Review of The Legend of the Wolf Woman

La Lupa Mannara, or Werewolf Woman as it's more commonly known among English speaking audiences, begins 200 years ago with a naked woman (Annik Borel) tied to a stake in the ground and surrounded by a circle of fire as the credits roll, she also performs some sort of dance totally naked. After a lengthy nonsensical monologue about Werewolves this woman turns into one, a Werewolf that is. She has a dog snout for a nose, sharp teeth & drools a little bit but otherwise looks human in appearance except her ridiculous looking over-sized nipples and patches of hair over her body. A local posse of torch wielding towns people are after her. She kills one (Andrea Scotti) by sticking an axe in his head. Daniella Neseri (Annik Borel, again) wakes up from her nightmare. Ever since Daniella found a miniature portrait of an ancestress that has a striking resemblance to herself she has been having bizarre nightmares & hallucinations. Daniella has been living in solitude in the Italian countryside with her rich industrialist Father, Count Neseri (Tino Carraro), ever since she was raped when she was thirteen. Daniella is one messed up individual. One day her Father informs Daniella that her sister Elena (Dagmar Lassander) and her husband Fabian (Andrea Scotti, again) are coming to visit. When they arrive Daniella is shocked to find that Fabian looks exactly like the guy in her nightmare. After dinner and drinks Elena and Fabian go upstairs and start to have sex, Daniella looks and listens outside their open door and starts to, ahem touch herself if you know what I mean. Daniella makes a noise and runs away outside. Fabian decides to investigate the noise and follows Daniella outside. Fabian finds her and Daniella starts to seduce and have sex with him until she bites a chunk of flesh out of his throat and chucks his body over the side of a cliff. Daniella and her Father cover Fabians death up but Daniella completely loses it and is confined to hospital. A female patient tries to have lesbian sex with Daniella. Daniella kills her with a pair of scissors and escapes the hospital by stealing a doctor's car. Daniella then wanders around watching people having sex and killing them, killing people not having sex and just generally making a nuisance of herself. Inspector Monika (Frederick Stafford) is assigned to clear up the mess that Daniella is leaving behind, track her down and bring her to justice! Eventually Daniella seems to settle down, find some happiness with a boyfriend & start a relationship but things soon change when some local thugs decide they want to rape Daniella and kill her boyfriend. Actions which literally brings the animal out in Daniella! Co-written and directed by Rino Di Silvestro I thought Werewolf Woman was a cheap Italian produced exploitation film, which is not a bad thing in itself. It's not a bad film I suppose but it's hardly anything special, it has a very silly premise, unlikable characters, poor dubbing and an uninvolving patchy story. The script by Di Sivestro and Howard Ross who stars in the film as well, moves along at a fairly good pace but is very silly. The only sequence to feature a Werewolf is the opening nightmare, the script then tries to explain Daniella's actions with lots of stupid psychoanalysis babble spouted by pool playing doctor's that has to be heard to be believed. Totally ridiculous stuff and utterly laughable at times. Characters just come and go, for instance Daniella's Father and sister Elena both get a lot of screen time at the start but then they all but disappear at the half way mark at which point Inspector Monika is introduced along with Daniella's boyfriend as their characters take over the remainder of the film. Daniella is the only character who is in the film throughout, from beginning to end. Talking of the end it's really dull and doesn't bring things to a satisfactory conclusion in any way, we also get another narration that claims these events were based on a real life incident. There is lots of nudity in Werewolf Woman. Borel gets undressed at every opportunity, in fact I think the amount of time she spends naked is greater than the time she is clothed. All the other female cast members also take their clothes off at some point. There are a lot of sex scenes and an unpleasant rape. The gore & violence is more restrained, a gory shot of an axe in someones forehead, a pair of scissors stuck into the back of someones neck, a dead mauled body on an autopsy table and a few bitten off chunks of flesh. Nothing to explicit but at the same time these scenes have a certain nastiness about them. Werewolf Woman as a whole has the sort of production values you would expect from a 70's Italian exploitation film, cheap looking but professional enough and in no way outstanding. Worth watching if your a Euro exploitation/horror fan but if not than don't bother as there's nothing here to shout about. Average, at best.