La casa del terror (1960)

Director:

Gilberto Martínez Solares

Writers:

Juan García (adaptation)
Gilberto Martínez Solares (story)

Release Date:

24 March 1960 (Mexico)

Genre:

Comedy | Horror | Sci-Fi

Plot:

Casimiro, night watchman at a wax museum of horrors, is even more sleepy than his usual laziness makes him - because his boss...

Plot Keywords:

Experiment | Sarcophagus | Professor | Mummy | Wax Museum

Cast

Germán Valdés	...	Casimiro (as German Valdes Tin Tan)
Yolanda Varela	...	Paquita
Lon Chaney Jr.	...	The Werewolf (as Lon Chaney)
Yerye Beirute	...	The Professor (as Yeyre Beirute)
Óscar Ortiz de Pinedo	...	Psychologist
Consuelo Guerrero de Luna	...	Stuttering Patient
Alfredo Wally Barrón	...	Professor's first assistant (as Alfredo W. Barron)
Agustín Fernández	...	Professor's second assistant
Rafael Estrada
Dacia González	...	Waitress
José Silva		(as Silva)
José Luis Aguirre 'Trotsky'		(as Trotsky)
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Raymond Gaylord
Linda Varlès

Also Known As:

House of Terror

Runtime:

USA:60 min

Country:

Mexico

Language:

Spanish

Color:

Black and White

Sound Mix:

Mono

Company:

Diana Films

Movie Connections:

References The Wolf Man (1941)

This film throws in everything but the kitchen sink

A totally daft horror/comedy from Mexico that exists only in its original Spanish language version, but that hardly matters -- even if you don't understand what they're saying, the film is a hoot. Lon Chaney starts off playing a rather rotund mummy (in makeup that looks like a second-grade class attacked him with their paste jars) who is stolen during a press conference by a mad doctor, played by Boris Karloff-lookalike Yerye Beirut. The mummy miraculously gets revived and essentially turns into Larry Talbot, right down to the black clothes, and therefore into a wolf man (he is actually announced as "el homre lobo" while still in mummy form at the press conference, though no one appears particularly suprrised at this). Now add in a scared wax-museum caretaker (the funny German Valdes, aka "Tin-Tan"), wax figures that are really dead bodies, ala "House of Wax," spooky graveyard shots, a secret laboratory, a hirsuit Chaney chasing Tin-Tan around the lab, ala "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein," a musical number (why not?) and a King Kong-like finale that has the werewolf climbing up the side of a building with the girl over his shoulder, and you have a film that manages to be like a lot of others, but at the same time unlike any other. Chaney's wolf man makeup is fairly good -- certainly better than the mummy makeup -- and his silent performance (apparently he didn't speak Spanish, either) provides occasional echoes of his younger, better days at Universal.

A trivia note: Footage from "La Casa del Terror" was cut into a mid-sixties Jerry Warren mess called "Face of the Screaming Werewolf," and a recent book on the notorious Ed Wood, Jr. states that it was Wood who directed Chaney dragging the girl up the side of a building in full werewolf regalia. A subsequent book on Chaney rationalized that claim by postulating that it had to be Warren, not Wood, who really directed the scene. But the sequence is there in the original Mexican version, which was filmed five years before Warren shot his new scenes for "Screaming Werewolf."