The Werewolf (Fred F. Sears, 1956)

"The word 'lycanthropy' is defined a human being having the power of becoming a wolf, or of having the power of turning another human into a wolf.   Some say lycanthropy stems from nothing but myth and superstition, yet the belief that a human can turn into a wolf has persisted since the Dark Ages to this very day.  It is a universal belief.   The ancient Romans and Greeks wrote of the phenomenon.  There are tales of such happenings in Borneo, Turkey, South America.  Everywhere.    The American Navaho Indians and other tribes tell stories about wolf-men.  The legends have persisted since the beginnings of Man's memory of Time.  Why?  Why haven't these tales died?  The tales that say wolf-men roam the Earth...?

From prolific cheapie producer 'Jungle' Sam Katzman (he of everything from the seemingly endless Dead End Kids/East Side Kids/Bowery Boys series of alleged comedies [actually, that's unfair: 1943's Ghosts on the Loose, co-starring Bela Lugosi and Ava Gardner - now there's a potent cocktail! - was a bit of a laugh] to horror B's to musicals to the Johnny Weissmuller starring Jungle Jim flicks) and director Fred F. Sears (helmer of the Bill Haley and His Comets vehicle Rock Around the Clock [1955] and well as genre fare such as the Ray Harryhausen-tastic Earth vs the Flying Saucers [1956] and the Mara Corday-tastic turkey The Giant Claw [1957]) comes this interesting SF twist on the well-worn werewolf genre.

From out out of the wilderness there stumbles a stranger (Steven Ritch - usually a competent journeyman actor in Westerns and thrillers, but also the co-screenwriter of the 1959 sci-noir City of Fear) into the small resort town of Mountaincrest.  This lone figure, a man without a memory, stumbles into the local bar to fortify himself and try to ascertain whether any of the locals know who he might be.  After he unthinkingly flashes his cash buying a drink before leaving, a local hoodlum named Joe (Charles Horvath) follows him outside with the intent of extorting money with menaces.  Dragging the stranger into an alley, his attempted assault ends with the mugger looking a right mug as the victim turns predator and the attacker having his neck nibbled to the sound of animalistic snarling, bringing the deputy sheriff Ben Clovey (Harry Lauter, It Came from Beneath the Sea [Robert Gordon, 1955], Superbeast [George Schenck, 1972]) running to the scene.

"Only an animal could do that to a man's throat!"

Heading in pursuit of the culprit, Clovey and two of the townsfolk arm themselves and head into the snowy mountains surrounding this ski-skate town that they forgot to close down to find a trail of footprints in the tundra that they follow only to find that at one point the human footprints end only to be replaced by the paw prints of an animal: an animal who walks on two legs.

These events of of course a concern to the town's sheriff Jack Haines (Don Megowan, who had already played the icon Black Lagoon resident the Gill Man earlier that year in John Sherwood's The Creature Walks Among Us and would go on to play the Frankenstein Monster in 1958's Tales of Frankenstein [review here ] as well as star in 1962's The Creation of the Humanoids) who has to spearhead the manhunt for the man-imal, torn between his instinct to shoot to kill and the advice of town doctor Jonas Gilchrist (Ken Christy) and his own fiance, Gilchrist's niece Amy (Joyce Holden, Terror from the Year 5000 [Robert J. Gurney Jr., 1958) to treat the fugitive as a sick man rather than a wild beast and bring him in warm rather than cold.

"Well do the best we can.  Doctors try to save people.  The law doesn't always have a choice."

As the truth gradually begins to emerge we discover that our lupine loner is Duncan Marsh, family man; husband to Helen (Eleanore Tanin) and father to Chris (Kim Charney) who was involved in a car crash and found and treated by unscrupulous doctors.  This mad scientist due consists of Dr Morgan Chambers (George M. Lynn, who had featured twelve years earlier in Universal's monster mash House of Frankenstein [Erle C. Kenton, 1944]) and Dr Emory Forrest (S. John Launer, who'd tangle with another lycan a year later in Gene Fowler Jr.'s I Was a Teenage Werewolf).  Dr Chambers' mad scheme involved using the wounded Marsh as a guinea pig for his theory of injecting humans with the irradiated blood of a wolf to create a canis lupus sapiens (a similar theory to that of George Zucco's Dr Cameron in The Mad Monster [here]) to survive his projected holocaust of WWIII.  As he tells his rueful associate Forrest:

"Radiation creates mutants - who who become monsters, no longer human.  They'll make the hydrogen bomb more powerful, then more powerful again.  Enough to change every person on the face of the Earth into a crawling inhuman thing through fall-out radiation."

