Werewolf of London [VHS]
Universal's first werewolf film falls in the shadow of the 1941 hitThe Wolf Man. You might say it's a different animal, as this version carries none of the now-familiar trappings of the wolf-man legend: no wolfsbane, no silver bullets, no gypsy curse. Dr. Wilfrid Glendon (Henry Hull) is a London botanist whose search for a rare flower takes him to a "cursed" valley in Tibet where he's mauled in the moonlight by a wolflike creature. Back in London he meets the mysterious Dr. Yogami (a marvelously melancholy performance by Warner Oland), who explains they met once before "in Tibet... in the dark" before asking for a flower from his botanical find, the only antidote for his curse. Glendon scoffs at his stories of werewolves--until he transforms into a hirsute killer under the effect of the full moon. Although leaner and edgier than the famous 1941 Lon Chaney classic,The Werewolf of Londonstumbles with the corny Scotland Yard investigation of the murder spree and gets sidetracked in the bizarre bickering of two old drunken cronies. But it takes flight in wonderfully imaginative and eerie scenes and striking action sequences, while a Jekyll-and-Hyde dynamic turns a jealous squabble between Glendon and his young wife Lisa (Valerie Hobson) into the tragic twist of the curse: "The werewolf instinctively kills the thing it loves best."--Sean Axmaker