Despite a title that sounds like a primo Hawkwind cut from Warrior on the Edge of Time, this 1983 flick is actually a Spanish/Japanese co-production starring none other than Paul Naschy (aka Jacinto Molina) as ageless lycanthrope Waldemar Daninsky, this time on the prowl in feudal Kyoto.
Cursed by a sorceress in his native Europe to always carry the chubby mark of a throat-biting werewolf, pudgy monster-man Daninsky travels to Japan at the behest of his local alchemist to find a cure from Kian (Shigeru Amachi), a wise man with a penchant for fighting monsters and solving mysteries.
Together, Daninsky and Kian take on assassins, ninjas, samurais and, of course, a satin shirt-clad wolfman. And while all that is entertaining enough, the set piece has to be the werewolf-vs.-tiger scenario that happens about midway through, an epic fight of bloodied fur that’s on par with the living dead vs. tiger shark from Lucio Fulci’s Zombie.
When he made The Beast and the Magic Sword, Molina was bankrupt and turned to Japanese producers for an influx of cash; they gave him the money and so much more, from the inspiration to bring the lycanthrope movie to Japan to the sheer guts of having said lycanthrope punch a tiger in his man-eating mouth.
Apparently filmed at Toshiro Mifune’s studios, this 10th and, for a while, final of the Daninsky films, it’s also one of the best in the series; while the story is a bit far-fetched, this Were Wolf and Cub tale of high action and even higher production values is an extremely entertaining melding of European trash and Asian class. —Louis Fowler