I must admit to not being terribly au fait with the Spanish horror industry that sprang up around the same time as the Italian one in the 1960s beyond a couple of obvious names like Jess Franco and Paul Naschy, but it appears to have been as OK with actual animal cruelty as its Italian counterpart would be… yuck. I mean, I’m not a megafan of rats either, but still…
Anyway, around 15 years ago I saw my first Paul Naschy film, The Werewolf vs. The Vampire Woman; it was a barely watchable probable bootleg, but beneath the shitty video quality I could sense something of interest. I meant to explore Naschy further, but haven’t done so until now. It was Youtube’s resident Naschy enthusiast Daniel at The Cobwebs Channel who finally convinced me to invest in the Scream Factory collections of his work, and I chose this particular title because I found this terrific essay on it (thank you again, Substack), which I think is quite correct in finding the animal cruelty abhorrent but also in identifying what makes it work other, a substantial part of which is Naschy himself.
This is one of his non-Waldemar Daninsky films, in which he is the titular hunchback, Gotho, but he’s not the monster of the movie. Granted, he kills multiple people through the film, and in remarkably gory fashion for a film made at that time too; but Gotho is a hunchback far more sinned against than sinning, a figure of freakish fun to his fellow townsfolk but essentially kind and loving until provoked. He is the film’s sorely-beset focus of sympathy. When the young woman he loves dies, he encounters the real monster of the movie, Dr. Orla, who makes use of him for his, er, unorthodox experiments. All of this is told in a way that could be described as “jagged”, full of abrupt scene cuts and transitions; it’s somewhat unbalanced and not entirely coherent, but it captures a suitably grim mood (even if the apparently night-time exteriors are kind of suspiciously well-“lit”). I enjoyed this, it basically gave me what I’d hoped for from it. I just wish it hadn’t also given me those burning rats…
Oof. I don’t normally expect 1930s cinema to be, you know, big on racial sensitivity or anything, but Black Moon managed to lower the bar by setting its story on a Caribbean island inhabited by “two white people and a couple of thousand blacks” and then having one of those blacks be racist towards the island’s natives (presumably because he came from the mainland US). That… didn’t really endear me to the film, and nothing much else about it did. This is a horror film where the real horror is that of a nice white woman “going native”; born on the island in question, she’s raised by her plantation-owning uncle after her parents’ death, and becomes involved in the natives’ voodoo practices. Although uncle dispatches her to the mainland where she marries a nice white man and they have a nice white child, the old attraction to those old ways comes back for some reason never fully explained. Per IMDB, the film provoked a mini-riot in Jamaica when it showed there, and even in the US there were questions about whether or not it was wise to show it in some areas there, but one African-American newspaper gave it credit for employing a load (up to about 250 or so) of black extras, so I suppose that’s… something? I don’t know. This was Fay Wray’s last horror film, and apparently she later had no memory of being in it. It’s like that. I don’t really have much else to say about it.
Interesting to see Jean Rollin making an appearance in this film, given that quite a few of the people involved in it (including director Jean-Denis Bonan) also worked on Rollin’s Rape of the Vampire around the same time. I suppose in some respects this is kind of similar to that film, in that it’s obviously taking a genre (the crime film in this case, vampire horror in the other) but doing really quite odd things with it. Alas, Bonan was even less fortunate that Rollin was; his earlier short film Tristesse des anthropophages had been banned, and consequently no distributor wanted to take this thing on, meaning that it didn’t get shown until 2010, and only after that did it finally actually get finished and released. Plotwise, I suppose it’s pretty straightforward, in that a woman’s been executed but her crimes appear to be continuing… the handling of this story, however, is quite experimental in many ways; Bonan was clearly not interested in making a conventional noir or anything like that, especially with the gender tomfoolery going on. I have seen one review that considers the film as possibly a spoof of nouvelle vague style, which may have been the case, indeed the blu-ray commentary says something about the French new wave having petered out by 1968 and a sort of “new” new wave comprising figures like Bonan and Rollin taking its place, so there may well be something to that too… It’s interesting that Bonan shot the film while all the 
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