'Curse of the Devil' (1973) – Carlos Aured.

Reunited with cult director, Carlos 'Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll' Aured, the multi-talented icon, Paul Naschy enriches the bloodily burgeoning Daninsky legend by successfully adding another moonlit flit into the tragic legend of melancholy lycanthrope Waldemar Daninsky. The terminally lovelorn landowner, forever cursed to suffer in the shadow world of his bloodthirsty half-man, half-beast alter ego. The tormented nobleman, perpetually at war with the bestial lusts of the preternatural beast within him! Tormented by a romantic love he can never consummate, as once roused, his werewolf animus destroying the lives of all those close to him.

Carlos Aured's gruesome reiteration of the doomed Daninsky mythos opens in spectacularly thrilling fashion! Daninsky purges his land of blackened satanists, only to find himself the victim of a witch's curse!!! Through each generation, all the male descendents shall be cruelly damned to prowl the earth as a rageful werewolf! Aptly titled, Waldemar descends into a malevolent maelstrom of thwarted love, eldritch curses, revolting peasants, doomed twilight trysts, and bloody bouts of lunar lunacy! The haunted Waldemar's single hope of release is death by the delicate hand of one who genuinely loves him!

'Curse of the Devil' remains a monstrously twisted addition to the diabolically doomed Daninsky mythos! While formulaic, the blood-spattered narrative proves engaging. Maestro Paul Naschy unleashes all his inimitable feral charm as he perpetrates myriad sensationally splashy kills! Daninsky's victims being gored most explicitly, faces pounded into gelatinous goo, and their fleshly protuberances flayed most ferociously! Aured's grisly set-pieces endowing 'Curse of the Devil' with an additional frisson of Grand Guignol glamour! The handsome castle exteriors, and luxurious forests express a pleasingly atmospheric Gothic verisimilitude, even a middling Naschy nightmare is greater than many less gifted genre filmmaker's best!