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Paul
Naschy can easily be described as Spain’s version of Karloff,
Lugosi, and Chaney all rolled up into one stocky little
barrel-chested wonder. Born
in 1934, he penned a few western novels in the 50s, was a bodybuilder and appeared
in several films as an extra before finding his true calling as a total animal
in 1968’s La Marca del Hombre-Lobo, an incredibly fun
(and goofy) werewolf (and vampire!) film inspired by Universal’s classic Wolf
Man series. La Marca was also released as The Mark
Of The Wolfman and Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror (a
wonderfully inappropriate title for a movie that has absolutely nothing to do
with the Frankenstein legend). La Marca proved to be a hit and
Naschy (real name: Jacinto Molina) just couldn’t get enough of playing
the role and made over a dozen follow-ups as well as starring in several other
horror/thriller titles (most of which he wrote or co-wrote) over the next decade.
 By the time the 1980s rolled around, Naschy’s semi-gothic
horror stories weren’t selling al too well and his Spanish
funding wasn’t doing that hot either… and so, the horror
icon went off to Japan in search of financing so that he could keep
telling his stories. One such result was Human Beasts (aka El
Carnaval De Las Bestias).
Bruno (Naschy), is a professional-for-hire (á la Robert
Urich) who meets Mieko (Eiko Nagashima), a charming Japanese woman
one day and begins a relationship with her. Mieko and her
brother then hire Bruno to pull off a diamond heist, putting aside
all fears of a double-cross since Mieko is pregnant with Bruno’s
child (which is as good as being family in their eyes). Naturally,
Bruno double-crosses them… and the once peaceful pair of siblings
decide to learn the use of weaponry and eventually track him down
in the mountains, where they have a big, bloody shootout (and I
should like to point out here that Paul Naschy with a gun does not
an action hero make).
 Here’s the odd part: the entire 90 minutes worth of story
I just described is compressed down to about 1/6th of the time (causing
the average viewer to receive multiple fingernail wounds to the
cranium from scratching their head so much) and from then on, we
enter into a strange mixture of several other films (including Naschy’s Blue
Eyes Of The Broken Doll - it almost looks like some of
the same sets are used) where an severely injured Bruno finds himself
recuperating in the house of Don Simón (Lautaro Murúa)
and his babe-a-licious daughters Alicia (Azucena Hernández)
and Mónica (Silvia Aguilar). As luck would have it,
Don Simón is a retired physician and the girls both sneak
in at night to make sure his equipment is in proper working condition. Things
change, however, when Mieko comes-a-looking for Bruno and a mysterious
killer starts offing people for no apparent reason whatsoever.
 Apart from some funky music (which sounds like it was rejected
from the soundtrack to Bloody Pit Of Horror), a
couple of superbly done creepy dream sequences, a great scene of
a man being eaten by pigs, and the random bit of nudity here and
there, Human Beasts isn’t that great of a
movie. As a matter of fact, it may be my least favorite
Naschy film to date. First off, Naschy’s direction isn’t
nearly as tight as it could be (where exactly were any of Paul’s
regular directors like Carlos Aured or Leon Klimovsky?) and, as
such, some of the action scenes (and acting) simply do not hold
up. Worse still, the concept of lucidity is abandoned in favor
of cheap thrills: take for example the scene where Spanish horror
movie regular Luis Ciges appears solely to get killed by an unseen giallo-like
killer in the middle of a movie that hasn’t quite decided
if it’s a murder mystery, a crime drama, or a ghost story.
 Presentation
BCI Eclipse and Deimos Entertainment bring us another
fine transfer with their presentation of Human Beasts. While
it isn’t on-par with some of the previous BCI/Deimos releases,
it’s still good and the color levels look very nice at times. The
film is presented in an anamorphic 1.78:1 ratio and only the original
Mono Stereo Castilian Spanish language soundtrack is provided (which
is odd considering there was an English language print distributed
on VHS) with optional English Subtitles. A few scenes in the
movie are spoken in Japanese - these bits feature burned-in Spanish
Subtitles as well as optional English Subtitles (that start off
at the top of the screen and end up on top of the Spanish Subtitles
below… making them hard to read).
Extras
The film contains an Introduction by Paul Naschy (1:19),
and additional Bonus Features include the original Spanish language
Theatrical Trailer (2:53), and The Vampyre (23:27),
a recent short film based on the story by John Polidori and starring
Naschy as a vampire. The digital, 2007-made featurette (in
Spanish with non-removable English subtitles) is rather nicely done
and it’s wonderful to see Naschy still working in his 70s
(although he looks a bit like Rip Torn here). A Still Gallery
and some wonderful Liner Notes by Mirek Lipinski round out the list
of Extras.
The Bottom Line
I’m not saying you shouldn’t watch it - I’m
saying don’t go out of your way to watch it.
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