A Halloween Tale from the 3rd Dimension Part II

My review of Earl Owensby’s Tales of the Third Dimension continues...

WARNING there may be spoilers!

TALES OF THE THIRD DIMENSION: YOUNG BLOOD

The first installment of Tales of the Third Dimension is written and directed by EO Studios alumni Thom McIntyre. McIntyre penned the inaugural EO Studios stereoscopic projects; Rottweiler: Dogs of Hell (1982), Hit the Road Running (1983) and Hot Heir (1984) as well as a number of early films for Owensby including Seabo (1978) and Living Legend: The King of Rock and Roll (1980) --a disguised Elvis Presley biopic, which starred Owensby as the King renamed Eli Caulfield, with songs by Roy Orbison and Ginger Alden (Presley’s real life fiancée at the time of his death).

Does this couple remind you of someone... undead?

With “Young Blood” McIntyre draws upon the classic monster films of the sixties and seventies as inspiration. Two social workers, Dudley and Ms. Marquette make a mysterious late night house call to the eerie Victorian Manor, in order to facilitate an adoption for its residents, an enigmatic Count and Countess. Although they already have a small salo-faced brood of their own they wish to add to their family. Dudley has been weary of the Count from first meeting (perhaps it’s his long black cape or Transylvanian accent), yet he consents to the adoption request due in no small part to the urgings of Ms. Markette (seemingly mesmorized by the count). A mute boy is brought to the new parents, described as a problem child with no explanation given. At this point it becomes clear that the couple are indeed vampires as the Count drains the blood from Ms. Markette. The problem child then turns out the window to face the full moon and begins a lycanthropic transformation. Once in wolf form he attacks and kills the vampires. The next morning Dudley returns to collect the boy, who it is revealed is Dudley’s son.

The Children of the Night. What music they make.

And that’s it. A story that ends when it really should have just began. “Young Blood” is the weakest of the three tales contained in Tales of the Third Dimension. This can be blamed on first time director Thom McIntyre, he wrote the script after all. His direction is adequate, he even manages to hurl a few candles at the camera to heighten the 3-D effect, but the script (built on such an absurd premise) is far to heavy handed for its subject matter and devoid of the humor it could have delivered. There are no attempts to create a sympathetic Count longing for a child since he is played and written as a caricature of Dracula, complete with an old world accent. Contrasted with the vaudevillian humour delivered by our host Igor from the introductory segment (also written by McIntyre), it is a real missed moment.

It would also seem that Mr. McIntyre had also seen a few Paul Naschy films, because where else in moviedom can a werewolf kill a vampire simply by scratching them.

Which brings me to the lycanthrope. The transformation of boy to wolf is achieved through a number of mismatched lap dissolves. My copy of the film is pan-and-scanned so I can only assume that we watch the boys hand change color and grow hairier. In fact we are never really treated to a good look of the werewolf at all. The bulk of the transformation occurs under a sheet and when it leaps out to attack the Count it is often obscured.

We never get a glimpse as good as this publicity still in the film.

So this first story is a bit of a dud. Don’t worry they do get better...

La marca del Hombre lobo

An opportunity to see La marca del Hombre lobo (1968) in 3-D is something akin to finding the Holy Grail for me.   It's a film that through repeat viewings never fails to fascinate me with its imagery. It is a lushly shot film, blending elements from its two major influences; the gothic high contrast black and white cinematography of Universal’s 30’s and 40's monster fare with the colourful eroticism of Hammer’s 50’s and 60’s counter parts.  Yet the film also manages to weave its early cinematic roots into a modern story of good and evil --in this case a present day setting in 1968.


Unfolding like so many of its sister lycanthrope films the plot of La marca del Hombre lobo reworks many elements from the film that heavily inspired its screenplay; Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman (1943).  Irme Wolfstein, a werewolf, is awaken by a pair of grave robbers, in this case a Gypsy couple when they remove the silver cross from his heart that has keep him dormant for almost 50 years. Free to hunt again, the beast kills the gypsies and a pair of local villagers,  Joining the hunt to find the creature film’s tragic hero, Waldermar Daninsky (Paul Naschy), is bitten by the man-wolf.  He immediately knows the implications of this beast’s bite; by the next full moon he too will become a wolf.  And like Lon Chaney Jr.’s Larry Talbot, Naschy’s Daninsky seeks outside help.  Rather than seeking out a member of the Frankenstein clan as Talbot had done, Daninsky he enlists the aid of Dr. Janos Mikhelov and his wife Wandessa. Not decedents of the doctor who had been treating Irme Wolfstein, they are in fact vampires, bent on controlling the beast Daninsky has become.

Gypsies release the first werewolf, Imre Wolfstein.

It’s a synopsis that that reads like a first-time screenplay written by a professional weightlifter in a month while living at his parents home and influenced by a matinee movie he had seen when he was eleven.  Which in fact aptly describes its screenwriter Paul Naschy at the time.  While the screenplay contains many leaps in logic (what can the vampires really gain by controlling the werewolf?), the film engages its audience, like so many euro-horror films do, by creating a fantastical dream world that is somewhere close to, but outside our own. The film also includes a bloody battle between werewolves and some gorgerous temptress women, significant pluses for the drive-in crowd of the seventies.  Yet within its his juvenile monster story, Naschy also manages to present a unique and complex love triangle, between Daninsky, his love interest Janice (Dyanik Zurakowska) and her childhood friend / potential fiancé, Rudolph (Manuel Manzaneque). Naschy’s screenplay introduces us unsympathetically to Daninsky.  He is presented as a playboy, flirting with Janice in front of Rudolph, and an outcast in the village who has returned only because he has squandered his inheritance. Janice falls for the playboy Daninsky, while Rudolph becomes indebted to him for saving his life from the werewolf Wolfstein during the hunt. Yet, from the moment he is bitten, Daninsky begins to evolve into the hero, a good man battling the beast inside him.  It is as if the dark side of Daninsky is channeled into his werewolf form, leaving his good characteristics to surface in his human form.

