La lupa mannara

Soft porn Italian she-wolf horror with loads of throat-ripping, c-word yelling debauchery to offend almost everyone. A young woman (Borel) believes she's the reincarnation of a two hundred year family link to lycanthropy, and duly turns into a savage she-wolf during the full moon. Complicating matters, she's also sex-averse due to a harrowing experience when she was younger, seducing her victims before gorging on their blood in retribution for their misguided advances.

Frequent disrobing by almost all of the female cast and a plethora of gory murders will appeal to some audiences, the line between mainstream feature film and sado-porn is sometimes teased, but never fully crossed. Dagmar Lassander has a largely extraneous and minor role, most of which is a sex scene, while Frederick Stafford does an amiable job as the inspector with an ever-burgeoning mountain of corpses, courtesy of our fair maiden Borel. For her part, Borel is intense and obviously committed to her performance, but the film's erratic narrative fails to focus and consequently, her role is shallow and uninvolving.

Director Silvestro seems uncertain whether he's making a werewolf movie, attempting a mental health statement, a rape and revenge flick, or just a softcore trip with apparently divergent themes awkwardly woven into the tale that seems at times never-ending (I saw an uncut 100 minute version which despite all the climaxing throughout the movie, fails to deliver one at the film's sunset). Little suspense, just buckets of gore, nudity, self flagellation, various sexual acts and grade A profanity to pass the time. Bring it on.

This is NOT a good movie. Nor is it really even "so-bad-its-good", but it is kind of interesting in a twisted, car wreck sort of way. The movie is about a young woman who due to an ancient family curse and implied childhood sexual abuse is suffering from a kind of "hysterical lycanthropy". She believes herself to be a werewolf, so she starts killing (and eventually eating) her male lovers. Her actual lycanthropic status is left kind of ambiguous throughout the movie, making this more interesting than most. It kind of aspired to be what "Ginger Snaps" was years later. But unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view) it was directed by Rino DiSilvestri, a notorious Italian exploitation hack who had absolutely no sense of his own limitations. Still I vastly prefer a movie like this that tries to be serious and stumbles into camp, to one that intentionally aims at camp (like so many alleged "cult" movies do today) and fails just as miserably.

Of course, DiSivestri WAS pretty good at sexploitation, and he always had a very decent female cast. In his earlier movies he worked with a whole bevy of Euro-beauties (Anita Strindberg, Jenny Tamburi, Paola Senatore, Krista Nell, Magda Konopfka, Orchidea DiSantis, ad infinitum). Here he's reduced to the lovely Dagmar Lassander, who has probably the longest and most gratuitous sex scene of her career, and the lead, the much more obscure Anik Borel, who was cast because DiSivestri, according to his DVD commentary, thought "she looked like a wolf". She is kind of weird looking I guess, but her body is pretty impressive and you get to see a whole lot of it here. (Interestingly, her only other notable screen credit is in "Weekend with the Babysitter" a very 70's and very American sexploitation film directed by Tom "Billy Jack" McLoughlin). This movie is certainly not for everybody, but it works for me

Daniella Neseri raped as a girl,channels her hatred towards men by summoning and becoming possessed by a deceased and vicious female werewolf ancestor.She lures victims by her charm,sexual drive and seduction before turning into the Wolf-woman to graphically take a bloody revenge and kill them."The Werewolf Woman" by Rino Di Silvestro of "Deported Women of the SS" fame is a very sleazy Italian horror film loaded with gore and graphic nudity.The first dreamy sequence in which Annik Borel is writhing and dancing naked before transforming into werewolf left me stunned.The film is occasionally quite dull,however it surely contains lots of nudity,soft core sex and bloody mayhem.I particularly liked the supernatural aspects of the story.The acting is bad and the dubbing is even worse,but overlook that and we have an enjoyable piece of Italian sleaze with no artistic pretensions.I wanted nudity and gore and that's what I've got.7 out of 10.

I don't know how I could explain that I like Werewolf Woman. It doesn't work logically as a movie, but does one go into a movie that's about a schizo who craves the company of men and then kills them at the instant they try and have their way with her expecting great art? It's a little like a rougher, more sexed-up cut of David Cronenberg's Rabid, only here the dead or injured don't come back to life. This time it's Annik Borel, instead of Marilyn Chambers, as the perplexed anti-heroine of the story. The catch with her is that she has werewolf ancestry in her blood, and after a cruel rape (which we may or may not see on screen, I can't remember) she goes on a killing spree.

The dubbing is bad, but maybe deliberately so; Leone didn't have dialog so bad that it made the voice-over actors cringe as they said some of their lines. And sometimes the director and crew get creative with blood and various colors: there's a shot when Daniella, after attacking a nurse whom she's snuck into the car with, gets out of the now crashed vehicle, and the first shot seen looks as though there's blood everywhere, though it's mostly just the seats and a jacket. For a moment or two, Werewolf Woman carries artistry (not to mention during a particularly steamy sex scene as Daniella watches with hungry, jealous eyes of a friend getting it on with a friend).

When all is said and done, Werewolf Woman does teeter between a hot and exciting half-farce half-serious/pretentious drama on a woman's descent into madness and murder, and it doesn't amount to any kind of 'statement' except that, um, crazy women with a disease passed down through the generations can't be stomped out so all men with penises have to pay. Yeah, that's it. But even with the laughs that are had- including a bit when Daniella is in the hospital bed and an over-affectionate nymph comes in trying to have her way with the taut were-woman that probably inspired the P**** Wagon scene in Kill Bill 1- it's not a badly made film at all, which adds to the appeal.

It's not some stupid movie put together in very cheap soft-core ways. If there is any strength to the best sex scenes it's that they seem actually erotic and not as some tedious pornographic exercise ala Porno Holocaust. And, relative to other cheesy horror flicks of the 70s (the *Italian* horror 70s), Annik Borel isn't too shabby an actress, with a quality reminiscent of Sondra Locke from Clint Eastwood's films (only, perhaps, a better actress!) She adds just that little bit of fun and danger to a part that needs it to sustain its tone wavering between exploitation and sincere horror.

So watch it under a full-moon, make sure you're tied to the bed (without any crazies around to untie the knots), and keep all sexual organs on stand-by- Werewolf Woman is a bite!

I saw this on terrestrial television here recently and found it one of the most hilariously bad films I've seen in a long while.

It's starts out with a make-up job that has to be seen to be believed (get a load of the stuck-on fur and black nipples on the were-woman) and get's progressively worse.

It's your standard Italian 70's exploitation fare with the usual contents of rape, gore and standard soft-core lesbian scenes and editing that's been done with a meat-cleaver. If MST3K ever do adult versions of their show, I'd recommend this one.