MEXICAN HALLOWEEN PART 7

For the seventh day of this week of thrills and excitement we have two more fine films from the Churubusco-Azteca studios especially for the ladies:

Espiritismo (1962) is a domestic melodrama with a devilish twist.  Mom and Dad are just celebrating their big anniversary and are extra happy because the mortgage on the house is finally  paid off, and they feel they can ignore the dire warnings they got at that Ouija board party they went to the week before.  Along comes junior who needs eight grand to start a crop dusting business and if they loved him they would mortgage the house again.  Things don't seem to be working out after that and they are going to lose the house unless drastic actions are taken, so it seems like the natural thing to do is join a spiritualist cult and call upon the dark forces for aid.  This takes the form of an emissary from the devil bringing Pandora's Box which, as you recall, contains a Crawling Hand that grants you your desires. Mom runs the show here, always puffing on a cig and ranting, and poor Dad can only tag along and watch the world fall apart. How it all turns out isn't too surprising.  This is kind of slow and talky and is intended to appeal primarily to the housewife of those days, but it keeps a steady pace of mysterious events leading up to the inescapable conclusion that she shouldn'ta done that thing.

That's Pandora's box on the table between them but the cool thing is the shadow of the lamp on the wall behind her.  I have this thing about seeing the shadow of something that should actually be emitting light.  It's crazy, I know.  I'm just nuts about lighting.  Look how they hit that chair in the background to establish that the space goes all the way back there.

I found it interesting from a sociological standpoint; the attitudes expressed by the characters regarding their social standing and economic security, with The House being the big thing in their lives which keeping or losing meant their happiness and survival.  Which may not be the way you want your horror movie to come across.  This was a K. Gordon Murray release, dubbed in Florida by Floridians for the edification of the English speaking world, and it is the first time I have ever heard the narrator of a movie or anyone else use the word "quelch."  Apparently the aim of this movie is to quelch our desire to get involved with Ouija boards and summoning the spirits of the dead.  WELL IT DIDN'T WORK.

El maldicion de la Llorona (1963) a.k.a. Curse of the Crying Woman, is a real rip-snorter.  You never know what is going to happen next.  It's a multigenerational family curse story, the curse of an ancestor who made a deal with the devil to gain youth and power, with the catch being that to keep her youth and power she had to keep committing the most terrible crimes she could.  This didn't go down well with the community.  Most families don't keep the spear-transfixed skeleton of their most evil ancestor in the basement awaiting the day the youngest member of the clan turns 25 and pulls out the spear to bring her back to life, but this one does.  And guess what.  Home comes the young niece of the family who is exactly 24 and 364/365ths years old.  All kinds of crazy stuff happens then.  The aunt comes flying into the basement like a hideous skeleton and gets these empty eye sockets sometimes, and she's got no reflection and the niece loses her reflection the closer it gets to the fatal hour and the uncle they said was dead is actually a half human beast chained up in the bell tower but he GETS OUT when the club-footed scar-faced lackey goes up there to give him a GOOD BEATING, the dogs are let out to KILL POLICEMEN, and MIDNIGHT IS FAST APPROACHING.  It's one nutty thing after another, and it all takes place in one night of terror.

You can see they light the hell out of everything and it all looks really great and spooky.  They don't spare the horrors and rats and cobwebs and groping hands and sudden shocks.  What's funny is that when they do the flashback explanation of the origin of the family curse they show it all in negative and a bunch of the scenes they use are a nonsensical jumble of shots from El mundo de los vampiros.  I thought it was funny anyway.  Oh yeah, the niece has a husband too but the great thing is he spends most of the movie in peril and really only gets useful when it comes to the climactic scenes when someone is needed to brawl with the club-footed scar-faced lackey.  It's all about the ladies here and it's great.  Rita Macedo as Aunt Selma is creepy as hell, always seeming weirdly elated over her evil power and not hesitating to do whatever she needs to do to achieve her wicked goals.

This concludes our week of holiday cheer and I wish you and yours all the joys of this wonderful Halloween season.  Just be careful who wears the pants in the family, that's all.

MEXICAN HALLOWEEN PART 6

Suffering sometimes brings rewards, and two nights of crap make a good night that much more pleasant.

