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.