Cry of the Werewolf (1944)

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

I couldn't agree more with those who called this a turkey. The running time is just over 60 minutes but it feels like 3 hours. Slow, turgid crime drama with a supposed horror element is what you get. Nina Foch plays the gypsy girl who turns into a werewolf, but in reality she turns into a regular wolf, an entirely different animal. Even "She Wolf of London" is better than this, and that one is no epic either. Stephen Crane is an awful actor; a lousy romantic lead. The gypsy queen comes off best, but still she's hardly Maria Ospenskya. The other Columbia entry into horror, "Return of The Vampire" proved that not every movie studio was up to doing horror films well. At least that one had a good demise of the vampire at the end. Best stick with Universal horror films of the era.

"Cry of the Werewolf" is a decent enough entry in the genre, and is pretty entertaining.**SPOILERS**In a museum tour, guide Peter, (John Abbott) explains about local legends involving vampires and werewolves. After the last one, he and Dr. Charles Morris, (Fritz Leiber) retire for the night, only for Bob Morris, (Stephan Crane) and his girlfriend Elsa Chauvet, (Osa Massen) to find that the museum had fallen under a series of mysterious events. Starting to investigate what happened, a very long legal battle over the culprit resolves with nothing accomplished. When they find that a local gypsy tribe has a way of explaining what happened, they quickly race to stop the creature that has been attacking those nearby.The Good News: This here is actually rather fun. The fact that this one is a predominant mystery makes it really good. There's a lot of back-and-forth over what is going on and that is rather entertaining. This also has a really believable one for this, since it manages to mix in a story about how the ancestors handled it and some rather intelligent areas explored in the back-story. That back-story allows for a bit of mystery concerning what has happened, which is done with the mixing together of a gypsy legend and that of a distorted family version. The huge museum also looks rather creepy, which is perfect for setting up an air of suspense and dread with it. The last big positive is that there's a lot more action than expected. This one has several really nice scenes , including a spectacular chase through the museum at the end, which has some great moments inside it and an earlier sequence where a character is stalked through a mausoleum by a large shadow across the wall. It's a great scene, but can't compare to how great the final museum chase sequence is. That is quite fun, and is the film's really good points.The Bad News: This one doesn't have a whole lot wrong, and is a mildly flawed film. The biggest flaw is that there's a rather large chunk of time taken up with the impossibly long courtroom scene. This drags on forever and takes quite a long time to get through. This is also time consuming with a large segment without drawing anything with it. The case is concluded with only a few little pieces captured about the background but doesn't do anything else. This never says anything about what might've or could've helped, and that would've been a justifiable reason for keeping it there. It's a useless scene that only serves to eat up time. Another pretty big flaw is that this one's werewolf is played by dogs or wolves dressed up to look like werewolves. This really takes away from the creature when they're obviously completely against the norm. seeing a grown man do a horribly-choreographed shoving contest with a dog while others are screaming at him to avoid the werewolf is beyond ridiculous. These are the films with the film, and are responsible for lowering this one.The Final Verdict: With a fair amount of both strengths and negatives, this one comes out as being rather decent overall. It's not mind-blowing spectacular, but serves just good enough for fans of the horror from the time period or those into the earliest werewolf movies to give this much of a look.Today's Rating-PG: Mild Violence

I enjoyed this film precisely due to the reasons that another reviewer DIDN"T! It was interesting to have a woman as a werewolf, there was no werewolf costume used, and there was an element of mystery in the proceedings.I enjoyed the Val Lewton-ish scene in the mortuary basement where the hero is being stalked by the werewolf!I myself am glad that the werewolf transformation scene was done in shadow (the Val Lewton touch), as the special effects of the time were far removed from today's slick computer-created animations. Anything other than the way it was done would've looked SILLY.A nifty, seldom-seen film! Norm(PS. Hull's makeup looks MUCH more "wolfish" than Cheney Jr's!).

Scenes featuring three magnetic actresses lift The Cry of the Werewolf to a brief but intriguing glimpse of an occult matriarchy and sisterhood who renounce men for lycanthropy. A short running time and shorter budget prevent these themes' development, but the film delivers one loopy turn after another: *Despite being set in New Orleans, where water levels preclude underground construction, the film features two extended scenes in basements of surprising dimensions.*Granted, New Orleans is a multicultural city, but who suspected it was teeming with immigrants from Transylvania, among them a sizeable encampment of Gypsy or Roma folk in traditional covered wagons?*Several scenes hinge on a quadruped other than a wolf: Minnie the cat's yowls at wolves or gypsies earn her surprising screen time as well as solicitude from employees at the Marie La Tour Museum. Three scenes are punctuated by characters acting on Minnie's behalf.*Those wandering Gypsies / Roma converge in New Orleans one month a year for ethnic courtship and to bury their dead. Just when you're asking yourself, "What do they do with their dead those 11 other months?", another eccentric scene answers the question. . . .*"Adamson and Sons Undertakers" is, in its front rooms, a facsimile of a mid-20th-century funeral parlor, complete with drab furniture, cheap drapes, and recorded organ music playing in the background. Hurrying to turn it off is the last of the Adamsons, played by Milton Parsons (also uncredited), whose bald noggin and solicitous manner would lead to film and TV appearances through the 70s as a clerk, clergyman, professor, choirmaster, or coroner (thanks, IMDb).*"Refrigerated vaults" keep the Gypsy dead "on ice" at Adamson and Sons. A quick tour leads to a basement as extensive as a hospital wing. There a four-legged werewolf stalks Dr. Robert Morris, the movie's insipid leading man played by Stephen Crane—no kin to The Red Badge of Courage author but doing his gosh-darnedest to imitate Jimmy Stewart.*The other basement, back in the Marie La Tour Museum but unseen till late in the movie, is entered through a mantelpiece by a secret passage whose operations everyone seems to know. Murders are overheard occurring somewhere beneath the fireplace. For most of the movie, though, viewers aren't granted a view of this secret chamber of blood. Near the end, though, Dr. Morris and Ilsa (Osa Massun), his Translylvanian foster-sister-turned-fiancée, explore the space. An altar designed like a Murphy bed drops out of the wall, bearing a large stuffed wolf, a human skull, and a goblet.These surprises aren't consistent enough to build on each other, but the film's a fast 66 minutes, so take a chance if only for the sake of its uncanny climax. That occurs in the covered wagon of Nina Foch's Gypsy Queen, named Marie La Tour after her mother—-herself named perhaps to evoke the historical Marie Laveau (1801-81), a Voodoo queen of New Orleans who shared the name of her similarly talented mother.Under the guiding eye of Blanche Yurka as Bianca the "old woman," Queen Marie recruits her look-alike Ilsa, a non-Gypsy Transylvanian-American, to join her as a "sister" in the werewolf matriarchy founded by her mother, the previous werewolf-queen. No men! Ilsa's eyes grow and glow, but the moment is so overloaded with feminine beauty, lycanthropy, and alternative sexuality that the only exit available to her is a dead faint. When Ilsa is rescued by the regrettable Dr. Morris, the revelatory allure of that occult alternative shines a little brighter.