Image nicked from Tim Lucas’s excellent Video Watchblog entry on Night of the Werewolf.
It’s surely convenience, or just
coincidence-rather than any nods to quality or pent-up demand-that these are the first two Euro-horror titles to arrive in high definition on
Blu-ray Disc. This double-feature package from BCI and Deimos
entertainment pairs two films starring the well-loved (and prolific)
Spanish horror actor Paul Naschy. Vengeance of the Zombies (La
Rebelion de las Muertas, 1972) is a potboiler from cult director Leon
Klimovsky involving a charismatic Indian cult leader (Naschy), his
less-attractive brother (also Naschy), and a beautiful redhead (Romy)
from a cursed English family. And Night of the Werewolf (La Retorno
del Hombre Lobo, 1980) is a genre mash-up directed by Naschy
in which he stars as the wolfman Waldemar Daninsky and faces off against a
bevy of vampire women led by Elizabeth Bathory herself. (Scroll way down to read about some problems with these discs.)
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.)