Curse of the Devil (Carlos Aured, 1973)

Curse of the Devil is the seventh Count Waldemar Daninsky werewolf movie, a Spanish film series known as the Hombre Lobo movies that began in the late 1960s and stretched into the early 2000s with writer/director/actor Paul Naschy playing Daninsky. Naschy often directed in addition to starring in the lead role, but, as is the case here, he sometimes turned over the directorial reins to another filmmaker. It's not necessary to see them in chronological order. They're self-contained. Each one is a reset of the origin story, with Daninsky being turned into a werewolf (or already being one, in some cases) for a slightly different reason and in a different way in each film. I strongly prefer this approach to sequels over the bloated worldbuilding nonsense of the modern age.

Like the last Daninsky movie I reviewed on this site, 1981's Night of the Werewolf (aka The Craving), Curse of the Devil has an early 1600s prologue involving Elizabeth Bathory, the Hungarian noblewoman who supposedly murdered hundreds of young girls and women and bathed in their blood. In both movies, we see the execution of the Satanic Bathory, her family, and her servants by her Christian political enemies. As she's burned alive, Bathory puts a curse on the family of her executioners. (The curse in this film is that once the first descendant of Bathory's killers spills the blood of a descendant of Bathory's, the killers' descendant and his subsequent relatives will endure nonstop misery on earth and then burn in hell.) In the later film, Daninsky is a contemporary of Bathory's who has already been turned into a werewolf by her via Satanic curse, and both Daninsky and Bathory are resurrected in the early '80s present by grave robbers disturbing their remains. This movie takes a different tack, with Daninsky a descendant of Bathory's killers who gets hit by the curse a few hundred years after the events in the prologue.

I appreciated the clunkiness of the horseback suit of armor battle in this film's opening scene, which likely gets closer to what this kind of thing would have actually looked like than the more graceful movements of Hollywood knights (not a reference to the Robert Wuhl teen party movie), but the actors struggling awkwardly under their heavy suits of armor are an indication that we are in the more rough-and-ready world of filmmaker Carlos Aured. I'm not saying Naschy is Max Ophuls, but he does have a more graceful and stylish approach than Aured does. Whatever Aured lacks in style, however, he makes up for in action, humor, and general '70s Euro-horror nuttiness.

In Curse of the Devil, Count Waldemar is a nobleman in a small village in the Carpathian mountains. He was raised by his castle's caretaker/housekeeper Malitza (Ana Farra) after his parents died when he was a child, but the overprotective Malitza is at least partially responsible for the Count still being a virgin. He's also related to the family that killed Bathory. Oh shiiiiiit! Bathory's descendants are gypsies who live in the nearby countryside. While out hunting a wolf with one of his servants, Waldemar accidentally shoots one of the gypsies. Oh shiiiiiiit! The curse is on! The surviving gypsies get together in their cave and summon a dark spirit (a guy in a black bodysuit and mask with a visible zipper on the back) who sexes up several of the sexiest gypsy women in order to choose the sexiest one to seduce Waldemar sexily before cursing him up.

The chosen gypsy woman, Ilona (Ines Morales), pretends to be unconscious on the road as Waldemar is taking his horse-drawn coach through the mountains at night to get to some kind of business deal. He "rescues" her and takes her back to his castle, much to the chagrin of Maritza, who is pissed as hell that this "evil woman" is enchanting her boy Waldemar. After devirginizing the Count, Ilona sneaks out of bed, holds up a wolf skull, drips her blood on it, and then bites Waldemar on the chest with the skull before running back to the forest, where she encounters an axe-wielding maniac who has escaped from prison and is hiding in the mountains. Oh shiiiiit! (There's a lot going on in this movie.) The gypsy blood wolf skull bite mark has turned Waldemar into a werewolf, doomed to carry on the curse for many more generations unless a pure-hearted woman in love with him kills his ass with a silver dagger. Oh shiiiiit! (I'll stop doing that now.)

The final piece of our story drops into place when a land surveyor from Budapest rents a country home from Waldemar for his year of work in the village. The surveyor, Laszlo Wilowa (Eduardo Calvo), has a blind wife, Irina (Pilar Vela), who was born in the area and mostly sits in a chair making dire pronouncements about the curse-filled Carpathians, and two lovely daughters, the graceful and composed Kinga (Fabiola Falcon) and the sexed-up and jealous rowdy teen Maria (Maritza Olivares). Kinga and Waldemar fall in love at first sight, and Maria falls in lust. Could Kinga stop the curse?

So, to briefly recap. We have Elizabeth Bathory, knights on horseback sword fighting, a mass execution, a curse, a hunting accident, a Gypsy cave orgy involving five sexy ladies and a guy in a body suit with no hole cut out for the genitalia, a 35-year-old virgin nobleman, the Carpathian mountains, a seduction, a bloody wolf skull werewolfening, a love triangle, an axe murderer, a land surveyor, and plenty of werewolf chaos. And we're only in the first half hour of the running time, give or take five minutes.

As I said earlier, Aured is not the most graceful stylist, but he gets results. If you like the classy-meets-trashy world of cheap '70s Euro-horror, you're probably going to enjoy this, but keep in mind that I'm an easy mark when it comes to Carpathian-based entertainment. It occasionally drags, but for the most part, this is a wild, goofy, fun time at the movies, and the story is packed to the gills with my kind of nonsense.

Unfortunately, Aured and Naschy had a falling out after this film, though Naschy said he never understood why. He's speculated that he may have been too controlling on the set and stepped on Aured's toes, but Aured never gave him a reason for icing him out of his life for years afterward. The two men finally reconciled shortly before Aured's death in 2007.

