Monday, March 14th, 2005

WEREWOLF IN LONDON (1935)

Tonight I had a FILMRADAR private screening at Mark Vieira’s studio in downtown LA. He has a ton of film prints so we took a vote on what to watch. We settled on WEREWOLF IN LONDON. Our main reason for doing was the fact that this film is so obscure. It never shows up on TCM and is not available on VHS or DVD. We all decided for that reason alone it was worth taking a look at…well that and the fact that the film’s advertising said “Beware the Stalking Being - Half-Human - Half-Beast!” You gotta love that advertising!


The plot is about a scientist who is on a botanical expedition and gets attacked by a wolf. He returns home to discover that he is now a werewolf who transforms nightly to kill the residents of London. He tries to cure himself with the aid of a rare Asian flower. With the whole mad scientist locked away kind of plot line, this film felt more like THE INVISIBLE MAN than the 1941 version of THE WOLFMAN. Jack Pierce (who created the make up for Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney Jr.) did the make up here. It looks fantastic!


The film itself is campy and is obviously a studio confection designed to sell popcorn and scare teenagers. That’s ok though. Someone once said to me, “Why bother saving some films…maybe some of them deserve to be lost.” I told them that was a really narrow and foolish way to approach it. Not every film is a masterpiece and many of them were never intended to be. That’s beside the point. Films are our modern day equivalent to ancient pieces of broken pottery thousands of years ago. Films take the temperature of our culture. They reflect how we dress, act, walk, talk, think, feel and love. They reflect our society, values and the core of our human emotions. ALL of it matters. Even campy werewolf movies matter.


Ok, I’ll jump off my soapbox now.