El mundo de los vampiros (1961) was written by Alfredo Salazar, and directed by Alfonso Corona Blake who went on to bless the world with Santo Versus the Vampire Women and Santo in the Wax Museum.  In the case of Sr. Blake I can assert that this movie right here was the greatest thing he ever did, probably.  I have seen more vampire movies than I can count and I have never seen one quite like this. Filmed on the startlingly large and elaborate well-lit sets of Churubusco Azteca, it has a great look from the very first shot of a hand groping out of a slowly opening coffin.  Multigenerational family curses seem to be a feature of Mexican horror stories, and this one is the three hundred year vengeance curse of Count Sergio Subotai, Vampire, against the descendants of the Colman family, and if he doesn't get his vengeance venged right now he will have to wait another hundred years.  Another feature of these stories is hairy-handedness - when you get vampire bit the first sign of impending vampirism is you get hair on your hands.  That is the universal sign of something going wrong in your life, when you get hair on your hands, because the next thing you know you are going to get claws and probably a big hairy pig nose and soon you will be running around in a cape and top hat going RAAAAAR! That doesn't happen in this though, I am just talking. You can forget about the plot and just watch the crazy things happening - the Bone Organ, the Pit of Impalement, the mob of stupid looking masked sub-vampires and spooky looking she-vamps, the fortuitous appearance of an expert on the psychological effects of music.  And this:

 

I like to fell over when I saw this insanely wonderful human-headed bat.  I have never seen that before ever.  I have also never seen the main vampire suddenly in the middle of the big fight inexplicably grow big furry bat ears.  To help him fight.  Every minute of this movie is full of great stuff to see, even if it is just the imaginative way the big fancy set is lit - it's as gorgeously filmed as any great Hollywood b-movie of the 1940s.  This is going on my list of all time favorite horror movies, second only to El espejo de la bruja (The Witch's Mirror).  I have used up all my raving and will just fill this out with absolute proof of my assertions in the form of these images:

The lovely Erna Bauman, who went on to grace El vampiro sangriento 

and La invasion de los vampiros with her solemn beauty.

Go and do likewise.

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.

MEXICAN HALLOWEEN PART 4

I figured I had better do some double features if I want to get all these things watched by Halloween so here we go with a Cowboys vs. Monsters double feature:

El charro de las Calaveras (1965) a.k.a. The Rider of the Skulls looks like it was meant as a pilot and two episodes of a kids' TV show, but judging by the online evidence of posters and lobby cards it was released as a movie.  The Charro was orphaned when his parents were killed by bandits and he dedicated his life to Justice, remaining anonymous and masked because Justice is faceless. I'd like to point out though that recent history has shown that being masked or anonymous does not make you automatically Just.  Sometimes it only makes you one of the monsters.  Social commentary aside, in the first episode the Charro confronts a werewolf which has a transformation style I have never seen before - the guy falls in a faint and his fully clothed body fades into a naked skeleton, then back into a fully clothed werewolf.  I have never understood the supernatural influence on attire and the way clothing tends to transform with the body.  In defeating the lobo humano the Charro acquires a cowardly and foolish sidekick, and an orphan boy.  In the second episode the Charro's costume undergoes significant changes, and the boy is replaced by a different boy but the cowardly foolish sidekick remains the same.  They go on to encounter two more episodes, a vampire and a headless horseman, both of whom are among the lousiest looking monsters I have yet seen. I hate to stigmatize an entire people but in general Mexican movie monster makeup and masks are terrible.

 

Charro Mk. 1 meets the Old Witch in the abandoned cemetery:

Skull and crossbone logos on arms and back, cloth face mask.

 

Crummy looking vampire.

 

Charro Mk 2 - logos on chest and plain skull on back, full head mask

 

Idiotic looking headless horseman head in box.

The monsters are intentionally not very scary because this is standard kids' show stuff - chase around, fight the monster, happy ending.  What interested me was the rural settings and decaying brick farm architecture of the locations where all the chasing and brawling was filmed.  Scholars of the Cinema should note that it was directed by El maestro de los Monstruos, Alfredo Salazar, who as writer created the most outrageous monsters of the Mexican cinema.  Name a famous Mexican monster or masked wrestler movie and chances are, Salazar wrote it. As director, maybe not so good.

El grito de la muerte (1959) was renamed The Living Coffin for its U.S. release, but there are more screams of death than there are living coffins in it.  There are strange doings on the old rancho, with a murderous Crying Ghost weeping over the deaths of her children in the quicksand swamp and clawing up the faces of her victims, and it has something to do with a fortune in gold.  Luckily along comes Gaston Santos, Cowboy Detective, and his stupid lazy sidekick Crazy Coyote - the same sidekick known as Squirrel Eyes in Swamp of the Lost Monsters, but wearing a coonskin cap this time.  The dancing horse doesn't do any dancing in this one but it does pull Gaston out of the quicksand and show him where the secret panel is that the ghost comes out of.  Swamp of the Lost Monsters was mostly filmed in rural locations, but except when Gaston is riding around the countryside or falling in the quicksand this is filmed in the gloomy arched sets of Churubusco Azteca.  In fact the street scene set looks like a rusticated and expanded version of the one in The Monstrous Doctor Crime:

I don't know if it is just the fading of the Eastmancolor print or they couldn't afford to light the sets or what, but even the courtyard of the rancho is wrapped in gloom at the triumphant finale with Crazy Coyote yawning on his horse:

When Gaston Santos takes a hand in things you know there aren't really any monsters, just criminals in monster suits, and everything will turn out okay after a lot of chasing around and brawling.   So, nothing really exciting here but I got these out of the way at least.

