Werewolf of London (Stuart Walker, 1935)

The first Hollywood werewolf movie, Werewolf of London is somewhat overlooked in favor of 1941's The Wolf Man, but it's a damn good movie in its own right and a surprisingly funny and modern-feeling one. If lead actor Henry Hull is a bit duller than the originally cast Boris Karloff (who decided to do Bride of Frankenstein instead), he's merely the center for a great cast of character actors to react to, and he makes a pretty good werewolf.

Werewolf of London opens in Tibet (giving the filmmakers an excuse to squeeze in a little anti-Asian racism, a Hollywood epidemic in the 1930s; at least it's relatively mild here with a few jokes about superstition and a little too much effusive excitement at our white characters encountering another white character), with famous botanist Wilfred Glendon (Hull) and his assistant on an expedition to acquire a rare flower called a mariphasa that exists only in Tibet and blooms under moonlight. Dr. Glendon finds his mariphasa on a Tibetan mountain range, but he's also bitten by a werewolf in the process. Glendon never gets a good look at the werewolf, so he assumes he was bitten by a regular old wolf of the non-were variety.

Back in London, Glendon is so wrapped up in his mariphasa experiments that he ignores his delightful, attractive wife Lisa (Valerie Hobson, who, unlike Karloff, managed to appear in this movie and Bride of Frankenstein). Lisa ends up spending much of her time with an old flame, Paul (Lester Matthews), who is visiting his native London on a vacation from his current home in California. Glendon is sometimes irritated by and jealous of his wife's ex, but he's so consumed by botany that he frequently cancels plans to join them.

Side note: Glendon's lab pushes this film toward science fiction. Not only does he have a large apparatus that supplies artificial moonlight, he also has your standard array of weird bubbling liquids in tubes and your non-standard Hi-Def TV security system that broadcasts the front door of his home directly to his lab. It's not even mentioned that a freakin' botanist invented a television/security camera hybrid in 1935.

Another famous botanist, Dr. Yogami (Warner Oland, in a role originally planned for Bela Lugosi), shows up in olde London towne with a strange request of Glendon. Yogami also tried to bring a mariphasa back from Tibet on an expedition that coincidentally coincided with Glendon's, but his plants died on the trip home. He wants two flowers from Glendon's plant because these flowers work as an antidote to werewolfery, and he knows two werewolves. Glendon doesn't take him seriously, but later that night, during the full moon, Glendon's hand wolfs out. He pokes it with the flower, and it de-wolf-ifies back into human hand form. Oh shiitttt!!

Glendon proceeds to wolf it up and wolf it down all over London town during the next several full moons while also trying to control his wolfly urges and keep Lisa out of danger. Meanwhile, the cast of characters surrounding the Glendons grows to include Lisa's aunt, Miss Ettie (Spring Byington), a society woman/goofball who refers to Dr. Yogami as "Dr. Yokohama," says the singer at one of her many soirees is singing a Botticelli, and likes to party but can't hold her liquor, and a pair of elderly alcoholic landlords, Mrs. Moncaster (Zeffie Tilbury) and the wonderfully named Mrs. Whack (Ethel Griffies), who really should have their own movie.

Special effects makeup artist Jack Pierce also designed Lon Chaney Jr.'s makeup for the iconic 1941 Wolf Man, and the werewolf makeup in this film would have more closely resembled that film's look but for a dispute with Hull. The actor complained that Pierce's designs were too elaborate and would have obscured too much of his face. Unlike many other werewolf films, the story of Werewolf of London required the other characters to recognize the man inside the wolf, or at least get an inkling of recognition. Hull and Pierce couldn't agree, so producer and studio head Carl Laemmle broke the stalemate by siding with Hull. A less charitable to Hull version of events has it that the actor just didn't want to sit in the makeup chair for hours and/or that he was too vain to let his face be completely obscured. Whatever the facts, the werewolf makeup is still pretty cool, even in scaled-down mode.

Director Stuart Walker has a natural, graceful classic Hollywood style that suits the material well, and the comedic moments complement the horror instead of undercutting it. Surprisingly, his forays into the genre were extremely rare. Besides Werewolf of London, his only horror-adjacent film is the dark psychological thriller Mystery of Edwin Drood. Walker specialized in musicals, comedies, romances, and melodramas. His directorial career lasted a brief four years, though in the classic Hollywood workaholic era, he still managed to direct 12 films. Walker was a theater actor, director, and producer for many years before transitioning to film, first as a screenwriter, then as a director. He quit directing in 1936 to concentrate on producing. He produced most of the Bulldog Drummond franchise and several other films before dying of a heart attack in 1941 at the age of 53.