As with most international and/or grindhouse/drive-in films of the era, Curse of the Devil was released under many other titles, some of them wildly inexplicable. I'm going to leave you with some of my favorites: The Return of Walpurgis, The Black Harvest of Countess Dracula, The Real History of the Werewolf, The Night of the Killer, The Mark of Dracula, The Death Claws of the Cruel Wolves.

Daddy's Boys (Joseph Minion, 1988)

That's right. I'm following my review of Mummy's Boys with a review of a movie called Daddy's Boys. Stay tuned for my review of Uncle's Boys in a few weeks. (I won't be doing this.) As longtime readers of this blog (all five of you) know, I started this site to review every movie in Fangoria's 101 Best Horror Movies You've Never Seen book. When I finished that, a reader suggested I tackle Rue Morgue magazine's similar list of overlooked horror. That task taken on and completed, I upped the ante by attempting to watch and review every movie in both volumes of  The Official Splatter Movie Guide and The Overlook Encyclopedia of Horror, though I will have to seriously pick up the pace after I retire (hopefully in a decade) to get through it all before I die. I alternate movies from each of the three books, so it's a weird and wild coincidence that Daddy's Boys directly follows Mummy's Boys.

In another weird coincidence, the star and screenwriter of Daddy's Boys, Daryl Haney, also wrote the screenplay for the movie I reviewed before Mummy's Boys, a post-apocalyptic sci-fi thriller called Crime Zone. Daddy's Boys is pretty much the same movie as Crime Zone, with the post-apocalyptic urban future swapped for Depression-era rural California. Both movies were made in 1988 and feature average Joes with checkered pasts trapped in criminal groups they've outgrown. The characters in both criminal groups are broadly drawn caricatures. Both male leads fall in love with sex workers. Both couples go on the run and resort to robbery to survive, which makes them local folk heroes in the process. Both movies also have surprisingly downbeat endings for the late '80s, and both were produced by Roger Corman.

Like Crime Zone, Daddy's Boys is not particularly great yet is strangely watchable, and it's injected with enough weirdness to keep it intermittently interesting. Oddly, Daddy's Boys is a rare directorial effort from cult screenwriter Joseph Minion, who I wish had also written this movie. Minion wrote the screenplays for Martin Scorsese's After Hours, Nicolas Cage tour-de-force Vampire's Kiss, 10-year-old-boy-steals-a-car road movie Motorama (aired often on Bravo in the mid-'90s, back when it was an arts and indie film channel), and episodes of Amazing Stories and Tales from the Crypt. His only other feature directing credit is 1999's obscure Trafficking, a shot-on-16-mm Los Angeles private eye movie he also wrote that sounds pretty fascinating. Minion, in a 1998 Indiewire article, called Daddy's Boys "a piece of shit, but I have a fond spot in my heart for it." That sounds about right.

Daddy (veteran character actor Raymond J. Barry) was a corn farmer in Oklahoma until the Depression and his wife's death turned him into a sociopathic bank robber and killer with a religious bent and a hatred for the rich (I'm with him on that last one). Daddy and his three sons travel the country, robbing rural banks, camping in the woods or staying in motels when they have the bread. The oldest son Jimmy (screenwriter Daryl Haney) is tiring of the life, sick of being under Daddy's thumb and having to spend time with his two idiot brothers, the hulking Otis (Christian Clemenson) and the perma-bedhead doofus Hawk (Dan Shor, better enjoyed in Strange Behavior and as Billy the Kid in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure) (another Bill & Ted alum, Robert V. Barron aka Abraham Lincoln, plays evil banker Axelrod; party on, dudes). Otis and Hawk are ridiculously broad characters. I wish the movie had made them menacing instead of stupid.

When Jimmy finally gets the chance to escape his family, he jumps on it, though it's unfortunately after Daddy makes all four of them get a tattoo of a corn cob on their arms. He ends up at the roadside whorehouse of Madame Wang (Ellen Gerstein), a white woman pretending to be Chinese for some reason even though everyone can see through it. Jimmy spends some time with sex worker Christie (Laura Burkett). After making a poor first impression, he eventually wins her over, and the two fall in love and plot their escape. The lovers go on the run, robbing banks under the name Adam and Eve and developing a regional celebrity. Daddy and his other boys hear the news and decide it's time to get Jimmy back in the fold. Daddy also has a dark and demented plan to get a home of the family's own and a new wife that can give him more children. I think you can see where this is going. 

Though the movie is no great shakes and Minion's direction is mostly perfunctory, the action is paced well and there are quite a few enjoyably oddball lines of dialogue that I'm guessing Minion may have punched up, based on the more standard-issue dialogue from Crime Zone. Even a hit-and-miss B-movie like this one has a lot more personality and flavor than the majority of A-movies.

Based on my image search, I'm starting to think Daddy's Boys is either the most unpopular or the most obscure movie I've reviewed on this site. I couldn't find any film stills other than the title screen, and the only other photos I could scrounge up were some international VHS and laser disc covers, a promotional photo with two of the actors, and a German poster. It was also one of the hardest movies for me to track down. Videos were out of print, it wasn't streaming, it's not currently on YouTube (other than the trailer and the first five minutes), and the rare used VHS copies on Amazon and eBay were going for ridiculously high prices. A popular Australian short horror film and several gay porn movies using the same or a similar title also make searching more difficult than it should be. I ended up buying a DVD rip of the VHS from the same person I got Mummy's Boys from. They must think I'm a lunatic.