Amazon.com video review:
After Hammer Studios rewrote the histories of Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Mummy it was only natural to take on the howling hirsute one. Discarding
the cursed gypsies, blooming wolfsbane, and chanted legends that swirl through
Universal's The Wolf Man, director Terence Fisher and screenwriter
John Elder (a pseudonym for producer Anthony Hinds) returned to Guy Endore's
novel The Werewolf of Paris for inspiration. Switching locations to
18th-century Spain (to make use of standing sets from a canceled production
about the Spanish Inquisition), this is a story of sex, sadism, and
decadence, a curse produced from human evil. Young orphan Leon, the progeny
of a mad, animalistic prisoner and a ravaged young peasant, is plagued with
nightmares while village sheep are slaughtered, but it isn't until he grows
into the stocky young Oliver Reed that his curse takes its terrifying toll.
Reed cuts an intense figure as the brooding, serious young man and makes a
marvelous werewolf, moving with a boxer's grace under feral makeup that
looks as much ape as canine. Curse of the Werewolf has all the
cleavage and blood you'd expect from a Hammer film, but it's Fisher's eerie
touches that make the film so gripping: a dog's howl anticipates the
crying
of the newborn Leon, holy water ripples as if coming to a boil before his
christening, and the wild-eyed, fanged boy struggles against the bars in
his room consumed in a canine bloodlust. --Sean Axmaker
