La Lupa Mannara AKA The Legend of the Wolf Woman (1976)


director: Rino Di Silvestro
release-year: 1976
genres: horror, sexploitation, werewolf, shocktober
countries: Italy
languages: Italian
fests: SHOCKtober 2024: WOLFtober

Opens with a woman shrieking right into the camera, and then a very naked woman walking around all stiff-limbed and then dancing in a flaming circle in the woods, with long zooms on her crotch to make it clear that this is going to be as sexploitative as it gets. The music is metal percussion.

Not a bad fire ring, at least.

A narrator tells us about how werewolves work, and the camera pans across the woman, now greenish-grey skin with patches of fur glued all over her. And black baby bottle nipples glued over her actual nipples.

Baby bottle nipples.

The local Count's daughter is missing, so all of the village people are running around in the woods with torches even though they know there are werewolves. The naked blue werewolf girl murders one of them, and it cuts badly to her being burned at the stake.

If she stayed like this, it would be a better film.

Then it cuts badly to the future, where two people rapidly read the entire plot directly into the camera as if it's a storybook. It's a fresh modern Count, 300 years later, whose daughter, Daniela, is having visions about her werewolf ancestors being burned at the stake. The doctor says that lycanthropy is absolutely real, but this girl is just crazy due to trauma from being horrifically raped. They chatter on and on and on about it, badly.

What I want to do to the doctor when he's been talking for 5 minutes.

Everybody who surrounds Daniela looks just like one of the villagers who killed her in the past. The awful, warbling synth soundtrack lets us know each time she recognizes someone from her dreams. She's caked with 3mm of makeup and has definitely never taken an acting class. The women strip naked at every opportunity, and the camera is always there to stare awkwardly.

The other women are also usually naked.

Daniela sees a vision of a bloody ancestor, who tells her the portal is now open. A komodo dragon runs around in her bed to celebrate. Despite being fabulously rich, her bedroom is decorated with the tackiest garbage. She spies on her sister having sex, and the camera zooms in on genitals to make sure you haven't missed that there's a naked woman around. Daniela starts touching herself, and I start getting familiar with the fast-forward button.

I come from the past to bleed on your carpet.

She teleports out into the woods, which are sprinkled with halloween decorations. When people come looking for her, she has sex with them, has werewolf visions, and then bites them to death while yelling "errrrrrrrrrrr!" She doesn't always bother to put on clothing for her scenes.

Man, I don't know.

She's locked in a hospital bed and does a crummy attempt at an exorcist imitation. The girls in the hospital slink around and take their clothes off. The doctors mostly inspect breasts. There are bad paintings of naked women on the walls. Daniela murders someone and flees the hospital, goes back to the woods, and finds people having sex there, so she kills them.

Necrosexploitation.

Then they talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk, in between rape-murder scenes, and absolutely nobody could possibly care about any of this. I just started fast-forwarding to the murder scenes to see the bad makeup, and even that wasn't worth it. In the end, she is arrested, and it cuts in the middle of the scene because everyone involved was strictly incompetent. Its 5.0 star rating on imdb is 4.99 stars too many.

Why even have talking scenes?  Just film cats or something.