Vengeance of the Zombies (1972)/Night of the Werewolf (1980) [Blu-ray]

The films have a lot in common, starting with Naschy's position as tragic-romantic figure. In Zombies, he plays the gentle spiritual guru Krisna as well as the murderous Kantaka, with a (subtextual) vendetta against English colonialism--Romy falls in love with one Naschy while another one plots to kill her. (Naschy also plays the devil himself in a fantasy sequence.) In Werewolf, he's a ladies' man who's prone to lose control and go on violent rampages under the light of the full moon. Both films feature women in filmy nightgowns (and occasionally out of them), and both films use inappropriately jazzy lounge music on their soundtracks. That latter tactic can be highly disorienting to an audience accustomed to seeing gore punctuated by horror-movie stings rather than swinging drum patterns and horn charts, but it can also be surprisingly effective. If there's a better music cue in Euro-horror history than the syncopated percussion that plays in weird accompaniment as the first beaustiful, pale zombie rises from her grave in slo-mo in the pre-credits sequence of Zombies, I have yet to hear it.

Those are classic zombies, by the way, not Romero zombies. They're the product of old-school voodoo ritual rather than quasi-SF plot points, and while they don't look especially ferocious, they seem to get the job done. Vengeance of the Zombies is liberally spattered with thick stage blood and a variety of murders--strangling, bludgeoning, hanging, etc. (One poor chicken gets beheaded on camera.) Klimovsky cultivates the idea of cultish ritualism by showing his mysterious masked impresario preparing for each killing by pouring a flammable liquid over a wax figure and setting it afire. Those moments of creepiness aren't enough to overcome the film's general air of silliness, and after the entertaining opening (in the film's very first scene, a worried husband pleads with his wife, "Flora, we've been desecrating graves too long") Zombies descends into an undistinguished melange of cheap sets and clumsy direction. Naschy's satanic cameo, which brings some gusto to the proceedings, is way too short.

Production values and the overall level of craft are much higher in Return of the Werewolf. After a brief prologue, set in 16th-century Hungary, in which both Countess Elizabeth Bathory and her servant Waldimar Daninsky are sentenced to die ("I will return from the ashes," Bathory promises, "and I will turn your world into a hell of blood and death!"), the film flashes forward to modern times--a quartet of good-looking young people are lounging around poolside in swimsuits. The boys are putting the make on the girls, who await the return of weird colleague Erika from Germany, but are efficiently rebuffed: "Shut up, you idiots. We're scientists!" Turns out the trio are on an expedition to unearth the final resting place of Bathory and the werewolf. Grave robbers disturb Daninsky's slumber; he kills them and takes up residence in an old castle. Bathory rises from the grave and two out of the three scientist women become her servants. The third falls in love with the werewolf--apparently no longer under Bathory's spell--despite his frightening mood swings. There's a terrific moment where Naschy, in full howl-at-the-moon mode, really tears up the scenery, emoting up a storm to evoke the idea of the romantic heart buried beneath that beastly exterior. (I was slightly less impressed when I learned that this is the ninth time Naschy has played this character; you'd expect him to get good at it over that many years.) Low-tech makeup effects add to the fun--Naschy's werewolf transformation is achieved, classic Hollywood style, with the judicious application of spirit gum and phony whiskers, with optical dissolves creating the transition from one stage to the next.

Don't let me oversell it. Audiences looking for a conventional narrative will come away disappointed. The story is no more than serviceable; the film's impact will come if you look at it as a sort of garish poem, with its subjects sexual and romantic longing. But it's also fun. The level of imagination on display--and a healthy imagination on the viewer's part will help some of the tableaux here reach their full potential--is striking and occasionally moving, less slick and more human than the quick, cynical horror pictures that crowd multiplex screens these days. (Speaking of which, did Eli Roth steal an idea from that scene where Elizabeth Bathory is awakened by the blood splashing from the slashed throat of a nude woman hanging upside-down overhead?) It's no masterpiece, but it's more rewarding than much more conventionally competent multiplex offerings. Zombies: C; Werewolf: B-

HD Geek Talk
There's a line of thinking that older, low-budget films don't benefit as much from high-definition transfers as newer, expensive ones, but that's hogwash. Anyone with eyes who's ever compared a standard-definition video version of a film--yes, even old black-and-white and silent pictures--to its 16mm and 35mm counterparts will be able to quickly and easily tell the difference between a standard DVD and a competent high-definition transfer. I haven't see the original DVD versions of either of these movies, but I'm confident the Blu-ray Discs well exceed them in terms of visible detail and color rendition. There are a few problems, though. Most bothersome is the fact that Vengeance of the Zombies won't play correctly. It stutters, repeating a few frames in certain shots. Because this tends to happen only after cuts between shots, and usually in shots that involve a moving camera and/or some other drastic change in the image, I suspect the problem has to do with image encoding (during disc authoring) or decoding (on playback). I'd happily blame my PS3, but this is the only Blu-ray Disc I've played to date that gives me a lick of trouble, so I suspect the problem can be traced to compression and authoring.

A more basic problem with the Zombies transfer is that the image has been rendered at about 1.37:1, while it's clear from both the image compositions and the film's provenance that it was almost certainly meant to be exhibited at 1.66:1 or 1.85:1 and thus would have benefited from a widescreen transfer rather than this HD-unfriendly "full-frame" version. Finally, the black levels appeared to be way too high--and also dramatically crushed--in the film's opening scenes, continuing all the way through the background of the opening credits, which looks terrible. I was able to compensate for this somewhat by using my Sony XBR4's "black correction" function, which deepens the blacks, to compensate, but this is clearly an error in the transfer. The picture is almost completely free of dirt and scratches, which made me suspect over-zealous noise reduction--on closer examination, those suspicions were confirmed. The image doesn't exhibit the kind of over-the-top ghosting that I've seen in some standard-definition DVDs, but take a look at the establishing shots of London that immediately follow the opening titles. In the shot panning across the Thames River, advance frame by frame and check out the bird flying in the bottom-right-hand corner of the frame. It disappears intermittently, in time with the flapping of its wings, as the algorithms interpret its presence as noise in the frame.

Night of the Werewolf got the widescreen transfer it deserves, although it seems to suffer from a similar loss of fine detail in the image. But there's a problem with the frame cadence that creates a distracting herky-jerky effect that's especially evident when the camera is moving. It may be related to pulldown issues--the conversions involved in translating films shot at 24 frames a second to international video systems that run at 25 or 30 fps (and, presumably, back to Blu-ray, which supports 24p encoding and thus should make this a non-issue).  Again, it's possible--though I figure not likely--that this is just a problem with PS3 playback. Beyond that, I didn't notice any egregious problems. Given the attractive price and the lack of off-beat genre items available on Blu-ray, I'd rather have these transfers available than nothing at all. It's still frustrating, and for videophiles I'm sure the frame-dropping of Zombies and the juddery motion of Werewolf will be dealbreakers. Talk about horror stories!

(Thanks to Michael Mackenzie and brother, who clarified some of the authoring-and-compression issues in this Mobius thread. It's worth noting that some viewers with standalone Blu-ray players claim not to experience the stuttering and frame-cadence issues I describe above. However, out of a library of 25 Blu-ray Discs, plus a few Netflix rentals, this is the only title that my PS3 hasn't tackled like a champ. So caveat emptor/lector etc.)

Posted by Bryant Frazer on May 8, 2024 8:00 AM

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