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Curse Of The Devil
[Anchor Bay]
1973; color
Directed by Carlos Aured
Starring: Paul Naschy, Fabiola Falcón, Maritza Olivares, José Manuel Martín & Eduardo Calvo
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Curse Of The Devil is yet another installment of what seems like an endless reworking of the basic Paul Naschy as Waldemar Daninsky / the Werewolf saga, but with enough tweaks and twists to keep things at least a little bit different. Starting off in a mausoleum, we see a mother and her young son paying their respects to a coffin. (Or, rather, the person inside it.) The brief dialogue clues us in that mother and son are remembering their husband / father. Things then jump back to what looks like the 1500s or 1600s (based on the costumes), where we're treated to a good old fashioned witch burning with ancestral Irineus Daninsky (Naschy) as some sort of witchfinder. The object of his ire is none other than the legendary Countess Elizabeth Bathory. After Daninsky beheads her husband and wipes out their entire clan of devil worshippers, he puts her on the fire. Before she dies she throws down a rather extended curse that portends to wreak havoc on all future Daninskys. A couple hundred years later - although still pre-20th century - Waldemar is out hunting and shoots a wolf. (Curiously enough, with a silver bullet.) When he goes to inspect the kill, he sees he's shot a man. (Not knowing, of course, that he's actually shot a werewolf.) The family of the dead man turns out to be gypsies, who are descendants of the Bathorys, and they send one of their women out to put the ancient curse into motion. Daninsky and his coachman come upon the girl lying in the middle of the road - injured, presumably - and he takes her back to his estate to administer medical attention. As is inevitable, she works her way into his bed and, one night while he's asleep, she cuts her wrist and drips some blood onto a sacred wolf's skull she's been secretly toting around, sinks the fangs of said skull into Waldemar's chest and flees the house. Ol' Wally is now cursed. Pretty soon it's a full moon and he's out killing the locals. (On a side note, I always find it funny that these movies seem to take place in some parallel universe where there's always more than one full moon in a month; if not more than one in a week!) At this point the movie does descend somewhat into the all-too predictable and familiar version of the story, as he must somehow get Inga, the woman who loves him, to kill him and end the curse. In an interesting red herring-like twist, there just so happens to be an escaped axe murderer roaming the woods in the area simultaneously. (So only a few local hotheads suspect the killing to be the work of a werewolf until very far along in the movie.) Around the same time as Inga finds out about the curse, and what she must do to relieve her beloved of his pain, the body of the axe murderer is found dead and everyone begins howling for werewolf blood and looking in Waldemar's direction. Fortunately for him, Inga arrives just ahead of the mob and manages to fulfill her (and Waldemar's) destiny, killing him and freeing him of the curse. Unfortunately for her, she's pregnant with his child. In the final scene, as she and her son leave the mausoleum where Waldemar's coffin is, a camera zooms in on the boy's hand and it's obvious the curse has been passed to the next generation. Curse Of The Devil stands out as one of the better entries in the Naschy Werewolf series because of it's lush sets, costumes and relatively high production values; it seems like director Carlos Aured took his time with this one, and the results speak for themselves.
—the Kommandant
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