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 Craneno 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.
*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 Craneno 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.