The Grim Cellar

1946, US, Directed by Jean Yarbrough

Black & White, Running Time: 59 minutes

DVD, Region 2, Universal, Video: 1.33:1, Audio: Dolby Digital Mono

Despite the similarity of title this has nothing to do with Universal’s earlier and infinitely better film Werewolf of London, aside from perhaps the setting. It opens with a pair of detectives discussing a recent spate of alleged werewolf attacks on innocent strollers when they’re called out to another killing in the park. Meanwhile a love-smitten couple are riding horses around the same location discussing their marital future when the detectives arrive and are overheard discussing the deaths and possible nature of the perpetrator. Phyllis seems suspiciously perturbed by the discussion and her fiancée Barry promptly whisks her off back home. There is the hint of some sort of curse at the beginning of the story that appears to have afflicted Phyllis: after each night of mutilations in the park she wakes up with dirt and blood on her hands - is she transforming into a wolf and providing the papers with their sensationalist stories? She gradually becomes convinced she is and deteriorates mentally as the stability of her world collapses around her.

A glance at the running time will reveal that this was a quickie for Universal, something that dragged few ideas of worth out of its writers. In the cinemas (released on a double bill with The Cat Creeps back in 1946) this only just about qualified as a feature film, being barely an hour long, and with PAL speed-up (i.e. 25 frames per second) it doesn’t even reach that. The actors approach their scarce material with what may be a reasonable attitude but they can’t turn dung to gold and their efforts are ultimately wasted on what eventually reveals itself to be an almost entirely pointless exercise. What’s worse, without wishing to give anything away, is the fact that it cheats its intended audience and disrespects the genre that its masquerading under - the trailer and title suggests that it will be something that it’s not, probably grasping at the only attempt possible to sell this to an unsuspecting public. Pretending you have a product of a certain nature on your hands simply to get people through the doors is hardly commendable. However, it’s relatively easy to spot early on that this isn’t really a horror movie, but that just turns the film into a rather boring way to spend an hour. In its favour there are one or two nice shots of the mist-enshrouded woodland, with the visually unthreatening cloaked female wondering through. The conclusive explanation of what’s going on and why it’s going on lacks solid logic and once again insults its audience, therefore I cannot recommend this.

A sharp and detailed image is joined by clear audio on the DVD release, though there is an odd anomaly that occurs: at the beginning of many shots there is a very brief soft focus effect that only occurs for two or three frames but is noticeable nonetheless, and somewhat distracting. This is no great loss, however, because the viewer will invariably become cataleptically bored to molecular solidification by the experience of watching She-Wolf of London. Find something else that will have some sort of effect on you other than hypnotically induced slumber.