Friday, February 5, 2010

LA MARCA DEL HOMBRE-LOBO - Ángel Arteaga - "The Vampire Of Dr. Dracula" (1968)

What the Hell? A movie called "Frankenstein's Bloody Terror" but it's really about werewolves and vampires?? I just think that writer and star, the late Paul Naschy, just liked to try and confuse the viewer, so that when you think, what the F is going on, you're not surprised that, you don't know, but also that maybe you don't even possibly care! Sweet concept! And when I found out there were alternate titles "The Vampire Of Dr. Dracula" or "The Wolfman Of Count Dracula," it cracked me up!! If not Paul, somebody was working it!!!

The art designer for the American version of this film was Creepy/Eerie comics artiste supremo Gray Morrow in a rare film outing!

Here's a damn fine reason for paying more attention to the credits; these two gents are the fathers of the two respective main players, besides Paul Naschy, of course, and even with the IMDB's help, I don't know who the heck they are, but let's have a bloody toast anyway!! To The Kids!!!!

Boy Howdy! Here's a mouthful for you, Dyanik Zurakowska as Countess Janice von Aarenberg and Manuel Manzaneque as Rudolph Weissmann! With names like that, they just might deserve what's going to happen to them, in fact, I'll admit it, they do deserve it!!

Enter our hero, Paul Naschy, as the venerable sleazeball Count Waldemar Daninsky! The music at the party by composer Ángel Arteaga is like weirdsville!!

Janice, here's the wine you wanted! Waldemar has cut in and Rudy is essentially cut out of the picture!

Here are the Happy Dads again, this time with a vintage Volkswagen. They have an inkling, but are pretty much in the dark as to how Waldemar is slowly replacing Rudy in Janice's life.

Classic picture of Paul Naschy. As you probably know, Paul just passed away last November, after having a career than included at least 95 films, most of them horror roles, and a lot of them pretty damn strange!

Now here's a woman after your heart, Nascha the Gypsy tramp, played by Rosanna Yanni, who the last time we saw her, was hanging out with Janine Reynaud in the Jess Franco flick, "Küß Mich, Monster!" In the top photo, she's helping push the wagon out of the mud, now that's my kind of gal!!

Here's a great lobby card featuring Rosanna!!

But I didn't say that Nascha was smart, her boyfriend Gyogyo and her unleash the Devil all in the name of getting drunk and having fun!! Yeehah!!! You ought to be more careful, kids!!

Yet another classic shot of Paul!

So the guys all get together, and instead of drinking beer and playing poker or watching football, they wear funny hats and then go hunting for werewolves!!! Paul doesn't wear a funny hat because he wrote the story, and it might mess up his hair!!

Because he wasn't wearing a hat, Waldemar got bit by the unleashed werewolf, and the results are predictable!

Paul Naschy always seems to really throw himself into his roles, and I wouldn't be the least surprised if some of the actors actually got hurt when he goes on one of his rampages! He's a wild man, literally!!!

Because Janice loves Waldemar, and Rudy loves Janice, he is willing to try and help her get Waldemar some help, and so they get ahold of some specialists in the field of helping werewolves!!

So now we're introduced to Julián Ugarte as Dr. Janos Mikhelov, and his spouse Aurora de Alba as Wandessa Mikhelov, who don't look the least bit freakin' suspicious!!

Aurora was in a couple of Zombie flicks too, and Julián has been in some interesting titled flicks like "The Vampire's Niece," "Blood Pie" and "They're Coming To Get You!"

Needless to say, they might be specialists in their field, but they're not much help!!

Unless you consider turning the people who were calling out for help into vampires!!

The Mikhelov's have taken over the whole movie now, and Waldemar, even though he's a werewolf, is the only one who can help! He's the hapless victim, and the hopeless killer, and as it turns out, he's going to have to be the hero too! But once again, what do you expect?? He wrote this confounded story!!

I've taken all I can, and I can't takes no more!!

Rudy, Janice, and their helpless fathers get one last shot!!!

Vampire bastard Dr. Janos tries to take off with Janice one last time!!

Waldemar finally breaks out, and in one last final triumph, kicks vampire ass all over the place!!

Don't forget to take a peek at the new link on the sidebar to "The House Of Black Wax" if you're interested in more weirdness!

3 comments:

  1. WOOLFSTEIN..yes WOOLFSTEIN!..lol.
    THis used to get alot of airplay on Sci-Fi theatre,along with the "blood Island" films in the early 70s..the dvds a little better than what I'd normally see on those high school Sat nights..which was NOTHING!

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  2. actually, you can blame Sam Sherman of Independent-International for the misleading title, he had already promised a Frankenstein film to his distributors while Al Adamson was making what eventually turned out to be "Dracula vs. Frankenstein", at that point however Al's film did not feature Frankenstein OR Dracula, just Lon Chaney & J. Carrol Naish futzing around, so to buy time he bought up the rights to Naschy's film and retitled it to include the name Frankenstein, and that goofy justification for it in the prologue was also cooked by Sherman. having said all that(with one long run-on sentence)Frankenstein's Bloody Terror is awesome and just unique in spite of the fact it's just good ol' vampires and werewolves again...

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  3. You took the words right out of my mouth!! I also read that Lon Chaney Jr. was supposed to star in this film too, but backed out, and Paul was stuck with doing the role himself!

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