The Witches Mountain / El monte de las brujas (1973)

Cover art by Justin Coffee

 “A woman will sometimes forgive the man who tries to seduce her, but never the man who misses an opportunity when offered.” – Charles Maurice de Talleyrand

I’m hoping that in the coming months and years, more and more people discover, and hopefully enjoy, the unfairly banned and relatively forgotten Spanish horror Raúl Artigot’s The Witches Mountain thanks to Mondo Macabro’s recent release of the film. Lured by its title and because Patty Shepard was in it, I first saw the film as a VHS rip on YouTube back around 2013 and was really floored by how atmospheric and beautifully haunting it was despite the low picture quality. I’m usually easy to please in this area, but every DVD-R and download of this film I came across was quite soft looking and really showed the film’s age. Anytime I thought to review it, I was discouraged, and mildly depressed, by how much the poor-quality screengrabs undersold the film, so I kept holding out for a decent release someday. Years went by, and I personally started to give up hope, so it was miraculous news for me when the HD upgrade of The Witches Mountain was finally announced. There was a significant delay after the Halloween presale, but I thought it was worth the wait.

Assignment Terror / Los monstruos del terror (1970)

Halloween always gets me in the mood for the classic Universal monsters, so I thought I would revisit a Spanish monster mash-up (done in the vein of Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman (1943) and House of Frankenstein (1944)) that I had not seen in over ten years.

Assignment Terror is one of the Paul Naschy films I revisited the least for some reason. Naschy wrote and starred in it, but at the same time I couldn’t help thinking it needed a little more Naschy. Paul Naschy’s scripts usually come off as real personal projects, but, even with the presence of the Universal monsters that inspired Naschy’s childhood love for horror, I didn’t quite feel that as much with Assignment Terror. But to be fair, it is quite early in Naschy’s filmography. Plus, I can see how Naschy might’ve thought it best to have his tragic lycanthrope character Waldemar Daninsky step aside a little to make room for the other classic monsters. In the end, it still ends up being Naschy’s show and what I think is an alright old-school monster movie that has got a few neat tricks up its sleeve. The whole thing is of course messy and flawed but also kind of whacky and fun.

The Werewolf Versus the Vampire Woman (1971)

Spanish filmmaker Paul Naschy, born Jacinto Molina, played the cursed Polish nobleman Waldemar Daninsky in twelve different movies. Thirteen, if you count the brief appearance in The Howl of the Devil (1987). A sort of missing addition, Nights of the Werewolf (1968), is alleged to be an uncompleted and lost film, unseen by anyone.

A lycanthrope, cursed to live forever with a regretful instinct to kill, the character of Waldemar Daninsky afforded Naschy plenty of opportunities to emulate, to an extent, and pay tribute to his childhood hero, Larry Talbot from Universal’s The Wolf Man (1941), while at the same time mark his werewolf with his own brand of personal characteristics. Naschy’s first encounter with the Wolf Man onscreen occurred while he, underage at the time, was allowed in to a theater, by an usher he personally knew, to see Lon Chaney Jr. and Bela Lugosi in Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man (1943), an experience that left the child Naschy awestruck, planting the seed for what would materialize in Naschy’s movies.*

A record setting champion weightlifter from the late ‘50s to the early ‘70s, an artist, a Western novelist, and a lover of movies, Naschy became interested in working as an art director in film.* Thanks to his father, Enrique Molina, Naschy got involved in filmmaking and eventually appeared in small bit parts, which include small uncredited roles in the peplum King of Kings and in the television show I Spy, where he met his longtime idol, Boris Karloff.*

In 1967 Naschy wrote the script for Mark of the Wolfman (1968), introducing his cursed Wolf Man character while also throwing a pair of vampires into the story. After enduring numerous rejections from producers, Paul’s script was eventually picked up by two filming companies, one in Germany and the other in Spain, interested in making his film.* The werewolf character in Mark of the Wolfman was originally a Spaniard, but the Spanish censors were not so keen on this, and so Paul, tweaking the script a bit, changed him into the Polish nobleman, Waldemar Daninsky.*