The Wolf Man

1941 monster movie

Rating: 15/20

Plot: The second son of a rich guy, a guy rich enough to own his own telescope, ventures into town to pick up chicks. He buys a cane with a wolf's head in order to impress one, a gal he Peeping Tommed with the use of his daddy's telescope, and she recites poetry about werewolves. Then, they meet another character who recites the same poem about werewolves. Then, a pair of gypsies tell the guy all about werewolves and tell him he's about to be bitten by one. Then, he's surprised when he's bitten by a werewolf and turns into one himself. This ruins his plans to boink the gal he spotted with his daddy's telescope.

Some rich atmosphere, quality writing (despite what I wrote up there), and a monster you can connect with and feel sorry for save this one. The titular monster (is it obvious that I really like using the word titular?) is really pretty goofy looking. He really just looks like a hirsute guy with a terrible haircut who might be getting ready to go to a discotheque or might just stay home for the evening, sipping brandy and smoking his phallic pipe while leering at women through a telescope. And the wolf man really isn't in the movie very much. The back of the dvd box tells me that it took make-up people six hours to make Lon Chaney Jr. look like a wolf man and then three hours to make him look like Lon Chaney Jr. again. I think that was for only a single day (or night) of filming though because the wolf man doesn't do a lot. The great Bela Lugosi, here playing a gypsy wolf man and apparently too lazy to spend time with the make-up people so that he gets to be a wolf man on screen, also isn't in this movie nearly enough. Actually, you could argue that there's not nearly enough movie here. At a zippy seventy minutes, it all seems kind of rushed. I would have liked a little more character development and a lot more scenes of the wolf man raping people or biting chickens' heads off or doing something other than just running around the same few trees over and over again. And less lycanthrophy poetry! I do like some of the ideas the makers of this hint at about the duality of human beings (the werewolf as a metaphor), but just like a lot of the rest of this, it's only hinted at.

Titular.