Despite the low quality and the overwhelming schlock of Naschy’s films, it’s almost a miracle that he even made them in the first place. For starters, Naschy, who was born in 1934, grew up during the Spanish Civil War - a bloody horror show that was worse than anything he ever did on screen. According to most historical statistics, Naschy came out of the womb with a less than stellar chance of surviving until adulthood.
As a young man, Naschy tried his hand at most things. A lifelong horror enthusiast (a condition that he blamed on his viewing of “Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man” at a tender age), Naschy found his earliest creative outlets as a comic book artist and as an author of pulp westerns under the pen name of Jack Mills. Neither activity gained much traction, so Naschy made the economically unstable decision to pursue acting.
On paper, working in the Spanish film industry of the 1960s and 1970s sounds even more ludicrous than the general fable of moving out to Hollywood in order to get the treasured “big break.” Spain was still a dictatorship after all, and Generalísimo Francisco Franco - El Caudillo to most - was Europe’s arch social conservative and a big fan of censorship. Still, money trumps ideology, and in the case of Francisco’s Spain, the growth of an active and a relatively wealthy middle class in the mid 1960s meant that the previous era of draconian measures was bound to ease up. That’s exactly what happened, and by 1968, Spanish filmmakers such as Naschy and his friend Amando de Ossorio were scrambling to make scintillating thrillers and ghoulish extravaganzas with plenty of blood, breasts, and bad taste.
Naschy’s first foray into this world was 1968’s “La Marca del Hombre Lobo” (“Mark of the Wolfman”). Since the film was financed by German investors, Naschy decided to make things a little more Central European, and thus Jacinto Molina became “Paul Naschy” and the film’s setting was placed somewhere in a composite Europa - a land near the Danube were German is the “lingua franca.”
While the cult of cinephiles has been kind to the man who played a werewolf more times than anybody else, history has not. Despite making twelve films featuring Daninsky as the lead protagonist, not all are still in existence today. “Las Noches del Hombre Lobo” (“Nights of the Wolf Man”), the second in the series, is a lost film, while many of the subsequent pictures remain either hard to find or only available in sub-par or otherwise grainy copies. “La Noche de Walpurgis” is no different, and this film (which is more commonly called “The Werewolf vs. The Vampire Woman”), is a staple of the cheap horror DVD box set.
“The Werewolf vs. The Vampire Woman” opens with two men arguing about werewolves and superstition. There have been recent killings in the area, and the locals believe that the dead man in the morgue was actually a werewolf when he was alive. The coroner, a man named Dr. Hartwig (played by Julio Peña), doesn’t believe the hullabaloo about lycanthropes, but Müller (played by Barta Barri), his assistant, isn’t so skeptical.
Even before the postmortem inspection begins, Müller notices a pentagonal scar on the corpse of Daninsky - the man the locals believe to be a werewolf. Inside of the scar are two round holes that were made by silver bullets. Müller calls this “the mark of the werewolf,” and this scene highlights something very important about Naschy’s career. Naschy, who in many ways never stopped being the same little kid who loved “Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man,” more or less remade the classic Universal films from the 1930s, and “The Werewolf vs. The Vampire Woman” owes a lot of its plot to not only 1941’s “The Wolf Man,” but also to all the black and white vampire films that were so popular before World War II. The then burgeoning interest in Satanism also plays a major role in “The Werewolf vs. The Vampire Woman,” but more on that later.
In order to prove that Daninsky was just a man, Dr. Hartwig begins his examination by first removing the silver bullets from Daninsky’s chest. This decision just so happens to coincide with a full moon, and as a result Daninsky awakens as a hirsute and hungry beast in front of the terrified Dr. Hartwig and Müller. Not satisfied with the blood of two older gents, the newly revived werewolf quickly finds a pretty girl to maul in the forest, and before he kills her, Daninsky makes sure to rip off her clothes so the audience can get a glimpse at her beautiful bosom.
Within five minutes, “The Werewolf vs. The Vampire Woman” is exposed as a cheap and terribly made production. Although the Argentine director León Klimovsky was one of Naschy’s favorite colleagues, he still had a bad habit of rushing things and moving on even after clearly poor takes. As a result, “The Werewolf vs. The Vampire Woman” is marred by poor lighting (the girl in the forest is killed in almost utter darkness), clunky transitions, and artistic touches that walk the line between acceptable and downright stupid.
Of course, Naschy’s writing is partially to blame too. Throughout the Waldemar Daninsky series, continuity is rarely kept, and even though Daninsky’s demise at the end of “La Furia del Hombre Lobo” (“The Fury of the Wolf Man”) is maintained in the beginning of “The Werewolf vs. The Vampire Woman,” the origins of his curse is not the same between the two films. In fact, Daninsky’s history is all over the place in the series, and each film offers a different explanation for why the Polish nobleman has to bark at the moon on certain occasions.
In “The Werewolf vs. The Vampire Woman,” Daninsky is joined by another monstrosity - Countess Wandessa de Nadsady (played by the American actress Patty Shepard), a Hungarian countess from the 11th century (although her gravestone gives dates from the 15th century) who did more than just a little dabbling in the dark arts of witchcraft and devil worship. Sheppard was supposed to be the next Barbara Steele, the British actress who is best known for playing a similar role in Mario Bava’s “Black Sunday.” Sheppard plays the Countess, who is clearly just Elizabeth Bathory with a different name, with all the serious intensity of a rising star, but unfortunately her name faded into the background after interest in the Spanish horror explosion died off in the mid 1970s.
During their search, Elvira and Genevieve run into Daninsky, a man who lives alone near a set of ruins. Over dinner, Daninsky tells the pair that he is writing a historical study of the Gothic churches in the era, and as such he is capable of locating where the vampire Countess rests. While at the ruined chapel where the Countess is buried, Elvira is accosted by a hooded skeleton who runs in slow motion. A year before de Ossorio’s “Tombs of the Blind Dead” was released, “The Werewolf vs. The Vampire Woman” made good mileage out of the whole undead monk routine.
After both removing the silver dagger that originally killed the Countess and bleeding all over her corpse due to an accidental cut, Genevieve unintentionally awakens the vampire woman. From here, the Countess pursues the two girls while Daninsky, playing the role of the savior monster, tries to protect Elvira - his new love. The Countess successfully turns Genevieve and the two soon fall to killing the locals in super slow motion. No worries: in the end, the werewolf Daninsky kills the Countess with a bear hug and the vampire witch turns into maggot syrup not long before the film fades to black. Finally, in order to set her lover free, Elvira completes the monster holocaust by plunging the silver and cross-shaped dagger into Daninsky, thus killing both the man and the wolf man.
Despite its numerous deficiencies, “The Werewolf vs. The Vampire Woman” is widely seen as the film that finally jumpstarted the nascent Spanish horror movement. Given that most of the Spanish horror films from the early 1970s were better known for their cheap quality and their exploitation of everything puerile, then “The Werewolf vs. The Vampire Woman” begins to look less like a precursor to something better and more like a fitting start. Far from a good film, “The Werewolf vs. The Vampire Woman” is merely a crude bit of celluloid, but of course that’s the type of stuff that doomsters like.
Words: Benjamin Welton