La Bestia y la Espada Magica AKA The Beast and the Magic Sword (1983)


director: Paul Naschy
release-year: 1983
genres: horror, fantasy, werewolf, shocktober
countries: Spain, Japan
languages: Spanish
fests: SHOCKtober 2024: WOLFtober

The tenth out of twelve Naschy films about a wolf man named Count Waldemar Daninsky, a Spanish-language film shot in Japan. It opens in the year 900-something, in a German castle where a Spanish emperor is conspiring to hire a Polish paladin named Daninsky to kill one of their prisoners in hand-to-hand combat, because the emperor fears his population will be cursed if the prisoner is merely executed. They head on down to the local Medieval Times, and the paladin lops the baddie's head off with a cheap prop sword.

Crisis averted.

The slain leader's wife turns out to be the real witch, and curses the paladin's family line by poking Daninsky's wife in the pregnant belly with a prop skull. The witch wears a flattened fox on her head.

Crisis reestablished.

Jumping forward to the 1600s, a Daninsky descendant asks some Jewish secret society scientist to help cure his lycanthropy. He introduces his blind daughter with super senses, which will surely be important later. The local townsfolk whisper about them all being witches. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition… except this guy, who knows they're coming. The inquisition stabs the secret society guy in the gut. The human-form Count Waldemar fights them all off in a dramatic sword fight, and makes his first strangulation kill.

Naschy looks like a werewolf even in normal times.

The dying scientist gives him directions to find the next secret society scientist: he must travel to Japan with the blind daughter and find the scientist (also a samurai) named Kian. We, the viewer, meet Kian in the next scene, where he is being hired to figure out who is vandalizing buried corpses during the full moon. The Japanese all speak dubbed Spanish, and boy oh boy do people ever like to talk in this film.

It can't be an animal because animals don't know about the moon.

The Japanese have their own werewolf problem going on, and all of the guards they send out to find the beast are found devoured the next morning. They chatter about it a lot, and the next night the werewolf eats a dozen people in a brothel before Kian randomly walks by and spots the werewolf walking around on the roof. Kian tells his superior that he has seen a wolf man, un licántropo. He says werewolves have pentagram-shaped scars on their chests, grow back limbs that are lost (!!??), and can only be wounded by silver weapons. They ask him if he's had a bit too much saké. "He must be killed by a woman who pieces his heart with a silver weapon during a full moon," Kian continues, "the woman must love him more than her own life." It's wildly inconvenient.

People seem to give their necks willingly.

Count Waldemar is also in Japan now, and I'm not sure if we're meant to know if he is the same werewolf that has been eating Kian's friends. Waldemar can't find Kian, and determines the best way to solve that is to visit a sorceress in the mountains. Before he can do that, Kian finds him by tracking werewolf paw prints. Kian himself was followed by a lady ninja, who sneaks in through the roof to spy on them; she works for rival samurai, and reports back that Kian is working with the killer werewolf.

The rival samurai also keeps this secret.

While having bizarrely acted conversations in a hot spring, suddenly Kian notices the lady ninja and initiates a topless battle in the spa. He gets the upper hand, when she is suddenly assassinated by one of her own via throwing star to the boob. It penetrates about 2mm into her skin, which is enough to kill her instantly. The camera zooms in on her nipple to ensure we saw it clearly.

Fast acting poison, perhaps.

A bunch of ninjas hop into the water for a sword fight, complete with cool ninja flips, but they are no match for Kian with a dagger.

Exactly the face I was making.

Suddenly Kian is out of the spa and fully clothed, and he chain-and-katana duels with his rival in a poorly choreographed samurai showdown. He wins quickly and with little fanfare, his dead rival hopping stupidly into the river to be washed away.

Chain sheath doesn't help, but looks cool.

On the night of the full moon, Kian ties Waldemar to a post and feeds him some tibetan herbs to cure him. They're briefly hopeful, but it does not work at all. Nor do the ropes, which disintegrate immediately. It jumps suddenly to daytime, and they secretly go visit the mountain sorceress who speaks in riddles. The blind daughter tells Waldemar that the sorceress is evil and her castle is not real. Regardless, Waldemar continues and drinks her magic time travel potion.

And who wouldn't trust a random evil sorceress?

The sorceress locks Waldemar into a dungeon to transform, and then releases a live lion into his room. They smack each other and roll around. Wikipedia says Naschy actually rolled around with this real tiger by himself, which seems dangerous. But in tiger versus wolf man, it is wolf man who wins. The sorceress locks everyone in the dungeons and keeps them all hostage, planning to use the wolf man curse as her own weapon of revenge against the townspeople who banished her to the mountains.

I don't know why the blind woman watches so intently.

The sorceress shows off her magical silver sword, the only sword that can injure Waldemar. The blind girl tries to stop the sorceress, and is stabbed through the stomach for her troubles. It turns out neither her blindness nor anything about her character was important. The sorceress's female guards make sure to take turns attacking wold man one-at-a-time, so he easily defeats them in slow, choreographed battle, biting them one-by-one in the neck. He bites sorceress neck last.

It's not actually magical, just silver.

Kian, having given up on magical Tibetan herbs, suggests brain surgery to remove the lycanthropic source. When Waldemar returns and explains that all of his beloved womenfolk are now dead, Kian tells him that there was legend of a vengeful mountain sorceress, but she died 200 years earlier. In the next scene, Kian has already given up on his surgery plans and on Waldemar in general. "The beast must die!" Kian tells his sister. But it's too late, his sister has spent one entire scene with Waldemar so now they're in love.

His previous love interest died five whole minutes ago.

Kian's disgraced uncle, who was in charge of defeating the beast, is forced to commit harakiri. Kian assists, without telling him that he knows who the wolf man is. Kian heads off to the mountains to try to find the magic silver sword. He finds dirty zombie samurai in a blue-tinted, misty, cobweb-filled basement, and defeats them in choreographed battle.

I remember this scene from Lord of the Rings

The filthy temple collapses, and a whole lot more zombie samurai appear for a second choreographed battle. Upon defeating the final samurai, the blue tint fades away and the silver katana rises majestically from the ground. But a red-haired sorceress pops up behind it and throws paper streamers at Kian, starting the final boss battle. It's short and uneventful, and he takes his newly-acquired silver sword home.

You will never defeat my strings of paper!

Kain heads down to the local werewolf-filled temple for a final battle with his friend. He is disarmed, but his sister fetches the magical silver sword and plunges it deep into the chest of her lover. The wolf man hams it up, taking 30 seconds to die while rolling around and grunting, and crossfades back to human. Kian says the curse of the wolf man is ended, but his sister runs her hands over her belly suggestively.

Can't stop a werewolf curse when the werewolves are so damned sexy.