Werewolf Of London (1935) Some years before the Wolf Man was released, Universal tried out a movie with
similar themes in 1935 in a little piece of less than successful period horror
called Werewolf of London. Now I won't lie to you and say that this movie is anywhere near as good
and/or entertaining as The Wolf Man or even the song "Werewolves of London" by Warren Zevon, but it also doesn't
fall in with some of Universal's worst horror movies like The Invisible Man's Revenge or one of those Mummy movies that featured Kharis instead of Boris Karloff's
Im-Ho-Tep from the original.
Henry Hull is a mega-popular botanist named Dr. Wilfred Glendon and he's on
vacation in Tibet looking for a really fancy flower that only blooms in the
moon light. It 's called the mariphasa lupino lumino and despite it sounding
like some sort of Latin American actress, it's basically a generic white flower
that you or I would just stomp on as soon as look at. The flower is naturally
holed up in its secret hideout in some forbidden part of the mountains and
Glendon actually runs into an old dude who warns him not to go to that area
because it's in a really bad neighborhood or something. You may recall this
setup from any number of scary mountain movies like The Abominable Snowman. Glendon and a pal head off in search of this flower and encounter some strange
unseen forces that hinder their movement, but eventually Glendon makes it to a
place where some of the flowers are growing. I don't really recall what
happened to Glendon's companion, but Glendon didn't seem to worry about it, so
I wasn't sweating it either. Just as Glendon is ready to capture this flower,
there's some howling and the next thing you know, we're in the middle of our
very first werewolf attack. Glendon gets himself chomped on the arm, but
somehow manages to survive the attack, so that he can return to England and
begin his hairy rampage. Back at home, Glendon has what we will delicately call "woman problems." This
means that the little lady he's married to is constantly whining about all the
time he spends in his lab trying to get that little stupid flower to bloom.
He's even gone so far as to invent some type of artificial moonlight, which
resembles those big lights the dentist has hovering above your stanky mouth
when he's knocking you out with nitrous oxide and filling your cavities and/or
feeling you up.  Glendon is one of those pasty-faced botanists that wears his pinched expression
like it was a laboratory smock, so you can imagine his excitement when for some
reason there's this charity event he has to attend with his wife. It's the
biggest social gala of the season for plants in the London area. All the heavy
hitters are there: the Venus Flytrap, Triffids, and that weird looking plant
with tentacles that move around and try to eat babies. Guess who else is at the
party? It's Captain Paul Ames, a dashing pilot who is a childhood friend of
Mrs. Glendon! We know he's dashing because the old fuddy duddy ladies go ga-ga
over him and we hear something about some gallant deed he did while flying. The
real give away that he's dashing is his little, Frenchie-style mustache that
real men would never be caught dead with, but that women from a hundred years
ago thought was a sign of masculinity. What about guys who are obsessed with
flowers? That's manly, right? (Heck, I tried, Dr. Glendon.)
For reasons I'll never understand, the wife of Dr. Glendon seems to be
attracted to this fancy pilot. I don't know why she would think he was better
than the good doctor. I mean, being neglected because of some retarded flower
is something the wife of the most valuable botanist (MVB) of 1935 should have
expected when she signed on board. While she's trying to join the mile high club with the Red Baron, Dr. Glendon
gets a visit from a rotund dude that speaks very mysteriously about meeting
Glendon in Tibet, about flowers and about werewolves. He even knows were
Glendon was bit by the werewolf. If you think that this dude, Dr. Yogami, is
familiar it's either because you've figured out that he was the werewolf that
bit Glendon back in Tibet or because you've seen actor Warner Olander in the
thirty-eight Charlie Chan features he made in about a three year period in the
early thirties. I kept waiting for Number One Son to show up and lend a hand
to things, but apparently he was off on another assignment.  Yogami is there trying to get hooked up with some magic flowers, but that
greedy Glendon is not going to give them up, so Yogami steals some of them.
These flowers important because they are an antidote when you change into a
werewolf. If you don't get the antidote, you need to kill at least one person a
night, and as an added, dramatic stipulation, you will be driven to seek out
the one you love the most! I hope Mrs. Glendon's seat is in the upright
position and that her seat belt is fastened because things are about to get
very bumpy! You see, it's that time when the moon is full and Dr. Glendon has
that primal urge all men have to haunt the fogged-shrouded streets of London
and bump off hookers. The best part is that when he goes out he wears an
outfit with a coat, hat, and scarf like he was one of the Beatles from the
movie Help.
After returning to human form, Glendon starts to worry about things, like
turning into a werewolf again and killing more "working girls." So he hangs
out at the lab and stands over the last flower that hasn't bloomed saying stuff
like, "come on you stupid flower! Bloom! Bloom! Bloom!" Then it gets dark
again and the movie veers off into filler time. Filler time in a seventy-five
minute movie is almost never recommended. What I mean, is that from here on
out, the movie consists of Glendon running around each night trying to lock
himself up so he doesn't kill, all the while waiting for his worthless
mariphasa to finally show itself. The first time he did that was mildly entertaining, but when he does it the
next night, you start to think that maybe somebody, say the writer, didn't
exactly have much gas left in the tank. What's also irritating is how dumb
Glendon is when it comes to locking himself up. I'm not real sure, but I got
the impression that it was the direct exposure to moonlight that caused his
condition, much like it was the exposure to moonlight that caused the flower to
bloom. If that's the case, why did Glendon always lock himself in rooms that
had windows, why didn't he ever pull the shade or curtains on those windows,
and why did he insist on sitting in these windows so that the moonlight could
hit him? Why not just lock yourself in a basement or some windowless room?  It isn't just Glendon's questionable efforts to stop himself from killing that
hampers this film. For these kinds of movies to work, you need some amount of
sympathy for the victim/monster. The point is about someone losing their
humanity and their loved ones and their struggle against that. That sort of
thing was handled well in movies like The Wolf Man and The Fly. Why? Because you were allowed to see the afflicted persons as people that
were decent and good and someone you wouldn't mind knowing.
This Glendon guy? He's a cold scientist with little hint of feelings for his
wife or anyone else except his precious little flowers. So what if he gets
tapped to be a werewolf? After watching how he treated and neglected his wife,
is there anyone out there that doesn't think that she would be better off
without him and that she would be happier with this pilot? Not because of all
his cool adventures, but because he treats her like she is important, not a
piece of furniture. He talks to her about things other than secret flower
experiments and he wants to go out with her and spend time doing things other
than worrying if the latest shipment of fertilizer has rolled in yet. The movie also suffers from a lack of buildup between Yogami and Glendon. The
problem is that Glendon and Charlie Chan didn't have much screen time together
and never really had any acknowledgement of a feud until tubby got caught
giving a flower the five finger discount. Even though Yogami turned Glendon
into a werewolf and that he took his flower, Glendon didn't really seem to know
much of that until the very end, and didn't seem to care other than he was
irked that his flower was stolen. More time should have been used establishing
Yogami as someone we hate for turning Glendon into this creature. I don't
think I'm going out on a limb when I say that this film doesn't fare well when
compared to The Wolf Man, but much of its problems are of its own making and not the results of being
in the shadow of a superior movie. Your monster must generate sympathy for
these types of stories to be involving. When Glendon finally took a bullet (it
wasn't even silver!), I just thought, "that was only about 75 minutes overdue,
you unfeeling, self-absorbed jerk!"
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