A cruel Marquis tortures and imprisons a beggar. Many years later a beautiful servant is tossed in with the beggar who rapes her. She later kills the Marquis and escapes, and is taken in by Don Alfredo Carrido (Clifford Evans), where she gives birth and dies. The child is cursed, an evil spirit entering him a birth because of the rape, or being born on Christmas, or due to the murder, and becomes a werewolf child. Due to the love of his adopted parents, he overcomes his weakness of soul, at least until he goes out into the world as an adult (Oliver Reed) and runs into women. His attraction to his boss’s daughter (Catherine Feller) weakens him, but then he runs into loose women and that sends him over the edge, causing him to become a werewolf.
Hammer studios had covered Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Mummy, so turned to The Wolf Man, but it needed a new source (they didn’t have the rights to the classic Universal story). So they went with a novel about a werewolf in Paris, and removed all the politics that were the point of the book. Due to a possible boycott, Hammer executives canceled an inquisition feature they’d been planning, so moved the setting for this film to Spain to make use of the sets. And due to the upset of different censors, they changed how lycanthropy was passed on. It is never a good sign when your decisions are based on censors. The cruelty of the aristocrats is kept from the novel, but little else.
The Curse of the Werewolf is an oddly constructed film. For a ninety minute flick, there’s very little monster action. There’s lots of cruelty, just not much of it involves a werewolf. We get fifty minutes of back-story before the adult Leon appears, and no werewolf till over an hour, and then it is just shadows—we don’t see him in his full glory till near the end. Considering how good the makeup is, I’d have thought they’d have used it a great deal more. The wolf man is Hammer’s one outstanding monster design and he’s wasted.
But there’s other peculiarities that suggest a good number of pages of the screenplay were jettisoned. Multiple major characters vanish from the film. We never know what happens to the beggar. The game warden and his wife are given a great deal of time away from other main characters, and then they just stop existing. Characters are killed off in narration or simply forgotten.
Outside of those few minutes of the monster, this is a dour film. I don’t mind my werewolf films tragic, but there’s got to be a few moments of hope and light. Not here. Things are hopeless from the first moment to the last. It’s oppressive.
Like most of Hammer’s horror films, the theme is one of support for stogy, proper society. The opposite of what Ealing Studios was suggesting at the same time and also a retreat from the direction of British society. Hammer pushed for the older class system as well as gender roles that had slipped away during the war. Everyone should know their place and keep to it. If Leon had simply stuck to his place, and stayed away from women (Hammer really didn’t like women), then he’d have been fine.
If it wasn’t a werewolf film I’d say to skip it, but there are so few good films in the sub-genre that the bar is set a bit lower. The Curse of the Werewolf is nicely, if simply, shot, with rich colors, and the sets look as good as low budget sets are going to look. The actors are all good. Reed was still learning the craft, but he drips masculinity, and that counts for more than talent when playing a werewolf. That makes The Curse of the Werewolf good enough to catch on cable.