As Marsh's wife and son make their way to Mountaincrest in search of him, and the shady medics responsible for his predicament also close in with the intent to kill him before his memory returns and he can implicate them, Duncan finds himself torn between his humanity and his inner beast.  Interestingly, his transformations are triggered not by the light of the full moon but by his animal instincts: fear and anger cause the change whether it be day or night.  I found myself wondering if Stan Lee saw this at the time, and thought, "The Incredible Wolf?  Y'know, with a tweak this could work.  Excelsior!"  The wolfman make-up is by Clay Campbell, and pretty much exactly the same as the job he did on Matt Willis in 1943's Return of the Vampire (clearly Duncan Marsh and Andreas Obry were both of the same strain of lycanthrophobia).

Released in the US in 1956 as the lower B-half of a double bill with Sears' Earth vs the Flying Saucers and in the UK as the upper half of a twin-spin with Edward L Cahn's Creature with the Atom Brain (starring Richard Denning, whose other half Evelyn Ankers knew about a lycanthropic trick or two having starred as Gwen in George Waggner's 1941 classic The Wolf Man), The Werewolf received a poor notice in Variety but a favourable one in the MFB (how I wish that were still a going concern as a publication as well as Sight & Sound).  Featuring a fine performance from Steven Ritch as the hunted and haunted Duncan Marsh fighting for his life and his own sense of self, The Werewolf stands as a curious collision of 1950s radiation-charged sci-fi and the classic horror of the previous decades.

Wolfman ([a.k.a.: Wolfman: a Lycanthrope] Worth Keeter, 1979)

Southern Gothic, or: Talbot... Daninsky... Glasgow... an eternal golden braid

Also known in Brazil by the rather wonderful Portuguese title of A Verdadeira Historia do Lobisomem, or The True Story of the Werewolf, this little gem of obscurity is another that I learned of years back thanks to Stephen Jones' Illustrated Werewolf Movie Guide (a real boon of a book - along with its Vampire compatriot - for those of us interested in delving deeply into the vast cinematic archives of the famous monsters of filmland).

Tool salesman turned actor/producer/mogul Earl Owensby (known as 'Dixie DeMille' and 'Redneck Roger Corman') did what many a cineaste kid years to do and established his own production facility in Shelby, North Carolina.  Spending most of the 1970s and '80s churning out low-tier grindhouse fare for the drive-in circuit that would rarely play north of the Mason-Dixon line, Owensby was a sort of Southern-fried Don Dohler - his films always making back their outlay and being profitable for him though rarely impinging upon the wider public consciousness.  That said, looking up his oeuvre (stop giggling at the back - that's not a euphemism) I realised that I had seen at least one of his films: 1983's Rottweiler: the Dogs of Hell.

Here, Earl has cast himself in the leading role of the hilariously-monikered Colin Glasgow (it somehow just doesn't have the same resplendent redolence of other lycanthropic legends as Leon Carrido, Lawrence Talbot and Waldemar Daninsky), scion of a Southern family who finds himself called back to his ancestral abode after spending years travelling the world - globetrotting which has done nothing to blunt his Aw-shucks accent.  Colin (which at least the cast pronounce correctly: i'd shuddered slightly in apprehension that we were going to be treated to a surfeit of "Coe-lin"s, a la a certain Mr Powell) makes his way back to stately Glasgow Manor - which sounds like the turf of a Gorbals gangster - too late to see his elderly father Edwin (Julian Morton, who like many other members of the cast has only one other acting credit to his name: another Owensby production) who is sped on his way when he is stabbed on his deathbed with a silver dagger wielded by the evil and sorcerous Reverend Leonard (Ed Grady, pretty much the only member of this ensemble to have any real kind of acting career, following the the footsteps of the screen's most evil churchmen such as Claude Frollo, Gregory Trask and Jack Hackett).

