Rating: /5
Hoop-Tober | 15/31 | Terence Fisher 5/5
In 18th-century Spain, a jailed beggar rapes a mute servant and dies. The servant escapes to the forest, where Don Alfredo Corledo and his housekeeper Teresa care for her. The unnamed servant dies giving birth to a child on Christmas Day, whom Alfredo and Teresa raise, naming him Leon. To be born on Christmas Day is considered “unlucky.” So, Leon learns that an evil spirit is attached to him at birth, transforming him into a werewolf.
Oliver Reed was born to play a werewolf, and Reed does a swell job here. This movie was his first starring role, and he gives it all the sweat and desperation it needs. I like the transformation! Oliver Reed, mid-shift, has the panged “looked what you made me do” grimace down.
Man, I don’t know about this one. It feels like Hammer is trying to elevate its style, but it lives in some middle ground where I can appreciate pieces but find the whole pretty uninteresting. It spends half its runtime giving us the werewolf’s origin story, complete with Chekov’s silver-crucifix-smelted-into-a-bullet-for-emergencies-only.
At the same time, I can dig how the movie attempts to create a rounded character with Leon — something every other werewolf movie avoids except maybe An American Werewolf in London. Also, whether it intends it or not (in the 60s, almost certainly not), it acts as a tremendous STD metaphor.
Hammer traded their signature Gothic dread for full-blown tragedy — a man cursed at birth to hurt the ones he loves and dies. Hammer never returned to the werewolf. Maybe the filmmakers said everything they could on the subject. Perhaps they knew it didn’t work.
The more I think about the movie, the more I like it. But I’ll withhold a star rating until I give it more thought.