Monday 13 October 2014

Werewolf Woman (1976)



Well, this is a nasty little bit of sleaze.

The opening scene is a nude woman gyrating in a ring of burning branches, with a couple of close-ups of her pubic hair to make clear that she really, really isn't wearing any clothes.  She then transforms into a werewolf.  Or more accurately, into a nude woman covered in fur.  A bunch of torch-bearing villagers turn up, and while she manages to rip the jugular out of one of them, the others capture and burn her.

Then she wakes up screaming.

Oh yes, we have begun with a dream sequence.  Through the power of exposition, we learn that this is Daniella, a woman who was raped at the age of 13 and now lives a mostly solitary life.  Oh, and she is obsessed with the tale of an ancestor of hers - to whom she bears an uncanny resemblance - who was executed as a werewolf.

Anyway, Daniella has some deeply mixed up attitudes to sex.  After watching her sister and brother in law make love, she lures the latter outside and murders him.  She then collapses into a catatonic state.  Taken to a clinic, she will soon kill and kill again, usually as a result of some kind of sex happening.  This is a movie with a lot of that.  I don't think there's a woman with a line of dialogue who doesn't get at least partially naked.

The police figure out that Daniella is committing the murders, but aren't able to locate her.  Mind you, these are the kind of cops who have theories like "Her ancestor's spirit is possessing her and compelling her to kill these people", so I'm not sure they could find their own backsides with both hands and a map.

Eventually - ugh - the film has Daniella get raped again, this time by a pack of three men.  She later murders them all, and then the cops finally locate her and arrest her, and the movie ends with the mystifying statements that (a) "the names have been changed" and (b) "no resemblance to real persons is intended".  Those are pretty contradictory, if you ask me.  Not that you did.

So this is pretty sleazetastic, and the whole werewolf angle doesn't go anywhere, so unless you're really, really keen to see naked women, and don't know what the internet is, you should skip it.

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