If the IMDB is correct (hey, often it is!) Paolo Heusch’s Italo shocker Lycanthropus arrived six months after Hammer’s sensational The Curse of the Werewolf; it might indeed have been produced partly in response to the English hit. In 1961 few dud werewolf movies were on the books. In the heady Universal heyday both Henry Hull and Lon Chaney Jr. committed classic performances (and make-ups) to film, and Columbia’s less inspiring Matt Willis werewolf was at least respectable. Herman Cohen injected some youth appeal into the interesting I Was a Teenage Werewolf. Both Michael Landon’s regressed high-schooler and Steven Ritch’s The Werewolf of a year earlier have distinctive designs. Landon wins by a furry nose because his shape-shifter had sex appeal, whereas Ritch’s seemed weighed down with loser-noir angst.
Nope, word that Hammer was cooking up a werewolf tale is probably what got the gears going for this quickie Italo werewolf picture. Of all the wolf men listed above Oliver Reed’s silver-furred ferocious bruiser is the only one really to challenge Lon Jr. and Jack Pierce. So far, Rome’s response to Hammer horror had turned up at least two excellent thrillers about a reincarnated witch and a seductive ghost girl in a spooky mill. A werewolf picture requires a sophisticated makeup transformation, a challenge that was too much for the odd 1960 effort Seddok, l’erede di Satana.
Lycanthropus was recut and re-titled Werewolf in a Girl’s Dormitory for a U.S. MGM release two years later. It has some of the drawbacks of low-budget Italo genre pictures of this time, but in general comes off just fine. We readers of Famous Monsters of Filmland loved the photos of its fanged werewolf, his face distorted in a snarling, feral grimace. But with most Euro horror we had to wait thirty-to-fifty years to see an original Italian cut. Severin Films gives us a high quality widescreen encoding with a choice of audio tracks.
Severin’s Italian version jumps right into a giallo-like string of serial murders in a low-security reformatory for promising female rehabilitees. The main title graphics aren’t particularly impressive, and nostalgic monster kids will miss the campy title song heard in the American recut, The Ghoul in School.
The original film wastes no time setting up a savage murder mystery with plenty of potential suspects. Dr. Julian Olcott (Carl Schell) shows up to teach at the rural reformatory school run by the friendly Director Swift (Curt Lowens) and his associate Leonor MacDonald (Maureen O’Connor). Swift isn’t telling anyone that the new instructor is also a medical doctor; Julian has a shady past. Inmate Mary (Mary McNeeran) has been sneaking out to sleep with Sir Alfred Whiteman (Maurice Marsac), a cad who cultivates reform school girls as sex partners with promises of early release. The unhappy Mary threatens to expose Sir Alfred, and is later attacked by some kind of animal.
When the police investigate everyone becomes a suspect. Beautiful student Priscilla (Barbara Lass) tries to prove Mary was murdered, but only angers the cops and draws the ire of Sir Alfred’s jealous wife. Sir Alfred pays the school custodian Walter (Peter Lorre lookalike Alan Collins, aka Luciano Pigozzi) to recover some compromising letters. When more people die under suspicious circumstances the townspeople decide that Walter is the savage killer. Just as Julian and Priscilla begin to feel mutually attracted he becomes a suspect as well — a dog attacked the unseen killer, and Julian is nursing a hurt arm. Director Swift trusts Julian so much that he withholds suspicious facts from the police. But how many more reformatory coeds will be slain?
Paolo Heusch labored in the lower commercial trenches just as Mario Bava and Riccardo Freda’s horror work was being accepted as art in some quarters. It would take a researcher of Tim Lucas’s caliber to explain why Heusch took the credit for 1958’s La morte viene dallo spazio (The Day the Sky Exploded) while Bava did the actual directing. Lycanthropus is reasonably well directed, with good camera moves and nicely blocked dialogue scenes. The carefully contrived thriller places a monster at the center of a German-style krimi murder mystery, in a reform school with incredibly casual rules.
→ Barbara Lass’s Priscilla and other student guest-inmates hop the reformatory wall almost nightly. In Roman Polanski’s later masterpiece The Fearless Vampire Killers, when Sharon Tate’s schoolgirl tells an admirer that ‘We used to go over the wall at school. Did all kinds of things,” is it possibly a reference to Lycanthropus? Barbara Lass was previously Barbara Kwiatkowska, the first wife of Roman Polanski. She appeared in at least two of his famous student films, Two Men and a Wardrobe and When Angels Fall.
(Both Polanski short subjects are included on Criterion’s DVD disc of Knife in the Water. I believe that Polanski adapted a stunning visual moment in When Angels Fall for a key scene in The Fearless Vampire Killers.)
In Lycanthropus Barbara Lass and Carl Schell’s names are above the title. With her enormous eyes, cautious attitude and strong personality, Polish actress Lass makes Priscilla an excellent central character. In her trench coat and short hairstyle she reminds us of Juliet Mayniel in Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face. That shocker had enormous influence on subsequent Eurohorror fare and Lycanthropus is no exception — we see a dog going under the knife in a mad-lab scene. We know that Kwiatkoska changed her stage name to Lass several movies previous to this one. Did some of the other actresses take fake names for this movie — in the IMDB, ‘Mary McNeeran,’ ‘Grace Neame,’ ‘Anna Steinert,’ ‘Anne-Marie Avis,”Lucy Derleth’ and others have no other credits. The background students seem quite professional. The dozen ‘ballerinas’ in Polselli’s L’amante del vampiro are more of a random assortment of hopefuls, perhaps personally recruited (cough) by the producer.
The show is greatly aided by decent lighting. The night exteriors are filmed night-for-night instead of cheated. Every once in a while a striking shot appears, and attractive leading lady Barbara Lass is consistently given careful glamour treatment. The location is said to be the same villa seen in the previous year’s L’amante del vampiro. The HD scan reveals that a crude matte trick has attempted to give the large building a new roof … perhaps to make it look less like a Roman villa?
Lycanthropus is a tad talky and slowly paced. Simple cutaways linger as long as possible, perhaps to maximize the running time. A snappier editing rhythm might have helped. It would be a great editing exercise to see if scenes could be accelerated, or some extra exposition dropped. How much could be taken out?
As evidenced by those great old still photos, Werewolf in a Girl’s Dormitory’s good monster is a more frenzied and feral version of Henry Hull’s Werewolf of London, with larger fangs that he bares in grotesque snarls. He’s first seen as a pair of angry eyes, like The Curse of the Werewolf’s Oliver Reed. The first transformation is not accomplished with matched dissolves, as actor Curt Lowens says in an interview. A series of cut-backs to a man chained to a wall reveal a more distorted face and fangs, in stages. The scene is well done if perhaps too leisurely-paced. This werewolf could receive a ticket for loitering.
The mystery plotting is so thorough that one can imagine the Lycanthropus script adapted for an episode of Murder, She Wrote — we hear a lot about missing evidence, untrustworthy characters and good people hiding suspicious secrets. Curt Lowens and Luciano Pigozzi come across especially well. ← The voice talent dubbing Pigozzi into English tries to inflect a Peter Lorre quality without being too obvious. Handsome Carl Schell is the brother of Maria and Maximillian Schell. He’s a little stiff in dialogue scenes, but not bad.
Gorehounds may be upset that the wolf attacks leave none of the bloody slaughterhouse tableaux so important to later werewolf pix, namely An American Werewolf in London. The censorable sex content is limited to a few cutaways to reform school girls on their dormitory beds, screaming with the fronts of their nightgowns draped open. The producer probably leaned on the cameraman to get these, as pickup shots. I don’t remember them from the American cut.
