The Hunchback of the Morgue is a wonderful film with a great pace, an engaging story, some outrageous gore, and real scares. As the doomed and misbegotten Gotho, Naschy gives one of his finest dramatic performances – it earned him a well-deserved prize at Sitges, and I think it would've even made Karloff or Chaney, Sr. proud. Naschy is able to make Gotho, an utterly clueless and abused hunchback/morgue-janitor, a sympathetic character despite possessing a nasty, vicious temper, and being both an accomplice to serious crime, and a latent necrophiliac. Naturally, I think he's quite adorable, and with Naschy writing the script, so does the leading lady, regular co-star Rosanna Yanni. The real villain of the film is one Dr. Orla (homage/rip at Jess Franco or Generalissimo Franco?) who takes full and horrible advantage of Gotho's hardships; Orla (excellently portrayed by genre-veteran Alberto Dalbes) leads Gotho down a truly sickening path involving corpse robbing (or corpse-creating) and some absolutely ungodly experiments. The film's climax shocked me when I first saw it – I wasn't expecting it to be so frightening. There's a build-up throughout the film as to what the experiment-generated monster actually looks like, and unlike most cases of this device, it ultimately pays off in spades. The gore and make-up is fabulous, as is the sound effect for the monster (it still sends chills down my spine to think of it). The Hunchback of the Morgue is a real benchmark of Spanish Horror, and certainly one of Naschy's career. But be warned, this film does contain a scene (it's most notorious) where real rats were burned alive.
Review of Hunchback of the Morgue