The diabolical deacon has dispatched daddy in order to ensure that the hereditary Glasgow curse (which I always thought was heroin addiction) passes down unto the latest generation, i.e.: Colin.  And so our befuddled hero's homecoming is to the bad news that his father is indeed dad dead, and he must contend with his somewhat sinister cousins Clement (Richard Dedmon) and Elizabeth (Maggie Lauterer) as well as the rancour of the village's local yokels who resent his family name enough to start impromptu fights with him in the tavern in the town (in the town).

Whilst by no means at all a remake of Curt Siodmak's classic script for 1941's The Wolf Man - the turn of the century Southern setting alone a world away from the fog-shrouded Euro-Gothic elseworld of Larry Talbot's Llanwelly - there are a few points of similarity: Colin's encounter with his love interest, the divorcee Lynn Harris Randolph (Kristina Reynolds, giving one of the movie's more competent performances) occurring in Harris's Curios & Notions, the shop belonging to her father much like Evelyn Ankers' Gwen in Conliffe's Antiques in the earlier film.

Obviously, Colin eventually succumbs to his cure and transforms via the magic of poor time-lapse into a furry-faced monster.  Being in the post-Universal, post-Hammer hinterland just before the modern horror boom of the Nineteen-Haties with such stuff as The Howling and American Werewolf, this feels slightly out of time.  The time is out of (Alf) joint.  It really feels like Dark Shadows meets Hammer, with a sub-Carpenter synth score.  If that idea warms your cockles like it does mine, then check it out.  It's on Youtube.

My name is Earl.

The Manster (George P. Breakston and Kenneth G. Crane, 1959)

"Tara, he's exactly the type I need!  Besides, this is for science - for human knowledge!  What happens to one man doesn't make any difference.  You didn't seem to care for the others, Tara."

"I forgot how to care about anybody a long time ago."

Yet another movie that I first came across in the pages of Alan Frank's mundanely-titled-for-a-great-book Horror Films (Hamlyn, 1977: go seek out a copy), I was intrigued as a kid both by the amusing title ("He's a man, see, but he's also a monster!") and the large monochrome photographic still used to illustrate it.  What was my young mind to make of this bizarre spectacle of a sort of simian Zaphod Beeblebrox throttling an Asian man?  What was this two-headed hominid?  Why was it?

Some kind of Manster, I expect.

Long before Anthony M. Lanza's The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant (1971) and the following year's double-dunced blaxploitation class ic The Thing with Two Heads from Lee Frost of Love Camp 7 infamy came The Manster.  Director George Breakston had previously made such films as 1951's Tokyo File 212 and Oriental Evil and 1952's Geisha Girl on Japan and returned to the Land of the Rising Sun to shoot this film based upon his own original story The Split - under which title the film would see release in the UK in a slightly edited version with a run time of 67 minutes as opposed to the US 72-minute version.

As well as a mostly Japanese crew and supporting cast - including Satoshi 'Yetsu' Nakamura as the mad scientist Dr Robert Suzuki, Nakamura having already appeared for Breakston in both Tokyo File 212 and Geisha Girl - the movie also had an international lead cast including , in the lead man-into-monster role of the doomed Larry Stanford, Anglo-Canadian actor Peter Dyneley who would go on to be best remembered as the voice of Jeff Tracy in Gerry Anderson's supermarionation classic Thunderbirds (ITC, 1965-1966) as well as it's film spin-offs Thunderbirds Are Go (David Lane, 1966) and Thunderbird 6 (Lane, 1968), as well as having a supporting role in John Kruse's claustrophobic character-based thriller October Moth in 1960, a film i've previously taken a look at here: http://psychtronickinematograph.blogspot.com/2015/09/october-moth-1960-john-kruse.html .  Making this a soon-to-be family affair, cast in the role of Stanford's long-suffering wife Linda was actress Jane Hylton (who has a long and varied career including taking over from Hazel Court as the second incarnation of Jane Huggett in Here Come the Huggetts [Ken Annakin, 1958] and as Queen Guinevere in ITC's swashbuckling William Russell vehicle The Adventures of Sir Lancelot [1956-1957], as well as being the mother - with her first husband Euan Lloyd, of the actress Rosalind Lloyd: Queen Xanxia aka 'the Nurse' in Douglas Adams' 1978 Doctor Who story 'City of Death' as well as playing Gail in Norman J. Warren's 1981 "let's push it a bit further than Alien did" SF horror Inseminoid).  After meeting on the set of The Manster, Dyneley and Hylton would marry - making this almost a family affair - only to sadly pass away within eighteen months of each other in August 1977 and February 1979 respectively.

