Dug up from the late Soviet graveyard – a still fresh werewolf yarn.
Having been AWOL for some 31 years CHAS OBOROTNYA leapt from its coffin this year. A shadowy fan group calling itself From Outer Space -Vasily and Gleb on Vkontakte – managed to source this one hour and 27-minute-long made for television curio.
Post-Soviet casualty.
A direct translation of the title would be something like Hour of change or Hour of Reversal both of which strike me as both rather good titles in themselves, yet the over-explanatory title The Hour of the Werewolf seems to have prevailed.
Tonnis TV – who were superseded four years ago by Direct -produced it and it was broadcast, once only, by All Union Cable Television in 1990. Following this there were a few hard copy DVDs of the programme around in Moscow and St Petersburg but otherwise it vanished into the ether.
That is until the above mentioned fan group hunted it down and found it quivering in the vaults of the State Film Fund. They then put it out there last April in the form of a YouTube post – with English subtitles to boot.
This film embodies something distinctive having been shot in the Soviet Ukraine in the northern Black Sea region – Odessa no less. The director’s role was taken by a 31-year-old Igor Shevchenko and the company he was working for had been only going for a year. So, we have youthfulness and an interesting locale at play here. An experienced cast helped too.
Mikhail Pakhomenko, the lead, had already been presented with an Honour of the Artist of the RSFSR three years earlier.
Alexander Baluev, playing Grigory’s son, would eight years later have a role in the Hollywood film Deep Impact as a cosmonaut. Marina Starykh, the would-be love interest, is a very busy small screen actress never off Russian television screens.
Man on the brink.
The events occur in a provincial Russian town during one of those sweltering summers that this country specializes in. Grigory Maksimovich works a s a reporter for a local newspaper and, in late middle-age has become a widower.
The newspaper’s one-time editor has absconded leaving his post open. All to aware of his advancing years, Grigory has set his sights on becoming the new chief editor. However, a younger colleague functions as his rival in this ambition.
Meanwhile Grigory keeps a keen eye on a typesetting colleague called Taya, a friendly and desirable woman. Another co-worker, a party chairman presents himself as something of a confidante for Grigory before being unmasked as a man indulging in office politics. (In 1990 such a negative portrayal of a party cadre could well have seemed quite significant).
Otherwise superstition still hangs on in this backwater (The full Moon is a good time to make pickles Taya tells Grigory only half in jest). Howling is heard in the night and a werewolf on the loose gets whispered about. A Dog’s Gate – a sort of wooden structure formed from three intertwined boughs forms part of the local architecture. Grigory, good Soviet man that he is, will have none of it.
How ignorant people are, he tells the party chairman. They read about perestroika in the morning and gossip about evil spirits in the evening.
The Hour of the Werewolf [auction.ru]
It is shortly after this remark, however, that the journalist is set upon a mysterious black dog just as he is boarding the last tram home. It has taken a chunk out of the man’s ankle….
Metamorphosis.
During the long, balmy nights Grigory undergoes slow and painful transformations. This rational and cultured Soviet citizen will transition into a fanged, four-legged marauder. Furthermore, like Mr. Hyde, in this form he will hunt down his daytime bugbears. (I had to double check that this film came out four years before the Jack Nicholson vehicle and parable of middle-aged revenge – Wolf) His young rival for the office of Editor falls from a stairwell window fleeing the hound, Taya’s other lover and Taya herself are set upon in bed and the party Chairman is duly mauled.
Now a tortured Raskolnikov figure, Grigory attempts to tie himself to his bed at night and hopes that his terrible dreams are but premonitions.
It will be his own son , ahard-nosed young policeman (Alexander Baluev) ,who will unbeknownst to himself, execute his own father – and not with any silver bullets.
Twist.
The Dog’s Gate lore was new to me but, otherwise The Hour of the Werewolf pays obeisance to the expected lycanthropy tropes. Under the full moon the transformation scenes are economic but effective, when combined: distorting camera lenses, an impressive array of vampiric fangs, a wolfman mask and a black dog.
The summer setting sets the ambience apart from the usual wintriness of such tales (even if a bit of fake mist is added to some scenes).
The portentous synthesizer mood music courtesy of Artemy Artemiev, – sometimes Bach type organ chords and Giorgio Moroder style rhythmic pulsing -dates the production as much as the electric typewriters do.
Zeitgeist.
There are no heroes in this kitchen sink supernatural thriller, except Grigory seems like a decent man engulfed by his Id. In this though he is not alone in this (the film seems to suggest)as the Soviet Union embarks on perestroika.
A tramp is shown being hurled onto the ground after attempting to join in a street party. A subplot involves sordid money-grubbing as Grigory’s son ties to reclaim some cash that his late mother had lent to a miscreant.
There is a comic interlude involving a satirised hustler in the form of a young would-be poet on a desperate look out for employment with the newspaper. (When asked what workshop he comes from he replies: Frankly a poetical one…actually I’m an operator at the water tower.)
The action climaxes in a scene of social disintegration as residents wait in the night at a furniture warehouse for their names to be called so that they may collect ordered house household items.
The Hour of the Werewolf packs oodles of charm with its nostalgic ambience and relatable protagonist. Of course, to judge the show’s production values with fairness you would have to set it against other Western made for television movies produced that same period.. When you do so, it does not come out looking so bad.
Main image: horrorzone.