Janice (Dyanik Zurakowska) and Rudolph (Manuel Manzaneque) discuss the the fate of Daninsky 

While it’s Naschy’s ability to transform from gentleman beast to snarling hero that steals the show, credit needs to go to the film’s director, Enrique López Eguiluz, and cinematographer, Emilio Foriscot.  So in my next post it’s their contribution that I’d like to touch upon.

Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror

December 1, 2009 was a very sad day for me when I heard of the passing of Spanish horror icon Jocium Molina who many a horror fan will know better under his pseudonym Paul Naschy.

While no stranger to the lycanthrope Waldamar Daninsky, a character that Naschy is most closely associated with, I was just getting acquainted with the man and his body of work as I began my research for Depthsploitation.  I had begun reading his autobiography, Memoirs of a Wolfman, a few weeks earlier and had pitched La marca del Hombre lobo (1968) --his first wolfman film and shot in 3-D no less-- as a Classic Cut feature to Rue Morgue Magazine.  Paul Naschy was definitely on my mind at the time.

My Classic Cut was published in the March issue of Rue Morgue Magazine (#98), which featured an excellent tribute to Paul Naschy and his films.  Naschy fans should definitely track down a copy. Since the film is still fresh in my mind I though I’d take some time here on the blog to talk about it.  Consider it an addendum to the article.

  

As a 3-D film La marca del Hombre lobo is difficult to critique. While the original 1968 Spanish posters clearly declare the film to be en relieve (the Spanish equivalent of 3-D), in North America the film screened at most a handful of times, and in a much different edit to the prints we have now. 

The original Naschy film had been bought for North American distribution by producer Sam Sherman‘s company Independent-International Pictures, to replace the film Dracula vs. Frankenstein (1971), which had already been offered to theatre owners but was in a state of limbo (it’s negative was being held by a lab and didn’t look like it would ever get returned to Sherman and IIP).  Sherman needed a Frankenstein film so he re-titled La marca del Hombre lobo to Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror (1971) and added a voice-over prologue that declared the Frankenstein family had been inflicted with the werewolf’s curse and had changed it’s name to Wolfstein. It was stretch on Sherman's part to tie Naschy’s werewolf film to a Frankenstein monster flick. Even though the euro-horror film included vampires, there wasn’t a hint of a mad doctor creating monsters from human cadavers.  Sherman also lopped off about 11 minutes from the head of the film and made many minor changes throughout.  Despite its creative marketing, or perhaps due to it, the film began to do well on the drive-in / grindhouse circuit.

Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror was also promoted as being in 70mm, even though Sherman had been working off a 35mm U.K. version of the film that had been called Hell’s Creatures. He'd used  70mm Chill-o-rama to describe the film after he had heard that it was originally produced and shot as a Hi Fi Stereo 70 m/m production.  What Sherman didn’t realize at the time was that Hi Fi Stereo 70 m/m was a German company that specialized in 3-D production.  The film was not however a true 70mm film, but that it was shot with both stereo eye views (the left and the right) anamorphically squeezed onto the 70mm frame.  When Sherman found out that he could market a 3-D version of Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror he pulled the flat version film from release and immediately set upon producing a 3-D version of the film.  This is when the trouble began.

Very few theatres in North America could play a 3-D film in the side-by-side 70mm format thatLa marca del Hombre lobo had been shot in. The film would have to be converted to a format that could be shown and that was the over-and-under format, one that would see an explosion in the early 80’s.  The film was converted by Film Effects of Hollywood who later prepared prints for another Hi-Fi Stereo 70mm production Leibe en drei dimensionen (1973) a.k.a. Love in 3-D.  The master elements used to create the over-and-under version were of poor quality according to Film Effects --likely because they were working from a 70mm print  duplicated from a negative that was now over 3 years old.

Images from the original 1969 Hi-Fi Stereo 70mm print 
of La marca del Hombre lobo.  It shows how left and 

right eye images were placed in a side-by-side format.

These images can be viewed in 3-D using the cross-eyed method. 

Sherman ran into further problems during the English audio versioning of the film.  Working with the English dub and effects that he had created for the flat version of Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror, Sherman found that the audio no longer was in sync.  It’s his belief that the flat version of the film and the 3-D version of the film may have utilized different takes.  It’s also possible that a different camera was used to photograph the flat version.  If this is the case any flat version of the film would be a poor indication of any 3 dimensional screen piercing effects of general shot composition that may exist in the flat version, making an assessment of the film‘s 3-D quality a tenuous one.

Compounding IIP and Sherman’s problems further was a deal he had made with investors in the 3-D version of Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror.  In addition to providing funds to help create the over-under prints they were also to supply the projection lenses, which would be used in theatres to recombine the left and right eye images for audiences.  A lucrative investment for them if the film were to be a success since every theatre showing the film would need to have one. Alas, the lenses were made cheaply out of poured acrylic plastic which wreaked havoc on the quality of projection.  No matter how well La marca del Hombre lobo had been made, Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror’s 3-D was a mess.  After it’s première screening a reviewer referred to the film as being seen “through glasses darkly“.  The 3-D release of Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror was a bust and negative word of mouth quickly killed it.  The film wouldn’t be seen again until it appeared on television, slowly building a fan base and helping to turn Paul Nashy into an icon.

So that’s a bit of back-story.  In my next post I’ll take a look at the film itself.