MEXICAN HALLOWEEN PART 5

Mexico - in the late '60s it was where old monsters went to die. 

Fear Chamber (1969) was one of a batch of bargain basement movies Boris Karloff was lured south of the border to make for the sake of a paycheck - legend has it that paycheck was found uncashed among his effects after his death.  I am sure the circumstances of the making of those films and their posthumous release has been well documented, if you care.  I have seen one of the others, Snake People, and was surprised that this was not quite as dreadful as I had anticipated but still it is a disgrace in many ways.  Karloff's character takes to a sick-bed part way through the movie and doesn't appear again until the very end to clean things up, but a good bit of his dialog throughout is delivered into a telephone while others carry on the action of the story - if you can call it a story.  It seems he had discovered a type of subterreanean mineral intelligence by aiming some kind of atomic telescope at the earth's core, which fact is revealed near the end of the movie, in a dream sequence.  That shows just how broken up and inept the plot, script and overall execution of this thing is.  They don't seem to be able to shoot a scene in a way that you can tell what is happening, or in many cases so you can even tell what it is you are looking at.  Perhaps they realized that the rock monster was so stupid looking they should not give it one clearly visible shot but instead shoot only blurry closeups of some lumpy thing twitching around with smoke and colored lights.  Did I mention that to stay alive it needs a substance which is only formed in a human body in a state of terror?  A female human body?  That explains why they have to lure women into a spook house dungeon and torment them for a while before sucking out their blood for the monster rock.  Luckily it grows an elephant trunk after a while which it can grab them with and suck their blood out, making the spook house and its associated henchmen unnecessary.  I will give them one thing, the lab set looks pretty good.

 

 That blurry thing there is a representative shot of the monster.  The print I acquired also included a scene of gratuitous nudity deleted from the general release, and believe me even a little gratuitous nudity can really pep up something this badly made.

Pacto diabolico (1969) is an unconvincing costume effort inspired by Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  There isn't all that much you can do with that story.  You know eventually there is going to be a hairy-handed strangler involved, no matter what else happens.  John Carradine plays a former colleague of Jekyll who hopes to alter the transformation technique to create an elixir of youth and it does transform him into a younger Mexican actor, relieving him of some responsibility for how this turns out.  The essential ingredient of this elixir is just what you would expect - the eyes cut out of women's heads. Their eyes. Once again the magic of transformation baffles me, as Carradine's facial hair disappears with his wrinkles and reappears when the serum wears off.  At least it doesn't transform his clothes. I watched him very carefully, and it appears Carradine delivered his lines in Spanish, but apparently it wasn't good enough so he was dubbed.  Maybe there is an English print, I don't really care, but he does have one deranged line that I would enjoy hearing in his own lushly stentorian tones. This movie is meant as a period piece of a vaguely nineteenth century nature, and filmed mostly on cheap little sets that look just like cheap little sets and nothing more.  They are brightly lit from above whether people are carrying a candelabra around or not.  Fortunately there was a brief moment of gratuitous nudity, enough to give me hope that there might be another, which gave me the strength to endure the chasing and brawling that results when a hairy handed strangler goes after a young woman with a fiancee.  For some reason the primary young woman in the movie is the daughter of Dr. Jekyll.  That made me hope it might end up being a Daughter of Dr. Jekyll thing and that she might transform too, but no.  

See how hairy that hand is?  It will soon be strangling.  And see how crummy looking that set is?  And see how lousy the print is? I had to tweak these images in a graphics program just to make them decipherable to you, which shows what a great guy I am.  What you can't see here is the most horrible thing about the movie - the soundtrack.  The opening credits are backed with a horrendous continuous random piano noodling and organ pounding and I thought, "My god, what am I going to have to endure?"  The more exciting things were supposed to be the more random and horrific the background noise became.  Worst of all were the laboratory scenes - even though there were no electronics of any kind the lab scenes were overlaid with a continuous wooping and bleeping noise meant to indicate apparatus I suppose.  Four seconds worth.  The same stupid and absolutely inappropriate noises repeating every four seconds the whole time anyone was in the laboratory. 

I tell you, these two were pretty rough to make it through and I am going try to watch better things for the rest of this exercise because fun is fun but this ain't it.