Opening with what appears to be an attack on a young woman by a crazed gorilla (so far, so Ray 'Crash' Corrigan in his monkey suit from innumerable B-movies and serials of the '30s and '40s), we are soon introduced to the volcanic mountainside laboratory of Dr Suzuki (Nakamura) where he is engaged in bizarre experimentation relating to human evolution and the periodic genetic mutations that can accelerate the evolutionary process.   Having already tested his theory on his own brother Genji (Kenzo Kuroki in the ape costume) and devolved him to his current primaeval Gigantopithecus-style state, as well as turning his wife Emiko (Toyoko Takechi) into a malformed and befanged thing that he keeps locked up like the mutated cast-offs in the Delabres' barn in Curse of the Fly (Don Sharp, 1965), Suzuki plans to test his formula on a new subject.  The guinea pig presents itself in the shape of American reporter Larry Stanford (Dyneley getting a chance to utilise his North American accent).

Stanford is there to interview Suzuki about his somewhat radical new theories, but after a short confab finds himself spiked in more ways than one: his Mickey Finned whisky swiftly followed by a hypodermic chaser.  After returning to his head office in Tokyo to chat with his chief Ian Matthews (Norman Van Hawley, a likeable presence in his sole movie appearance) - presumably the Perry White-cum-J. Jonah Jameson of this American newspaper in Japan (let's call it The Daily Gaijin) - Stanford expresses his relief that his term in the East is almost over and that he will soon be returning Stateside to his wife Linda.  Things soon take a turn, however, as further meetings with Dr Suzuki see Larry lured into a whole new world for him of geisha evenings and visits to the hot baths with Suzuki's seductive assistant, the mysterious and alluring Tara (Terri Zimmern, another sole acting credit - a shame, as she brings a lot to the part of a woman tinged with regret and determined not to return to a secretive sordid past).

Suzuki's efforts to bring out the animal in him certainly work, as Matthews finds himself unable to wrap his head around the fact that his reliable employee has in the course of days become a drunken, violent and lustful Mr Hyde seeking the pleasures of the fleshpots of Tokyo.  When Larry returns from his latest raucous assignation with Tara to find his long lost Linda (Hylton) in his apartment he reacts by raging like a cornered beast instead of the contriteness of a man caught in an affair.

"You married me.  You knew I was a foreign correspondent!"

"I know, " replies his injured party of a wife, "but I figured one day you could settle down...."

"Settle down?!?" he seethes and spits.  "That's a grand way to put it.  To settle down like mud in a pond!  Bridge on Wednesdays, cocktails Thursdays, PTA Fridays?  I can't give you that kind of stuff, Linda.  Go home, and find someone else."

The manifold manifestations of his inner Manster go much further than a Neanderthal attitude and temper, however, as Larry finds his right hand taking on a distinctly anthropoid aspect - all gnarled and sprouting hair in a not at all bad lap dissolve sequence - but also his shoulder is becoming a problem, first a painful lump and then (in one of a couple of sequences in the film that I cannot believe Sam Raimi did not see before filming 1992's Army of Darkness) an eye.  As he finds himself unable to keep resisting his violent side that his ego can't override, Larry goes out killing.  After wandering into a Shinto temple and finding himself terrified by the monstrous visages of the oni demons depicted upon the temple walls, he butchers the lone priest kneeling in prayer there.

