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Professor Sebastián (Yerye Beirute) conducts experiments on bringing
the dead back to life ... and thus frequently draws blood from his
otherwise totally useless nightguard Casimiro (Germán Valdés). Thing is
though, he constantly fails ... until he finds a mummy (Lon Chaney jr)
that he thinks will serve his purposes much better than any ordinary human
... because the mummy's also a werewolf. Well, the experiment succeeds,
but once the mummy has become a werewolf, he kills Sebastián's assistants
(Alfredo Wally Barrón, Agustín Fernández) and the professor has
problems locking the beast into a cage conveniently situated in his secret
lab inside his wax museum. Casimiro sleeps through all of this, and once
he wakes up, the werewolf has already escaped from his cage and started to
prowl the neighbourhood - which leads to many scenes where Casimiro sees
the werewolf, but nobody else does. Casimiro only really jumps into action
when the werewolf kidnaps his girlfriend Paquita (Yolanda Varela), and he
even climbs up a highrise after the creature to save her - but ultimately,
the werewolf returns to the professor's lab, which naturally goes up in
flames, and the professor and the beast with it - and Casimiro saves (and
gets) the girl ... La Casa del Terror is known to the
English speaking world mainly because it's the last werewolf movie with
Lon Chaney jr in the lupine lead, and because its horror scenes were
worked into Jerry Warren's Face
of the Screaming Werewolf - but unlike that movie, La Casa del
Terror is actually more of a comedy, though anything but an extremely
funny one. Actually, most of the jokes are built around Germán Valdés'
character being very lazy, very frightened (something that he sheds in the
end), and seeing the werewolf when nobody else sees him. The plot this is
hung up on is rather on the thin side and full of genre clichés, and Lon
Chaney jr's role is a dialogue-less one and he's just going through the
motions again as he has done so many times before - but at least he does
what with panache ...
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