7/1/2007

Looks like “the Wolf Man” was a (sigh- here it comes) howling success last night! I’m surprised by how many people have never seen that original film. As I mentioned on the show, it’s also very surprising that there are NO facial transformations of Larry Talbot to werewolf. There is the transformation at the end, showing the Wolf Man’s face returning to normal Larry- but, every time he turns into a wolf man in this movie, all you see is his feet getting hairy and turning paw-like. In just about every other movie the Wolf Man is in, you get the facial change from man to wolf. Maybe they wanted the one big visual transformation to be the concluding one, and that’s why they held off in this film. The changes were never easy to do- you have Lon Chaney Jr. having to stay as still as possible- while the make-up changes are made in stages, shot by shot, with an average of about 17 stages in most of his man to wolf transformations. Things were much simpler in one scene of the 1935 feature “Werewolf of London”- where Henry Hull is walking, and as he passes several pillars that obscure the audience’s view of him, he emerges with a little more of the wolf make-up on! Though I like that film, I think “Wolf Man” is a much better film, though…

Will you be seeing more of Lon Chaney Jr. as Larry Talbot on Svengoolie? You bet! Our furry friend will be along for the ride in “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein”- not to mention when Wolfie meets the big green guy for himself in “Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man!” Larry also appears, along with Dracula, and the undying monster, in “House of Frankenstein.” We’ll be showing every one of those films between now and the end of this year- not to mention giving an “encore performance” of “House of Dracula”, with Mr. Talbot as one of the featured residents!

You might recall one of our other werewolf movies- called, amazingly, “Werewolf”! We ran it a while back- it was a newer (and, dare I say, cheaper) film- this 1996 howler (oops! I did it again!) also known as “Arizona Werewolf”- features archeologists finding the skeleton of a werewolf- and , when one of their excavators cuts himself on the skeleton- he too becomes a wolf man! A mad doctor type starts trying to get other people similarly “infected”- and more werewolves appear.

It’s really not as good as it sounds… let’s stick with Larry Talbot for all our lycanthropic needs!