Werewolf of London is a sophisticated, entertaining, and well-written piece of '30s horror, with developed, fleshed-out characters and a great sense of humor. As a bonus, I just finished watching Shudder's excellent documentary mini-series Queer for Fear, which made me look for gay subtext in this film much more than I would have done had I seen it last month. Werewolf stories tend to work well as metaphors for closeted homosexuality, and Werewolf of London is no exception. Looking at it through that point of view adds another layer to an already fascinating film, and the tug of war between repression and transgression is part of what makes horror such an endlessly fascinating genre.

Combat Shock (Buddy Giovinazzo, 1984)

To be overly reductive, Combat Shock is Taxi Driver meets Eraserhead meets Suicide's "Frankie Teardrop" on a Troma budget (Troma distributed the film but this is not a "Troma" film in sensibility), which is part of why I like it so much and part of why it's not something I recommend to casual acquaintances. It's a dirty, greasy, grimy, depressed bad trip shot in the butt-ugliest corners of early '80s Staten Island (possibly the least appealing locations ever captured on film), but writer/director/producer Buddy Giovinazzo has a strong visual point of view and knows how to execute it within his tiny budget, his brother Rick Giovinazzo, the star and composer of the score, intensely commits to the leading role while his music and surrealist nightmare electronic sound effects add so much to the film's atmosphere, and the vein of absurdist humor flowing through all but the darkest moments keeps the whole thing from being a depressing bummer.

Buddy G's first feature after several short films, Combat Shock is about Frankie Dunlan (Rick G), a Vietnam vet and POW with severe untreated PTSD (the film's first twenty minutes are a dreamlike version of his Vietnam experience) who has been out of work for four months. He has a pregnant wife who is sick of his shit, a mutant baby who makes electronic mewling sounds, a gambling debt past due with three local goons ready to collect on it, a down-and-out junkie friend who can't find a fix, a broken toilet, and a fridge that houses a single carton of expired milk. Frankie needs some money, and he needs it fast.

Frankie spends the day wandering the mostly abandoned wasteland of Combat Shock's version of Staten Island, the only New York City borough that voted for Trump, home to the city's garbage dumps, police officers, gangsters, and general meatheads who don't want anything to do with the rest of the city (a secession movement is popular locally) 

That's only part of the story, of course. The arts community has been growing in Staten Island as creative types get priced out of the other boroughs, and there are plenty of visually appealing spots, museums, historic homes, etc. Combat Shock is not about that Staten Island. Giovinazzo found the ugliest, most beat down, least populated parts of the borough and set Frankie's life there. This is not 42nd street neon sleaze or mean streets grit or any other popular New York b-movie setting. This is pure dank outskirts-of-town ugliness.

A landscape of near-dilapidated apartments, train tracks, abandoned storefronts, empty warehouses, trash, dust, dirt, and the undersides of bridges with the only people a handful of junkies, crooks, sex workers, pimps, and victims, the world of Combat Shock is hopeless and dreary but also a little comical in the way no-hope can be oddly funny. 

Frankie travels through the hellscape, having flashbacks to 'Nam, talking to a child forced into prostitution, taking a beating from the goons he owes money to, unsuccessfully attempting to talk his junkie friend out of robbing a woman (another junkie is played by one of my favorite comedians, Eddie Pepitone, in his first film role), and standing in line at the unemployment office.

Both the line and the office itself are great examples of the film's oddball sense of humor. The unemployment worker Frankie talks to (who, of course, has no work for him) has an office plastered with an odd assortment of posters, postcards, maps, and film stills, including a young Ted Kennedy, Frank Zappa sitting on a toilet, Dawn of the Dead, Klaatu from The Day the Earth Stood Still, and a swirling vortex, among hundreds of others. At some point, a longhaired stoner comes in and accuses the worker of using his Veg-O-Matic. This is the sensibility mainstream critics missed when they panned the film for taking itself too seriously.

After Frankie leaves the unemployment office, some really bad shit goes down, sending him into a downward spiral that is both disturbing and darkly funny. Giovinazzo, particularly in this final third, captures several memorable images and manages to wrangle his combination of social realism, exaggerated dark comedy, Vietnam movie, avant-garde experiment, grindhouse b-movie, and horror into a unified tone. Even on a second viewing, it retained its weird power.

Buddy Giovinazzo's next project after Combat Shock, a sequel to William Lustig's Maniac, fell apart after star and writer Joe Spinell died shortly after filming started, but he's managed to direct a handful of independent movies over the years, write a novel (Life Is Hot in Cracktown, which he also adapted into a film), teach filmmaking at NYU and the New York School of Visual Arts, and work extensively in German television. His most recent directorial credits include four episodes of the CW sci-fi series Pandora. Rick Giovinazzo never acted again after Combat Shock, but he's since become one of the most in-demand orchestrators in the movie business, arranging the scores for hundreds of big-budget Hollywood movies, and he's continued to compose the scores for most of his brother's films and a few of his television episodes.