It's hard to imagine that this was a product of 20th-Century Fox because it looks so much like a B feature from Universal Studios -- the isolated mansion, the absence of daylight, the ground-covering fog, the spooky music, the family haunted by a curse, the dark figures slinking through the shadows, and most of all the werewolf. I haven't read the novel but the writers have used every cliché in the monster book. I could hardly sit through it -- wouldn't have sat through it except that I'd bought the DVD.
There's nothing wrong with John Brahm's direction except that it's flat and unimaginative. He's done much better work elsewhere, as in "The Lodger." Really -- in a dark corner of the room, a hairy hand sneaks out from behind a heavy curtain while the musical score tells us to notice it and be frightened. There is not only no poetry here; there's very little effort at all. The script sucks. The dialog not only lacks sparkle but is predictable from moment to moment. There is even one of those ancient proverbs that serves as a warning, "Even the man who is wholesome and sane must cover his rear as he walks by wolfbane." Something like that. (Repeated twice, and also displayed on a plaque.)
And the score, by the way, so stereotypical, is by David Raksin, who was to go on two years later to produce the pretty little suspenseful and romantic theme for "Laura." Heather Angel is okay. She has the proper delicate features. But what is James Ellison doing as a Scotland Yard scientist assigned to investigate a death and mauling at the estate of an upper-class British family? He brings to the part the broad vowels of an American cowboy from Iowa. And the director doesn't help him in the least. Ellison rushes through his scenes as if the film were a one-hour quickie from Monogram Studios.
As it turns out, one of the family members suffers from "lycanthropy" -- the belief that under certain conditions he turns into a wolf. The problem is that in this instance he really DOES turn into a werewolf. We see him looking like hairy Lawrence Talbot until he's shot, and then as he dies he assumes his normal human form. A sample of his wolf hair disappears in the lab while under analysis. And yet, at the end, the whole business is treated as a quirk of the victim's mind, a kind of insanity, even by the family's doctor. It makes no sense. Either lycanthropy is a delusion or it's real. The movie gives us both, contradicting itself and papering over the plot holes.
The most interesting scenes involve the spectrograph and the centrifuge. Both the instruments had been around for a while so they're not anachronisms.
There's nothing wrong with John Brahm's direction except that it's flat and unimaginative. He's done much better work elsewhere, as in "The Lodger." Really -- in a dark corner of the room, a hairy hand sneaks out from behind a heavy curtain while the musical score tells us to notice it and be frightened. There is not only no poetry here; there's very little effort at all. The script sucks. The dialog not only lacks sparkle but is predictable from moment to moment. There is even one of those ancient proverbs that serves as a warning, "Even the man who is wholesome and sane must cover his rear as he walks by wolfbane." Something like that. (Repeated twice, and also displayed on a plaque.)
And the score, by the way, so stereotypical, is by David Raksin, who was to go on two years later to produce the pretty little suspenseful and romantic theme for "Laura." Heather Angel is okay. She has the proper delicate features. But what is James Ellison doing as a Scotland Yard scientist assigned to investigate a death and mauling at the estate of an upper-class British family? He brings to the part the broad vowels of an American cowboy from Iowa. And the director doesn't help him in the least. Ellison rushes through his scenes as if the film were a one-hour quickie from Monogram Studios.
As it turns out, one of the family members suffers from "lycanthropy" -- the belief that under certain conditions he turns into a wolf. The problem is that in this instance he really DOES turn into a werewolf. We see him looking like hairy Lawrence Talbot until he's shot, and then as he dies he assumes his normal human form. A sample of his wolf hair disappears in the lab while under analysis. And yet, at the end, the whole business is treated as a quirk of the victim's mind, a kind of insanity, even by the family's doctor. It makes no sense. Either lycanthropy is a delusion or it's real. The movie gives us both, contradicting itself and papering over the plot holes.
The most interesting scenes involve the spectrograph and the centrifuge. Both the instruments had been around for a while so they're not anachronisms.