The Big Whatsit

‘He fought the hideous curse of his evil birth, but his ravished victims were proof that the cravings of his beast-blood demanded he kill… Kill… KILL!’ 

The one where a young Oliver Reed becomes a werewolf starts with a splendid title sequence. The credits flash across the face of said lycanthrope, who looks this way and that, shedding the occasional tear (or is it sweat?) and looking scared as much as he does scary. It’s a good thing we see him at this stage, as there’s no werewolfery to be had at all until much later in the movie. Those who bought tickets to see The Curse of the Werewolf, expecting fuzzy creatures for their money must have been sorely disappointed.

Reed himself doesn’t turn up until roughly halfway into ‘Curse’. Beforehand, we are treated to a long, long exposition, scene setting of such inordinate length that it makes the rest of the film appear rushed. Curse is set in Spain. It opens with a narrator telling us the tale of a beggar who rather rashly tries to scrounge money and food from the local Marquess. It’s obvious the latter isn’t going to be a nice piece of work, and sure enough the beggar ends up spending years in prison. Time passes. Our scruffy hero, now covered in more hair than flesh winds up raping a mute girl who’s thrown into his cell, duly croaks, and leaves her to bear his child. Thanks to the kind of bizarre logic that doesn’t bear too much thinking about*, this offspring turns out to be cursed, doomed to turn into a werewolf with the waxing of a full moon. Only love can save him from this terrible fate, the local priest maintains. First, this comes from his adopted parents, but later he’ll need to find a woman who loves him, or else terrible things will happen. Terrible…

We get a taster of just such terror early in young Leon’s life. His Christening goes awry when the baptismal water ripples, presumably a sure sign of evil in days of yore. Shortly after, some of the local sheep are found dead, and when a hunter shoots at what he thinks must be the culprit, Leon is found in bed the following morning, a bullet embedded in his leg. Luckily, his parents are caring enough to look after him properly, and Leon grows up as part of a loving family.

Unfortunately, he also grows up to be Oliver Reed, delightfully hammy in the lead role. Personally, I have a lot of time for Ollie - the camera clearly loves him, and he possesses more than enough presence to keep this tosh moving. However, subtle isn’t really in his vocabulary, and as the adult Leon becomes ever more demented, Reed gets to chew the scenery to delicious effect. What he also does is emotion. Naturally, things go wrong for Leon once he sets out to work, laugh and love. He falls for a girl, possibly not the best choice as she’s the daughter of a merchant, he’s a peasant, and their romance is doomed from the start. Leon loses it, the full moon appears and, well, you can guess the rest.

In a lesser performer’s hands, Leon would be the stuff of utter schlock. Reed actually drags some sympathy from his character, falling into evident despair as he realises what’s on the horizon for him, and even managing to turn the werewolf - when finally he ‘morphs’ - into more than a two-dimensional monster. And rightly so. Leon hasn’t done anything wrong. The curse is none of his own doing, and it’s only fair that Reed elicits whatever feeling he can from the character.

The effects taking place during the ‘change’ are actually quite good. Nothing like as effective as Rick Baker’s work for An American Werewolf, naturally, but better than you might expect. Leon’s hands get furry before our eyes, and the first appearance of his werewolf face is suitably shocking. As always, I find the transformation of movie lycanthropes to be a little bewildering. Body parts change not all at once, but in neat, dramatically friendly stages, so that a clean-shaven Leon can glare in terror at his hands sprouting fur, before anything else happens.

Curse features the steady directorial hand of Terence Fisher, who keeps things ticking over just enough to stay it from descending into complete silliness. The actors, Reed aside, play their parts with an admirably straight face, with special kudos going to Clifford Evans as Leon’s long-suffering, perpetually understanding father. In his hands, the character turns into more than a plot device - the loving parent who does everything he can to save the boy who never really stood a chance. Catherine Feller doesn’t do a great deal as the heroine, and I imagine eyes to be more drawn to Yvonne Romain, who plays Leon’s mother, looks good in a low cut peasant’s outfit, and doesn’t need to do a lot more than that. Fans of the cameo actor’s cameo actor, Michael Ripper, will be delighted to see he gets a fuller role in Curse. The Ripster plays a village drunk, and even gets the credit ‘Old Soak’ - stick that on your CV! Peter Sallis, of Last of the Summer Wine and Wallace fame also shows up, here filling the part of a town bigwig, and sporting a moustache that’s more improbable than anything glued to Reed during his werewolf scenes.

So why does it take so long for the monster to put in an appearance? My first guess would be that even by Hammer’s tardy standards, the cost of morphing Leon into the wolf and having the latter run around was a reasonably expensive business, and so kept to an affordable minimum. Second, and I hope this is more likely, the team just had so much fun shooting Reed’s histrionic acting that there was little need to cheapen the thing with prosthetic fur, ears, and the like. In all honesty, by the time the werewolf did enter for the film’s climax, I missed Ollie’s tendency to over-do it hysterically, all eyes rolling and sweat pouring down his face. There was just something quite electrifying about seeing him shatter into pieces on the screen. All of which said, the film’s climactic moments are well staged and features an angry mob wielding torches and pitchforks, something you don’t see enough of in modern attempts at Gothic horror.

Though hardly a classic, Curse is good fun, a noble attempt at fleshing out the legend of another movie monster classic. I left it feeling sorry for the main character, thanks to a whole-hearted turn from Ollie Reed, and as with all early Hammers, the effort to recreate both a foreign country and a different time whilst shooting in 1960s England works surprisingly well. Considering this is film making on a shoestring, the results aren’t half bad. And not great either. Curse is, er, cursed with a story that moves too flaccidly, kills off its real villain - the evil Marquess - far too early, and doesn’t seem to know what it’s trying to say. Is Leon’s lycanthropy wholly the result of an accident of birth? Or does he have the chance to control the madness within him, blows it, and out come the claws? We never really know, and that weakens the film. Though not, unlike where poor Leon’s concerned, fatally.

* I looked this up on the IMDb, and apparently if you are conceived of rape and happen to be born on Christmas Day, then your first appearance on the birthday of Christ is unholy, and you’re knackered. This seems a little unfair to me - the film’s moral appears to be ‘Hope your mum doesn’t get knocked up after a violent liaison in late April,’ which doesn’t give anyone a sporting chance. Just as with Brides of Dracula, though, it’s good to see a religious undercurrent resurface in these early Hammers. Some wag also spotted that ‘Leon’ spelled backwards is ‘Noel.’ Coincidence? I very much think so.