WEREWOLF OF LONDON (1935)
This movie is considered to be the first main stream werewolf movie ever. In 1913 there was a werewolf short silent film made simply called The Werewolf, that involved a Navajo woman who turns into a wolf in order to attack white settlers, but this one was the first feature length film.
In this movie Dr. Wilfred Glendon (played by Henry Hull) is attacked by a freakin werewolf just trying to pick up some plants in Tibet. He goes back to London and finds out he’s turning into a werewolf because that is what happens if you get bitten by one and live. Dr. Yogami (played by Warner Oland) is trying to help him out but he’s being a jerk. He doesn’t stop being a jerk when he’s dealing with his wife. He is gone for months at a time and when they do get a chance to hang out, he just wants to bark at the moon. Kidding on that last part. The general idea is that an Asian flower can act as an antidote to the affliction.
This movie establishes a few things. 1. Cats hate werewolves . 2. Werewolves attack the ones they love instinctively. These are both things you see in later Universal films. I will say the werewolf effects for this movie are pretty garbage but it might be just because this thing is 85 freakin years old and counting. The werewolf actually does look meaner than in THE WOLFMAN, but they really don’t put a lot of fur on this guy. He ends up looking more like a vampire that escaped from the set of GREASE than a werewolf. Apparently the lack of actual werewolf was to appease censors in the US when the movie came out.
WEREWOLF IN LONDON has some strong points. The few shots of Dr. Glendon’s lab are pretty epic, like even better than some of the movies that came after it that features labs. The acting and cinematography is also pretty good for a movie that came out in this era. It doesn’t feature a lot of horror elements of the time like having mist everywhere on the ground all the time.
Odd – In one scene this old lady knocks out her best friend who is also an old lady. All this is over trying to figure out where Dr. Glendon is going to stay the night. So basically they are fighting over who gets to have a werewolf stay in one of their rooms. There is also a scene where the werewolf talks while he’s a werewolf. I don’t think we get that in any other werewolf movies from Universal at least, not in those days.
Overall this movie is decent, but it doesn’t really blow me away. I have to give this one a 3 out of 7. Sometimes being first doesn’t mean being best. Having said that, there are werewolf movies that are a LOT newer that aren’t even this good.
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