MEXICAN HALLOWEEN PART 3

I have mostly recovered from my physical suffering, leaving me only my usual mental suffering to cope with, so it is appropriate that I should enjoy a movie about lunatics on a rampage.

THE MANSION OF MADNESS (1973) is an hallucinogenic-expressionist rendition of Poe's story The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether, which explores the simple premise of lunatics taking over the asylum.  Though made in Mexico it more closely resembles many European gothics which begin with a coach rumbling through misty woods toward an eerie castle. In this case the castle is acknowledged from the beginning to be a lunatic asylum, instead of you having to figure out along the way that everybody is nuts. There is not much to Poe's story besides the situation. His writings never seemed fully comprehensible to me, being more mood than meaning and more poetry than plot, and this film does a good job of carrying that through.   At that point in history when this was made, the civilized world had been on drugs for years, wallowing in sexual and social libertinism, and it was just at that time that many filmmakers got the idea they could do any damn thing they wanted.  Movies like The Holy Mountain, Sweet Movie, and O Lucky Man! not only got made but watched, and there was a market for exercises in excess.  This particular mansion of madness was created in some remarkable scenes of industrial decay and creates an effective mood of derangement suitable to its origin in Poe's brief but intense story of lunacy liberated.

 

Even if you don't have any drugs to take this is still a freaked out headtrip, but it maintains an attitude of culture and sophistication throughout, never seeming to indulge for the sake of mere shock value.  The film appears to have High Art intentions and was made early enough in that period of accelerating decadence that it can be judged as a success in that regard.  

Addendum: Scholars of the Cinema will find it worth noting that the director, J.L. Moctezuma, was producer of Jodorowsky's Fando and Lis and El Topo.

Thanks also to reader Lou Minatto for noticing that Artistic Supervision was credited to noted Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington.  That explains a lot about how this movie looks.

MEXICAN HALLOWEEN PART 2

My reward for surviving the Attack of the Deadly Migraine Pill seems to be a perpetual low grade headache but in spite of that and other inevitable miseries of life here is more of the distracting triviality of Mexican Halloween 2012.

Swamp of the Lost Monsters (1957) a.k.a. El pantano de las ánimas, is one of the films brought to the U.S. by producer K. Gordon Murray and dubbed for the matinee market.  When a body vanishes from its coffin after being boated through the Haunted Swamp and a murderous fish-man begins dragging hapless campesinos to a watery doom, it's time to call in Gaston Santos, Cowboy Detective on his dancing horse, and his voluble comedic sidekick Squirrel Eyes.  There are mysterious doings on the old rancho, with plotters scheming via secret telegraphy, and it has something to do with a million dollars in life insurance.  There really isn't much movie in this movie, with lots of riding around, miscellaneous brawling, and some irrelevant fiesta footage filling it out.  It's aimless, meaningless, not in the least compelling and the only thing worth seeing unless you love the sight of a guy making a horse prance backward is the crazy fish man suit.  Though the waters of the haunted swamp are uniformly cocoa colored from above, once you are under water they are as crystal clear as a studio tank, as you can see,

The one unique experience this film provides is the opportunity to see a man in a fish man costume operating a telegraph key.  I actually took a couple of breaks to go watch baseball with my wife - that is how unthrilling Swamp of the Lost Monsters is.  It creates an eerie mood for about two minutes and from then on it's just stuff happening but not interesting stuff, just stuff.  So pray for me, that this headache will go away in a week or so.

MEXICAN HALLOWEEN PART ONE

Having determined to regale my small but sporadic readership with my experiences in enjoying a week of thrills from South of the Border, I promptly disabled myself in the middle of the first movie with a medical error.  I took a migraine pill the wrong way at the wrong time and put myself down for about five hours after the damnedest physical reaction I have ever had.  However I pulled through and here I am to do my duty.

