30 Day Movie Challenge: Day 29- La Loba (1965)

I knew when I created this version of the 30 Day challenge that I wanted one of the days to be a reward for all the hard work put into getting to this point. 29 days ago, we started this journey and we are one day away from the finish line so today's task was that I could repeat any of the previous challenges and I chose to repeat day 13 which was to watch a foreign film and I chose Mexico's first ever werewolf horror film 1965's La Loba which was directed by Rafael Baledón (The Hell Of Frankenstein). The film stars José Elías Moreno (Las tres perfectas casadas) as Professor Fernandez, a brilliant professor who is doing some breakthrough research on cell manipulation or the metamorphosis of the cells. He is doing the research because he wants to cure his daughter of a strange illness that only takes effect when there is a full moon. The film also stars Kitty de Hoyos (Adventure At The Center Of The Earth) as Clarisa Fernandez, Joaquin Cordero (The Book Of Stone) as Dr. Alejandro Bernstein, Columba Domínguez (Ánimas Trujano (El hombre importante)) as Marcela de Fernandez, Roberto Cañedo (Crime And Punishment) as Dr. González, Noé Murayama (Man on the Spying Trapeze) as Cazador de Lobos, Adriana Roel (Neutron Traps the Invisible Killers) as Alicia Fernandez, Crox Alvarado (The Aztec Mummy Against the Humanoid Robot) as Crumba, and Ramón Bugarini (Santo Vs The Zombies) as Inspector.

This was surprisingly a well acted film from everyone that was involved and it demonstrated that anyone could make a horror film besides the English, Americans, and Italians. The werewolf costumes could have been cooler, but for 1965 they were not that bad and you accepted it. The one thing that I enjoyed is that they sort of added their own rules for the werewolf genre because up this point we knew that only silver could kill a werewolf, but in this film it's either an ivory knife or a dog that is specially trained in werewolf combat. I know the last one sounds funny and even I thought it was stupid at first, but after a while the dog was pretty bad ass and I was OK with that rule. The only thing I didn't get was how could there be a full moon every night and how did the professor not know that one of them was a werewolf especially seeing as he dated the daughter that was a werewolf? The final fight scene was probably one of the most exciting sequences in the film as it was a fight to the end especially the fight that Crumba is involved in. One thing that I wished they were able to expand on was the transformation scenes, but I understand that it was something that was going to be tough to pull off in 1965 due to the lack of technology. They did manage to kind of do one where the little girl witnesses Clarissa transform right in front of her. This was surprisingly as I said before a really good film and while the film may be in Spanish, the version I was able to purchase had English Subtitles which definitely helped. I am going to give the film an B+ for a final grade.