Opted for some more Paul Naschy tonight; as the title suggests, this is one of his Waldemar Daninsky films, and an authentic Video Nasty as well (nice to have one of those for one’s October horror viewing), one of the handful that’s still never been released in the UK apparently (Arrow? 88 Films? Why aren’t either of you on top of this?). Speaking of titles, the literal rendering of the Spanish one, “Curse of the Beast”, is actually more accurate; there is markedly more werewolf than yeti to be had here.
Anyway, I’m clearly watching the Daninsky series well out of order, but I’ve always gathered that there’s little continuity to the series, with his origin being different in almost each one. In this instance, Daninsky joins an expedition to Tibet in search of the yeti, picking up after another expedition in search of same ended kind of terribly; perhaps needless to say, so does this one, albeit not in the way you might expect. Naschy is credited with the script, but the film felt to me like he actually wrote a number of different film scripts, took bits of each and just slammed them into one another while hoping for the best. I charcterised The Hunchback of the Morgue as “somewhat unbalanced and not entirely coherent”, and, well, this one is the same but even more so; the pacing and structure are so odd it feels like about 20-30 minutes of material that might’ve made it hang together more was either cut from it or maybe never even filmed. On the plus side, if the film is a mess it’s a pretty attractive one, shot almost entirely on location… Spain obviously stands in for Tibet throughout (a bit less happily, Spanish people obviously largely stand in for Tibetan people too) and looks pretty beautiful in doing so. And there were no burning rats in this one, which is an edge it has over the hunchback film…
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