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.
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.*
