cult film freak: MARÍA ELENA APRÓN DYING FOR 'HUNCHBACK OF THE MORGUE'

María Elena Arpón in HUNCHBACK OF THE MORGUE/ EL JOROBADO DE LA MORGUE Year: 1973 Rating: ***1/2

From Dracula to The Werewolf, Paul Naschy played every single classic monster in Spanish b-horrors, and in HUNCHBACK OF THE MORGUE he's actually more Igor than Quasimoto, serving a creature-creating mad scientist/Dr. Frankenstein-type by fetching body-parts, and eventually kidnapping doomed girls from a mental hospital...

But by this time the movie feels like its own choppy trailer... as the set-up's the most important, with María Elena Arpón returning to a medieval cavern like the previous years' TOMBS OF THE BLIND DEAD... only here she's dead-on-arrival, and the gloomy locale's converted into a working bubbling-beaker laboratory...

Paul Naschy and Alberto Dalbés in HUNCHBACK OF THE MORGUE

But Paschy's Wolfgang Gotho only does the mad doctor's nefarious bidding with the promise of reviving childhood friend Arpón... which never occurs since she's only in the catapulting first act, lying there, dying gorgeously...

Enter another lovely ingenue in Rosanna Yanni, the only kind nurse to the titular hunchback, fitfully ambiguous and yet, with a kind of TV-movie aesthetic combined with a 1970's Hammer-vibe, his countenance is far more vulnerable than formidable — and ultimately, more monstrosity (beyond the last-minute creature) is needed.