In his memoirs, Paul Naschy said about his 1973 movie, Vengeance of the Zombies: When I wrote the screenplay, I must either have been under the effects of hashish or, like Bram Stoker, I’d had one hell of a nightmare. Maybe it wasn’t hashish but cheap wine. I wonder if it was anything like the…

Known by many different names, The Hanging Woman (1973) best represents the movie. The name under which I bought the Blu-ray from Full Moon, Orgy of the Living Dead, does not. Sure, there’s a great quote from the film: They say the dead have orgies in that bloody cemetery. However, that’s as close as we…

Horror Rises from the Tomb (1973) was one of the first Paul Naschy films I saw. I watched it on July 2, 1973 and rated it seven stars out of ten. That means I liked it. Re-watching it now, my opinion hasn’t changed. Had I not also recently watched Dr. Jekyll vs. the Werewolf, this…

Based on the quality of the print I watched on YouTube, it’s going to be hard to discuss this one. Keep this in mind as you imagine what it must have been like for original Paul Naschy fans before his Blu-ray renaissance… searching for titles, then finding murky prints with bad sound on bootleg videocassettes…

Finally, Dr. Jekyll vs. the Werewolf (1972) is the Paul Naschy/Waldemar Daninsky movie I’ve been hoping I’d see! It has everything I want in a Eurohorror film and hits all my 1970s sweet spots. If you’ve ever watched a movie and felt energized afterwards, or wanted to immediately watch it again, you know how I…

Paul Naschy’s first attempt at giallo is a solid effort; however, the execution of Seven Murders for Scotland Yard (1972) by director Jose Luis Madrid is lackluster. Additionally, the lighting and camerawork by cinematographer Diego Ubeda is dark and uncreative, giving the film the look of a television movie. I don’t mean that it’s dark…

Paul Naschy becomes more confident with his next genre/Waldemar Daninsky film, which I watched in its American, public domain version, The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman (1971.) However, I wonder how much should be credited to director Leon Klimovsky. The pair would later make several of Naschy’s most popular films, such as Dr. Jekyll vs.…

Not understanding its reputation prior to watching Fury of the Wolfman (1972), I would have rated it an “average” film (5 Waldemar Daninskys, in this case.) I enjoyed it just fine, as wildly uneven and nonsensical as it is. However, when doing research, I learned it’s universally believed to be the worst of Paul Naschy’s…

Subgenres within subgenres… Within the “nature gone wild/when animals attack” horror subgenre resides one that belongs exclusively to dogs. Preceded by Dogs (1976) comes The Pack (1977), with nearly identical descriptions (on IMDb, at least.) They’re both in the company of Dracula’s Dog (1977), Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell (1978), and, into the 1980s,…

Not only was Guru, the Mad Monk (1970) a first-time watch for me, but it was also the first Andy Milligan film I’ve seen. The writer-director-producer-costume designer-and so on has at least some fans, I assume, due to the existence of a deluxe box set of his movies from Severin Films. One of those fans…