Face of the Screaming Werewolf (1964) (Mexico/USA)

⭐️⭐️1/2

At an institute in Pasadena, Dr. Edmund Redding researches past lives by experimenting with hypnotic regression. He discovers his subject, Ann Taylor, was an Aztec woman in a former life and he uses this knowledge to lead he and his associates to a hidden chamber in the Great Pyramid of Yucatán. They hope to find the legendary lost treasure of the Aztecs but instead they unearth two mummified bodies. One of them lookin’ a little more modern than expected and the other one period appropriate but shockingly alive! Redding brings the mummies back with him but his rival, Dr. Janney, murders the good doctor and takes the modern-man-mummy to his lab where he performs a resurrection experiment because SCIENCE!!! Since this modern man is Lon Chaney Jr, you can guess that he has a very hairy secret (No, you pervert! Not like that!). Chaney wakes up, transforms and attacks. Janney loses his assistants and throws the bandage-wearing werewolf into a cage. The schlubby werewolf escapes and mild terror is experienced. Janney has also employed a thief to steal the other mummy because he’s a greedy bastard, the thief bumbles the job and now on top of a lycanthrope running around, there’s also a confused Aztec mummy. Pasadena sure hasn’t changed at all. Another Jerry Warren hatchet job throws poor Lon Chaney Jr into the mix, cutting together footage from 1957’s The Aztec Mummy and 1960’s House of Terror (home of the Chaney footage) to mold a semi-coherent adventure that’s butt-numbingly boring yet defiantly charming. Long stretches without dialogue (dubbing ain’t cheap, ya chumps!), frantic editing (just cut out the stuff that doesn’t fit, ya chumps!) and an intrusive and slightly schizophrenic score (you don’t need words when ya got music, ya chumps!) let you know you’re watching something that was hastily thrown together. The mummy is destroyed before the wolf man makes his escape, which is convenient because then scenes would have had to been shot outside of the usual exposition filler you get in a Warren “production”.