Il mostruoso dottor Crimen (1952) a.k.a The Revived Monster, is said to be Mexico's first Mad Doctor movie.  [Addendum: the correct Spanish title is El monstruo resuscitado - I was watching an Italian print of the film with dual Italian/Spanish audio and English subtitles.] A jaded journalist answers an enigmatic advertisement which leads her into the bizarre domain of a masked doctor in his gloomy mansion between the cemetery and the sea.  His hideous countenance and social rejection drove him to become a renowned plastic surgeon and amateur sculptor of waxen beauties, but naturally his inner conflicts and isolation from humanity have deranged him.  

She becomes the first person ever to show him kindness or encouragement, inducing him to unmask, but when he learns that her true motivation is to get a great story he contrives a convoluted revenge.  This involves the inexplicable revivification of a handsome corpse by somehow transferring into it the life force of the beast-man he keeps caged in the basement, the resulting revenant being operated by the remote power of his insane mind.  This is really a gothic melodrama with plenty of appeal for the ladies - a strong independent female falling into a relationship with a pitiable but creative soul who ultimately becomes too crazy to endure.  How many times has that happened to you?  It happens here every day. 

This was filmed at the Churubusco Azteca studios, the RKO of Mexico, on a couple of very nice elaborate interior sets and some strange little exterior ones the size of a garage with a rear projection screen at the end showing the sea or the city.  It is a realm of endless night and one thing I love about these Mexican horror movies is their dark beauty.  The scenes are often staged with a truly artistic eye for lighting and the striking forms of arches and silhouettes, as these images reveal:

Despite its thrifty and slightly primitive origin it achieves a powerful mood and its melodramatic and sentimental nature becomes quite affecting.  Its formulas and cliches are not of the Mad Doctor variety, but more of the Doomed Romance style of older horror films, the pathetic situation of a gifted man who is too ugly and crazy to live, and an endangered woman whose error was in showing kindness to someone too poorly socialized to understand it.   

YES, it's the hideous story of my OWN TERRIBLE LIFE!!!!

IT DIDN'T START IN NIGERIA

 IN demonstration of the fact that the email scams of today are of long ignoble lineage, and that the wiseass response thereto is of nearly equal age, I present this excerpt from

P. H. WOODWARD

 Adventures in the Secret Service of the Post-Office Department

Entitled:

AN OLD GAME REVIVED

 On the 18th of September, 1875, a fellow was arrested in West Virginia who sent the victims whom he proposed to bleed letters whereof the following is a copy:--

 "A lady who boarded with me died on last Saturday of apoplexy. She left a trunk containing the following property: One very fine ladies' gold watch and chain, one ladies' gold necklace, six ladies' finger rings, earrings, and a great deal of ladies' clothing. Among other things was a letter addressed to you. I suppose you to be a relative of the deceased, and want to send you the trunk. When Miss Thompson died she left a board bill unpaid amounting to $20.50. You will please send this amount by return mail, and the trunk will be forwarded to you immediately."

 Instead of remitting the money as modestly requested, the recipient of one of these choice douceurs, a lady residing in the interior of Pennsylvania, sent the letter to the mayor of the town where it was dated and postmarked, who in turn handed it over to special agent T. P. Shallcross; and he in the course of a day or two succeeded in capturing the miscreant.

 This particular form of the confidence game is very old; yet in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and seventy-five a swindler by means of it succeeds not only in maintaining himself in dashing style, but also in sporting a flashy traveling companion of the female persuasion!

 Where the letters are addressed to men, the articles reported to be found in the imaginary trunk are changed to correspond to masculine habits and wants. The operators receive many singular and some entertaining replies. The following, dated long ago from a small town at the South, may serve as a sample, the orthography of the original being preserved:--

 "COL. SNOWDEN,

 "Dear Sir,--Yours received, and you say John is dead. Poor fellow! I always expected it. Death runs in the family. Dyed suddenly of appleplexy--eat too many apples. Well, I always thought John would hurt himself eating apples. I s'pose you had him buried. You said nothing about funeral expenses. He had a trunk--gold watch in it, &c. Well, well, what an unexpected legacy! but strange things happen sometimes. Never thought I should get a gold watch so. And he had the watch in his trunk, did he? Poor fellow! was always so particular 'bout his watch and fixings. Had two revolvers. What is them? I never heard John say anything about them. Well, you have been so kind as to write to me; just keep all the balance of the things, you can have them; but the gold watch, send that to me by express. Send immediately if not sooner."

 "Very truly,

 "GEO. STREAM.

 "P. S. My mother in law says, if you come this way, call. She likes to know all such good, kind folks."

 It is safe to conclude that "Col. Snowden" never accepted the invitation to call from the hospitable mother-in-law.