports promoter, Hollywood producer and author of the book Evel Knievel on Tour, which alleged that Evel used drugs and abused his family. To get back at him, despite having two broken arms, Evel cornered him on the 20th Century Fox backlot and beat him unmerciful with a baseball bat.

When the news of Knievel’s attack came up on the news, Saltman’s elderly mother had a heart attack and died three months later. Evel got a six month work furlough and was ordered to pay $12.75 million in damages, money he never paid. After the stunt icon’s 2007 death, Saltman decided to sue his estate for $100 million US dollars with interest, but he never got a dime before he died in 2019.

As for Evel, even his death was an event. His packed funeral was presided over by Pastor Dr. Robert H. Schuller — who baptized Evel in 2007 at his Crystal Cathedral, which led to an influx of new parisioners — with Matthew McConaughey giving the eulogy. But first — there were fireworks. Before he died, Evel said that he “beat the hell out of death.”

I told you all that to tell you about this movie.

The film begins with Evel — played by George Hamilton — giving a speech directly to us, the viewer: “Ladies and gentlemen, you have no idea how good it makes me feel to be here today. It is truly an honor to risk my life for you. An honor. Before I jump this motorcycle over these 19 cars — and I want you to know there’s not a Volkswagen or a Datsun in the row — before I sail cleanly over that last truck, I want to tell you that last night a kid came up to me and he said, “Mr Knievel, are you crazy? That jump you’re going to make is impossible, but I already have my tickets because I want to see you splatter.” That’s right, that’s what he said. And I told that boy last night that nothing is impossible. Now they told Columbus to sail across the ocean was impossible. They told the settlers to live in a wild land was impossible. They told the Wright Brothers to fly was impossible. And they probably told Neil Armstrong a walk on the moon was impossible. They tell Evel Knievel to jump a motorcycle across the Grand Canyon is impossible, and they say that every day. A Roman General in the time of Caesar had the motto: “If it is possible, it is done. If it is impossible, it will be done.” And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what I live by.”

Then we get a movie version of Evel’s life. It was originally written by Alan Caillou, who played King Sancho in The Sword and the Sorcerer. Hamilton wanted John Milius to rewrite it. Upon reading the original script, he launched it into Hamilton’s pool and beat it with an oar. That meant that he was the new writer.

Milius would go on to say that he preferred the final product to many of the other films shot from his scripts. “They didn’t restrain it or tone it down, they shot the script. The guy is just as obnoxious and full of hot air as he was in the script. Just as full of life and vitality too. He’s Evel Knievel! He wouldn’t take a dime off of anybody.”

Hamilton would later tell Pop Entertainment, when asked about the film, “The thing about it is at that time Evel was not famous. When we made that movie he took a jump over the fountains and splattered. He had not become a Mattel toy at that time. I put a writer on it named John Milius – who [later] wrote Apocalypse Now. He was the best of the writers of that era. I got him to write the script for me. Then Milius made me read the script to Evel. I realized he was kind of a sociopath and was totally messed. Then all of sudden Evel started to adopt lines out of the movie for himself. So his persona in the movie became more of his persona in real life. He would have been every kid’s hero on one hand, but then he went and took that baseball bat and broke that guy’s legs and that finished his career in the toy business. Evel was very, very difficult and he was jealous of anybody that was gonna play him. He wanted to portray himself and he did go and make his own movie later on. He had a great perception of this warrior that he thought he was and that was good. Then he had this other side of himself where he’d turn on you in a minute. Success is something that you have earn. You have to have a humility for it, because it can leave you in a second. It may remember you but it can sure leave you. I think if you don’t get that and you don’t have gratitude for what you are and where you are it doesn’t come back and it goes away forever.”

Evel Knievel ends with our hero successfully making a jump at the Ontario Motor Speedway and driving to a dirt road that leads to the Grand Canyon — which is about 456 miles if you take I-40. Again, he looks right at the camera and says, “Important people in this country, celebrities like myself — Elvis, Frank Sinatra, John Wayne — we have a responsibility. There are millions of people that look at our lives and it gives theirs some meaning. People come out from their jobs, most of which are meaningless to them, and they watch me jump 20 cars, maybe get splattered. It means something to them. They jump right alongside of me — they take the bars in their hands, and for one split second, they’re all daredevils. I am the last gladiator in the new Rome. I go into the arena and I compete against destruction and I win. And next week, I go out there and I do it again. And this time — civilization being what it is and all — we have very little choice about our life. The only thing really left to us is a choice about our death. And mine will be — glorious.”

Sue Lyon, who debuted as Lolita in the film of the same name, plays Evel’s woman. She’d go on to be in all manner of movies that I could go on for hours about like End of the World and Alligator.

George Hamilton seems as far from the real Evel as you can get. But he was a carnie too, as Milius related that Hamilton was “A great con-man, that’s what he really is. He always said, “I’ll be remembered as a third-rate actor when in fact, I’m a first-rate con man.””

Evel made one more movie. That’s another story and trust me, I’ll be getting to it soon.

You can watch this for free on the Internet Archive or use the streaming link I shared above.

I love when movies have more than one title. You may know of this movie by its Belgian title, La Plus Longue Nuit du Diable (The Devil’s Longest Night). In Italy, it’s called La Terrificante Notte del Demonio (The Terrifying Night of the Demon). And it’s also played as The Devil Walks at Midnight.

When a busload of tourists on holiday — seven of them, all representing the seven deadly sins — get lost, they end up at a gloomy castle. Could that be the same castle where we watched Nazis kill a baby at the end of World War II in the opening? Of course it is. That was the castle’s master, Baron von Runberg, who sacrificed his baby daughter because of an ancient family curse that makes the first-born daughter into an insatiable succubus.

After a dinner in which the Baron explains all of this to his guests, Lisa Muller (Erika Blanc, who shows up in all manner of Eurohorror like Mario Bava’s Kill, Baby, Kill and The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave) shows up to seduce each guest by using their personal sin against them.

From choking a man to death on food and wine to drowning a woman in powdered gold, guillotining another man, trapping a lustful woman in an iron maiden, throwing an old man out a window and killing yet another woman with a snake, Lisa is pretty much giving Dr. Phibes a run for his money.

Only Alvin, who represents pride, survives Lisa’s rampage. Satan appears to him and makes him a deal: the six dead people can return to life if Alvin gives up his soul. But can things ever be so simple when you deal with the Devil? And hey — is it just coincidence that the villains of this movie are Lisa and the Devil?

The Devil’s Nightmare is the only full-length movie that Jean Brismee directed. That’s a shame because I kind of love this movie’s mix of Gothic atmosphere and Eurosleaze sex and violence. And I absolutely adore the fake-out ending.

You can get this directly from Mondo Macabro. As a disclaimer, they sent us this to review, but honestly, I’d buy so much of their stuff otherwise. They’re an amazing label that’s constantly finding new and amazing things all over the world to share with movie maniacs like us.

This release has everything you want and more, including a 1080p presentation taken from a 2K scan of the original camera negative, so it looks way better than you’d ever dreamed it could. Seriously, the care given to this print is astounding.

There are also interviews with the director, his assistant director and avant garde film-maker Roland Lethem, as well as audio commentary by author Troy Howarth, original trailers, TV spots and Mondo Macabro previews that always make me want to purchase more from this great company.