The Curse of the Allenbys(aka. She-Wolf of London) is not a terrible film but it's not particularly great either and one of Universal's weakest overall.
It's the production values that makes The Curse of the Allenbys watchable, the sets are truly beautiful and rich in Gothic atmosphere, especially the fog-shrouded park, and the photography is equally handsome. William Lava's music score is appropriately haunting, the style of it fits well within the film and doesn't intrude with the atmosphere at all, this viewer associates Lava with his scores for some of the Looney Tunes cartoons but his music here is different and is effective. Some scenes do have a spooky atmosphere that does evoke some tension, but not really in a nail-biting way. A couple of performances are also decent, Sara Haden being excellent even while Dennis Hoey is in the Inspector role again but with a different and more subtle and intelligent approach to his Lestrade in the Sherlock Holmes Universal series.
June Lockhart was a highly dependable actress but while she is entrancing in the looks department this is really not one of her best roles, it's a blandly written character to begin with but Lockhart acts with too much doe-eyed passivity. Don Porter also is rather wooden. The dialogue is clunky and sometimes talky froth and the direction is technically accomplished but too staid, but it's the story that brings the film down the most. It's not helped by the misleading advertising and title, giving the sense that it was going to be a horror film with a she-wolf. As a horror film though The Curse of the Allenbys fails, if anything the film's more a mystery thriller-like one and even in that respect it doesn't rise above average. It's not scary or even remotely creepy, and the lack of suspense, draggy pacing, that not an awful lot happens and that it's rather predictable(the perpetrator and ending to me weren't that hard to figure out) are the reasons for that.
Overall, disappointing and not Universal at their best. A failure as a horror and blandly average as a mystery. 5/10 Bethany Cox
It's the production values that makes The Curse of the Allenbys watchable, the sets are truly beautiful and rich in Gothic atmosphere, especially the fog-shrouded park, and the photography is equally handsome. William Lava's music score is appropriately haunting, the style of it fits well within the film and doesn't intrude with the atmosphere at all, this viewer associates Lava with his scores for some of the Looney Tunes cartoons but his music here is different and is effective. Some scenes do have a spooky atmosphere that does evoke some tension, but not really in a nail-biting way. A couple of performances are also decent, Sara Haden being excellent even while Dennis Hoey is in the Inspector role again but with a different and more subtle and intelligent approach to his Lestrade in the Sherlock Holmes Universal series.
June Lockhart was a highly dependable actress but while she is entrancing in the looks department this is really not one of her best roles, it's a blandly written character to begin with but Lockhart acts with too much doe-eyed passivity. Don Porter also is rather wooden. The dialogue is clunky and sometimes talky froth and the direction is technically accomplished but too staid, but it's the story that brings the film down the most. It's not helped by the misleading advertising and title, giving the sense that it was going to be a horror film with a she-wolf. As a horror film though The Curse of the Allenbys fails, if anything the film's more a mystery thriller-like one and even in that respect it doesn't rise above average. It's not scary or even remotely creepy, and the lack of suspense, draggy pacing, that not an awful lot happens and that it's rather predictable(the perpetrator and ending to me weren't that hard to figure out) are the reasons for that.
Overall, disappointing and not Universal at their best. A failure as a horror and blandly average as a mystery. 5/10 Bethany Cox