The problem with most contemporary zombie movies is that so little of them bring anything new or innovative to the dining table. Half the time they end up merely imitating, poorly, the best aspects of George Romero’s Dead films and Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, despite the fact that 28 Days Later is not a zombie film. Others are just big Schwarzenegger-style action movies with a lot of gratuitous violence and bad storytelling.

Vampires versus werewolves is the horror equivalent of that eternal struggle between pirates and ninjas, only toothier and hairier. With Night of the Werewolf (original Spanish title: El Retorno del Hombre-Lobo), we have a film that doesn't bring much new to the genre in terms of plot. It's pretty standard fare, with no great twists or turns you couldn't see coming.

One of the most terrifying monsters in the modern horror film is the murderous child.  We can trace this monster back to at least the late 1950s, when an 8-year old girl murdered her classmate and intimidated her mother in The Bad Seed (1956).  Not long after, a gaggle of alien pod children took over a quaint British community in Village of the Damned (1960).  The notion of malevolent kids continued to horrify audiences well into the 1970s, when Hollywood aligned them with the Devil in wildly popular films like <

There are some movies that are avant-garde in their disuse of dialog. There are some movies that are brilliantly post-modern in leaving out most of the soundtrack. There are movies that are insightful because of their dubious logic and shifting plot. Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein isn’t any of those films. It’s possible that I might have missed something on the first viewing, some nugget of inspiration that I’d pick up on if I watched the film again. Unfortunately, you couldn’t pay me to watch Prisoner of Frankenstein a second time.

Whether you believe that prolific multi-hyphenate Jesus Franco, director of over 150 films and writer, co-star, or composer of many of them, is an irritating hack or a secret genius, you have to respect his 1962 film, The Awful Dr. Orlof. You may not admire it, although I certainly do, but its place in film history is set. The first “true” horror movie produced in Spain, The Awful Dr. Orlof is a flash point in the turbulent transition of the horror film from the Gothic to the modern.

In 1979, Roger Ebert called George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead “an ultimate horror film”¹ and, in a separate review a few days later, cited its horrifying, satiric, and well-crafted elements as combining to make it such

I would not call Vengeance of the Zombies a zombie film any more than I would call Dawn of the Dead a screwball comedy.  Just as a couple pies-in-the-face do not define the latter, five or six zombies do not make a zombie film.  But I’m going to stop rambling and get right to the dirt because it does not seem right to waste energy on a film of this quality.  Even as far as C-grade trash goes, Vengeance of the Zombies is bad and (even worse) boring.

Editor’s Note: This review covers the public domain Horror of the Zombies version, which is formatted to fit a standard television and features minor cuts for violence.

The story of Mario Bava’s Lisa and the Devil is the stuff from which cinema legends are made: brilliant auteur is given carte blanche to make his masterpiece, but the end result can’t find a distributor. To recoup costs, the film’s producer pressures the director to add scenes of demonic possession to cash-in on a popular American film (in this case, The Exorcist).

To stab and to burn from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in psychosis and in nightmare, to hate and to objectify, from this day forward, when death tears us apart… Marital bliss, Hatchet for the Honeymoon is not.