Evengyny Thanks for the memories!

BootDigest Such a frustrating disappointment

Cleveronix A different way of telling a story

Geraldine The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

tavm Having just seen most of the other Universal films that featured Larry Talbot, The Wolf Man (exception being House of Frankenstein), I finally got to see the first of the movies that featured Lon Chaney Jr. as that now-iconic character. He gets great support from Claude Rains as his father, Bela Lugosi as a fortune teller, Ralph Bellamy as the police captain, Evelyn Ankers as the leading lady, and especially, Maria Ouspenskaya as the Gypsy woman. Great atmospheric direction by George Waggner from a fine original script by Curt Siodmak. And let's not forget the legendary Jack Pierce for creating the wolfman makup that covered Chaney's skin and face. He was previously responsible for Bela Lugosi's Dracula face as well as Boris Karloff's Frankenstein's Monster's skin. Really, all I'll now say is The Wolf Man is still a bona-fide classic horror flick!

JohnHowardReid Modern horror fans will probably find this, the definitive wolf man picture, rather slow and disappointing. Certainly, it takes an enormously long time to get started and Lon Chaney unfortunately has a great deal of pre-werewolf footage including cosy domestic chats with his father Claude Rains (with Rains looking unusually diminutive) and even worse, small-talk romantic scenes with heroine Evelyn Ankers - all of which he hams up atrociously. Also the special effects of the actual change are rather disappointing (only in the final shot does his face change on-camera) and the make-up is neither particularly frightening nor grotesque - it is almost funny. Also the introduction of some comic relief with Ralph Bellamy of all people playing straight man to Forrester Harvey tends to dissipate the mood - fortunately this is not persisted with and Mr Harvey is dropped altogether from the climax. The dialogue has pretensions - we get all the usual claptrap about the werewolf legend and the poem is repeated no less than 3 times - but it succeeds only in being mundane. It was a mistake to set the film in modern times. Warren William's doctor is along to provide the medical explanation of psychiatric disturbance. Lugosi's role is unfortunately very small - only one scene in fact. Rains, William and Bellamy are wasted in roles that are far below their talents - only Miss Ankers and Mr Knowles are perfectly suited to the mediocre script. Ouspenskaya plays the gypsy straight but unconvincingly.The best thing in the film is Valentine's lighting, including a remarkable long shot of Chaney in the town with striped diagonal shadows thrown right across the set. The sets too are quite impressive and there is great deal of atmosphere with fog and gnarled trees in the moonlight. Waggner's direction is at its best when there is something happening - we like the camera panning at random to simulate the telescope, the tracking shots through the mist and the camera dollying in on the frightened features of the grave-digger. The music contains some familiar themes but it is effective too.

meddlecore Despite Universal's release of Stuart Walker's Werewolf Of London six years earlier, George Waggner's The Wolf Man would become Hollywood's archetypal werewolf film.It stars Lon Chaney, who gets bitten and turned into a into a wolf man by a gypsy fortune teller/werewolf.He beats the wolf to death with his silver cane- only to find out it was actually a man, when he wakes up in the morning.Really, he just wanted to woo the local jeweller's daughter. Now, he finds himself stricken with an ancient curse.And he's turning into a full blown werewolf.He promptly kills the gravedigger, and is followed back to his home by the police- where he tries to cover up his tracks.But he fears he might attack the woman he has eyes for...and he's starting to question everything he has ever believed.Nonetheless, he succumbs to the curse of the werewolf, and gets his comeuppance (which I personally think he deserves, because he's kind of a douche).This is a pretty solid, straight forward, film. And it sets a standard for what would become one of today's most well known sub-genres of horror.The werewolf makeup is pretty sweet...and that last transformation from werewolf back to human is pretty awesome! Though, a bit dated, this is still a classic film that needs to be seen.Definitely check it out.6.5 out of 10.

GL84 Returning to his ancestral homeland, a young man becomes increasingly convinced he's become the vicious wolf man running rampant across the countryside and tries to find a way of stopping the deadly curse from forcing him to hurt those around him.For the most part, this here is quite the deserving classic that has a lot to really like here. One of the better elements here is in how well this one lays out his coming to terms with his condition, as there are some great storytelling tactics to buy into what's going on. The constant nagging about the town's legend of the werewolf and it's tie-ins to the gypsies starts this off well, then once it brings up the attack on the couple in the woods that causes him to get the curse and all the really fun investigations going over the incident gives this some of the best parts of the film where they start going in on his experience which has no evidence to back it up. These scenes here are all built together with the towns' hysteria and his growing paranoia feeds into this one's storyline about his growing resentment at becoming this creature that it really sells the idea, and it all comes together so well that there's very little about this that doesn't come off as wholly appealing. To tie that all into the storyline is fun enough while managing to really overwhelm on the action scenes which are quite fun overall, from the first attack on the girl in the woods where he gets bitten, his first attack where he goes after the workers along the moors which is quite chilling with the suspenseful amount of fog rolling through the area and his later attacks prowling through the night which makes for some nice action in the later half where we get a lot of great looks at the werewolf makeup in action. As well, the fantastic finale really works quite well in generating the kind of exciting action required to leave on a high-note where the stalking of the girl through the swamp is quite a creepy setup leading so well into the scenes of the villagers chasing after him in the darkness with their pitchforks and torches while the big battle here gives this one the kind of rousing high-energy confrontation needed once it got there and ends this on a somewhat somber note. Given that this one really sets the standard for the genre's clichés and patterns into the setup, these are the film's main positives while there's a minor flaw here. This is that the amount of time spent here on the werewolf makeup show it off in a rather disheartening light by showing off just mounds of fur and hair glued all over which doesn't look best and really stands out here. Otherwise, there's not much really wrong here.Today's Rating/PG: Violence.