Returning to the seductive Tara (I guess the lust for the yoni is as strong as the oni), he almost attempts to confess:

"It was like a dream... or sort of a nightmare.  Only I don't know where the dream stopped and the real thing began."

Like a previous cursed Larry (a certain Mr Talbot, of Llanwelly, Wales), Stanford finds himself becoming a murderous creature but unable to stop the process.  Finally, the full change takes hold and Stanford not only takes on an apelike countenance but finds himself, like Richard E. Grant, discovering How to Get a Head in Advertising (Bruce Robinson, 1989) as another even more monstrous head sprouts from his right shoulder before he continues his reign of terror.

"Larry Stanford is going through the metamorphosis" Suzuki tells the remorseful and now-reluctant Tara.  "This is his new self - actually a different species of man... A species that's never walked the Earth before!"

Seeking out Suzuki in his mountainous eyrie of a laboratory, the Manster (George Wyman, rather than Dyneley on monster duties) fulfils the Oedipal urge of every modern Promethean by destroying his creator, before undergoing the titular 'Split' as Larry and his primitive half actually tear apart, like cross between Ash Williams in a windmill and Clark Kent in a car-breaker's yard.  After the beast-no-longer-within his attacked Tara and thrown her into the broiling depths of the active volcano, Larry does the honours by hurling his half-human half into said caldera.  And so into the mountain he falls, like Varney the vampire (ooh, spoilers for 1847!) and Larry is taken away by the police for the carnivorous lunar activities of his altered state as Ian comforts Linda by delivering the usual anti-scientific progress "didn't reckon upon Gahhhd" spiel required of Fifties monster movies:

"There was good in Larry, and there was evil.  The evil part broke through, took hold.  Call it an accident, or call it a warning... I'm a reporter, not a mystic, Linda, but there are things beyond us - things perhaps we're  not meant to understand...  Have faith, Linda.  Have faith in the good that's still in Larry.  And in all men."

Pffftt.  #NotAllMen.

The Warlock of Firetop Mountain: The Hero's Quest (Richard Fox, 2019)

"Zagor is a twisted soul.  He delights in setting traps.  To watch people suffer or die through the choices they willingly make."

And now, as they say, for something completely - or, at least, a little bit - different.  This blog has of course mostly covered the cinematic, and on occasion, televisual medium - but this time we're veering off into what probably won't be a very regular sideways trip to The Psychotronic Phonograph.  Yep, we're talking the audio medium here.

Audio, and radio especially, has long been a mainstay of genre product: from the old time radio pulp adventures of The Shadow on Detective Story Hour to the stentorian tones of Valentine Dyall's Man in Black on Appointment with Fear to the National Public Radio productions of George Lucas' Star Wars trilogy with its alternate universe cast such as Perry King's Han Solo, Brock Peters' Darth Vader and John Lithgow's Yoda.

Since the late 1990s, the UK's Big Finish Productions has been responsible for a lot of genre output (and for a long time, a lowering of my available bank balance!) with lavish full-cast audio stories from IPs such as Doctor Who, Blake's 7, Dark Shadows, Survivors, The Avengers and many others; providing additional stories that expanded and enhanced continuing fictional universes as well as giving a continuation of series and franchises long since gone.  These ranges have been a source of much entertainment, joy, frustration and more over the years for myself and many others and yet I never expected any of the personnel involved in crafting these sonic gems of the fantastique to delve (like a dwarf into the Dwarrowdelf in the vasty deep) into the demesne of Fighting Fantasy.

