Thursday

Last night's international October marathon movie was Curse of the Devil (1973),* also known as El Retorno de Walpurgis, starring Paul Naschy, a prolific star of Spanish creature features. Like any good Mediterranean gothic pop, the movie opens back in the middle ages when the clan Daninsky has grown tired of clan Bathory's satanic ways. In a fight so underwhelming they've slapped the credit sequence over it, Daninsky beheads Bathory, initiating a moral cleansing that doesn't end until the Satanic Germanic Catholic holiday of Walpurgisnacht, when the last of the Bathory women have been hanged or burned. Of course, one witch manages to curse the victorious family with a penultimate breath (ultimate breath? "Take me, Satan, take me"), dooming future Daninsky sons. Fast-forward to imperial Romania where the latest Daninsky boy Waldemar is hunting a wolf that looks like a German Shepard (and which is identified in the dubbing as a wolverine). After randomly selecting a silver bullet, he shoots--but the body that turns up in the underbrush is that of a man! He is upset; but the body's local gypsy kin are positively vengeful. Thus begins the modern instigation of the original witch's curse: the gypsies send a woman to seduce Waldemar and then stab him in the chest with the teeth of a magic wolf skull. The rest of the film follows the standard good-man-gone-tragic werewolf formula, complicated by a couple of cute Hungarian sisters and one psycho running around the woods with an axe. Authorities are quick to blame the resulting moonlit murders on the madman, but the villagers suspect folklore. Naschy makes an energetic monster due to his many years as a competitive weightlifter. Though much of this movie feels muted by the inadequate US drive-in print, its cleverness peeks through the murk. [Cavin]