FANTASIA OBSCURA: (Alleged) She-Wolves of London… A-rooo!
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, though, it can take a while to go from concept to execution, even decades…
She-Wolf of London (1946)
(Dist.: Universal Pictures; Dir.: Jean Yarbrough)
When the second round of Universal Monsters pictures was produced around the time of the World War II, the studio embraced a legacy they tried to walk away from before. The high cost of their musicals forcing them to undertake cheaper productions and the renewed interest in their earlier monster films led to a revival, with Son of Frankenstein giving the studio confidence to go full-in on creature constructions. It’s during this second wave that one of Universal’s most iconic films in the series, The Wolf Man, got produced and released, showing that the studio never forgot how to do what it did successfully.
Unfortunately, it never learned how not to make the same kind of mistakes it made before…
Set in London in the early 1900s, we find our heroine/victim, Phyllis Allenby (June Lockhart) on the verge of both getting married to barrister Barry Lanfield (Don Porter) and losing her mind, believing that she is the inheritor of the “curse of the Allenbys.” We never really get a good idea what the curse is, and with a running time of only 61 minutes, the film could certainly have added a scene to explain it, but the fact the Scotland Yard seems pretty casual about werewolf attacks in the park, we can take a guess.
Helping her through this traumatic period is her aunt Martha (Sara Hayden) and cousin Carol (Jan Wiley), assisted by their housekeeper Hannah (Eily Maylon), who worry about her and try to convince her that she’s not a monster. Except, of course, that one of these three is actually trying to convince her that she is a monster, and that all those horrible things happening in the park are her fault, even though there’s no werewolf at all.
Sorry if that’s a spoiler, but with the title of the movie promising the viewer one thing and after the build-up the film goes through before the final, sad reveal, decency requires a little truth in advertising be taken here. So to stress: There. Are. No. Werewolves. In. The. Movie!
Settling instead for being a bargain basement Gaslight, the film wastes a potentially potent idea the way it did with Dracula’s Daughter, unable to go somewhere worthwhile when it had the chance the first time. As a result, the film ends up being one of the least well remembered of Universal’s horror pictures.
Universal did, however, remember the title and concept well enough that when it had the chance, it could finally make good on the concept by building on their trademarks and deep-held intellectual property. Anxious to get in on the booming television syndication market of the late ’80s, early ’90s, the time of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Universal sold a package of programs to stations under the Hollywood Premiere Network banner in 1990. One of the three programs they offered, She-Wolf of London, finally gave us our werewolf:
An underrated series that paranormally touched investigators dealing with horrors seven years before Buffy the Vampire Slayer debuted on the WB, the series followed Randi Wallace (Kate Hodge), bitten by a werewolf and forced to change every full moon, as she looked for a cure and encountered other monsters alongside Prof. Ian Matheson (Neil Dickson).
Sadly, a lack of faith from the executives which reduced budgets (moving production from London to Los Angeles before the end) and played up wacky comedy over drama forced the series to do only 20 episodes with increasingly sillier stories as the run continued, relegating the show to a distant memory. Audiences would have to wait while looking elsewhere for a true, proper, horrifying female werewolf — until 2000, with the release of the film Ginger Snaps.
As for Universal’s efforts at being more inclusive while being horrifying, progress continued very slowly. Their only other effort, The Invisible Woman, is a genre film you could make a strong argument in favor of forgetting. Other than that, the studio would not have a woman rising from her tomb in Egypt to cause terror until their planned 2017 reboot of The Mummy, and no one has indicated that there would ever be a “gill woman” coming from the Black Lagoon.
In the meantime, we were left with the fact that we would not get a proper female lycanthrope from Universal (or anyone else) for decades… presumably; though after all, it needs to be pointed out, when June Lockhart played Ruth Martin on Lassie years later, she had this uncanny ability to tell just from the dog’s barks not only that Timmy was down the well, but where the well was located. So if she could speak to dogs like that, then maybe…
NEXT TIME: It’s so hot out there, we’re stripping down before we try to take over the world…
