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Greetings, and welcome to VIEWING THE CLASSICS. Here you'll find capsule reviews of vintage movies from the early days of cinema through the 1970s, with a special emphasis on sci-fi, horror, and mystery movies. Be sure to check out the Pages links, where you can find a Film Index of all my reviews, links to the reviews organized by cast members, directors, and other contributors, and links to my reviews of the films of talented young director Joshua Kennedy.

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Thursday, January 26, 2017

Face Of The Screaming Werewolf (1964)

Starring Lon Chaney Jr., Yerye Beirute, George Mitchell, Fred Hoffman, Rosa Arenas
Directed by Gilberto Martinez Solares & Rafael Portillo
(actor & director credits courtesy IMDB.com)

A scientist discovers two mummies in an Aztec pyramid, one of which when restored to life transforms into a werewolf.

Jerry Warren, the infamous director who made a series of horror movies incorporating footage from foreign films and padding them with lengthy exposition sequences is behind this travesty, which combines scenes from the Mexican thrillers The Aztec Mummy and House Of Terror.  Neither of those films were tremendously exciting pictures to begin with, though House Of Terror did have the hook of Lon Chaney Jr. once again playing a werewolf.  His transformation sequence is the best part of this movie, copying the time-lapse photography used in Universal's Wolf Man films, and rather effectively so.  But Chaney never speaks and neither do any other characters in his segments, making the plot hard to follow, and Warren's setup of his mummification and entombment along with the Aztec mummy is never explained.  The final product is a disjointed film that jumps between scenes, and is awkwardly unified by Warren, making it a real chore to sit through.

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