Context being king e'en in the realm of swords and sorcerers, let us go back (back, back to my beginnings!) to circa 1990: picture this, a day in December when as a small child of around ten years old I was standing at a bus stop with my mother in the rain waiting for a bus service that seemed forever, ever, delayed.  To pass the time, she suggested having a look in the shop that was behind us, which just inside the doorway had a display of cheap paperback books in various states of disrepair for low prices.  Even at that age, around ten years old, I had amassed a small collection of second hand books that I loved - mostly comprising various Pan and Fontana collections of horror stories being a youth of a fannish, geeky, gothic bent - and so my eye was caught by the green-hued spine of a tome entitled House of Hell credited to one Steve Jackson and featuring an intriguing cover illustration for my slightly warped young eyes of a daemonic creature reaching outwards towards  the reader.  Duly purchased by my understanding and indulgent parent, I gradually became slightly puzzled during the subsequent bus journey when I devoured the opening scene-setting prologue (so far, so short story to which I was used) to find a format that baffled me - the format of the Choose Your Own Adventure Role-Playing Game, or as I would come to call it the "pick-a-page book".

Thus began my voyages into Titan, the Fighting Fantasy world, and the gradual amassing of a quite sizable collection of these RPG books - which would include the very first (the original, you might say) of the Jackson/Livingstone collaborations, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain.  This battered old paperback contained a hero's quest against the wicked and powerful Zagor - the eponymous sorcerer - with many a travail during the travels into the wizard's mountainous lair ("Into the mountain / I will fall", as Black Francis crooned in 'Bird Dream of the Olympus Mons').  Fast forward, like a skipping record, to 2017 when I happened upon a post on a Doctor Who forum stating that Richard Fox and Lauren Yason (who had formerly worked on a number of Big Finish Doctor Who audios, so I was at least vaguely familiar with the names) had secured the rights to produce audio dramas based upon the Fighting Fantasy franchise.  I couldn't help but feel a bit of a tingle of excitement, yet there was a slight element of apprehension added to this admixture: what if, like other properties i'd revelled in as a youth (like, say, The Lord of the Rings for example) I found the dramatic interpretation of others clashing with the "proper" version that had long been in my own head?  Only one way to find out, I guess: let's pop in that disc, crank up the gramophone, and embark upon this tale of high adventure...

The first thing that I discover is that this, rather than being a dramatisation of a role-playing game - which is pretty much an impossible task, at least to do well: just look at the state of the Dungeons and Dragons (Courtney Solomon, 2000 [name and shame, and all that]) and Warcraft (Duncan Jones, 2016 [I expected better of you, Zowie!]) movies - is something of a prequel.  We are introduced firstly to kick-ass elven warrior Vale Moonwing (played by Rachel Atkins with a voice so huskily familiar that it's impossible not to picture Ms Moonwing as a pointy-eared Frances Barber) who is well on her quest towhence Zagor's mountain with her trusty bow 'the Giver of Sleep' and silver arrows to fell the wicked warlock (of the West).  Fighting through a snowstorm atop her trusty steed, she encounters an old man who turns out to be an astral emanation of Zagor himself, giving himself away be leaving no footprints behind him (how very Skywalker!) - then summoning a zombie which Vale quickly fells with an arrow.  presumably to the head, destroying the brain.  Zagor the necromancer can bend the dead to his will you see.  How very Nekromantik.

Stopping at an inn, as you do - questing being a thirsty beast - Vale meets the drunken adventurer Cassius Stormblade, which is so a name I can imagine a character in an '80s game like Golden Axe having.  Played by Tim Treloar, Big Finish's still-alive Jon Pertwee stunt double, Cassius is a sort of Welsh Boromir (one does not simply walk into Swansea) with a lilting voice and mighty sword.  He's on a quest of his own, to rescue his dwarf friend Gimorel who is trapped on the other side of Firetop Mountain.  Since the Tipsy Taff possesses a map of what lies under the mountain - a sort of Book of What is in the Duat for mystical mountain secret villain bases - Moonwing agrees to team up and enter the wizard's domain together.  And so into the mountain they will fall.

"There is a junction ahead!" says Vale.

"Ah.  Our first choice." replies Cassius.  ""Which way?  Left?  Or right?"

And there we have rendered one of the book's decision points.  Thankfully, they don't need to stop and take five minutes to roll dice and check whether their Luck Points are less than or equal to the result in order to arrive at their decision.  Though rounding the next corner, they do find themselves in a bit that I remember quite vividly, as they espy a sleeping sentry:

"What is that?  A goblin?"

"Too large.  See the tusks protruding from the lower jaw.  An orc."

Managing to pass via the usage of an invisibility potion, they proceed through a number of scenarios familiar from the book watched at all times by the all-seeing eyes of Zagor himself (Toby Longworth, another Big Finish veteran) who casts charms and curses and lays traps in their path, such as the choice between a brazen or iron helmet.  Vale refuses to choose, but Cassius in his arrogance - being the Fool of the cards that Zagor has cast - takes one for himself and finds the warlock whispering in his ear and getting inside his mind.  But this phantom doesn't want to teach him the music of the night, he wants him to steal away Vale's magical jewel: the weapon that she carries to use against the wily warlock.  Slanted and enchanted, Stormblade becomes an even more unreliable ally than he already was.

Coming to another very familiar point, the landing point for the ferry to cross the underground river that marks the boundary of Zagor's sanctum sanctorum much like the Borgo Pass traces the perimeter of Dracula's domain where the phantoms come to meet you, they have little choice but to ring the bell.  The old ferryman soon appears, as grouchy and haggling over the amount of gold pieces it will cost to cross the stream as ever he was (or, rather, will be in the future).  The voice of the ferryman is startlingly reminiscent of Ron Moody's zookeeper character from Freddie Francis' 1975 lycanthro-pic Legend of the Werewolf - which seems appropriate as it is he who informs Cassius that the rat bite he received earlier will corrupt his flesh and transform him into a were-rat, a process that will accelerate if he gives into anger.  Like the Hulk, but a rat, I guess.

Having moved, like God, over the face of the water - but not very gracefully - the dynamic dysfunctional duo find themselves fleeing from some Harryhausen-style reanimated skellingtons and arrive at another door (still, at least it's not another portcullis with a choice of levers to pull) only to hear some ominous sounds from within.

"There is something behind the door."

"That," Cassius replies in best Pink Panther style "is not a dog."

And so it it isn't, for just like me getting into the electro/intelligent dance music genres twenty years ago, they receive a sudden MINOTAUR SHOCK!

After escaping the clutches of Pasiphae's spawn, Cassius finds himself growing increasing agitated and ever more murine as he and Vale disagree whether to head East or West - he wanting to find his dwarven friends and she wishing to complete her mission to destroy Zagor.  After the parting of the ways, Vale finds that he has quite literally ratted her out, having pilfered her mystic jewel to trade to the warlock for the freedom of the dwarves.  You can't trust a warlock, though (I mean, it actually means "oath-breaker"), even when you've betrayed a friend for them, and the befurred and befanged Cassius finds himself greeting invisible ghost dwarves still digging in the mines of the mountain at the will of Zagor.  The despondent rodent manages to converse with the spectral voice of his late compatriot Gimorel, who is as Scottish as he is Welsh.  Are we "touring the regions" vocally?  Did Gammon Who Shouts Down Women On Question Time John Rhys-Davies set a precedent with Gimli?  Are dwarves Scottish?  I know some fair maidens who are.  And some ogres.

Anyway, as Vale faces the mighty dragon that Zagor has chained aside the mountain and Tramaloled on sleeping grass to guard the way out, Cassius finds a shred of inner humanity and takes on the Orc chief in possibly the world's first and certainly the world's finest Were-rat on Uruk-hai rumble. Resigned to his inhumanity and fate to never leave the mountain, he laments:

"I played the hero, but I was just a man with a sword.  Now, i'm not even that.  I'm a rat with claws."

"The game is over" smirks Zagor triumphant.  "You played well, but you have lost."

As Vale soars upon the freed dragon - tamed by an Elvish incantation - towards Darkwood (also known as the Forest of Doom) and the tower of the benevolent wizard Yaztromo (the Elphaba to Zagor's Galinda, to be all revisionist about things) she ponders.

"We can only hope that others will have the courage to face the warlock."

And so, the pieces are in place.  The die is cast.  Is your Skill less than or equal to the task?  Can you succeed where Vale and Cassius failed and take on the warlock of Firetop Mountain?  Then buy the book.