She’s obviously a vampire. Of sorts. She doesn’t have fangs. She drugs her victim, has sex with him and then cuts his throat. So we figure she’s either a vampire or a crazy chick who thinks she’s a vampire.
So what is she going to do with Ben? Is she going to kill him and drain his blood? Fall in love with him? Keep him as her toy boy? Is she going to tell him that usually she kills her boyfriends?
Cristina Ferrare’s slightly detached performance as Mary helps here. It’s hard to get a handle on how she feels about Ben (or how she feels about being a vampire lady for that matter). She seems to like the guy, but then she seemed to like the first guy she killed. She doesn’t go into crazed psycho killer mode when she kills. She just approaches it as something that she has to do.
The movie effectively keeps us uncertain as to exactly what Mary is. She behaves like your regular vampire and she seems to be driven by blood hunger but the fact that she uses a little knife (hidden in her hair comb) might suggest that she’s not a real vampire. The uncertainty is maintained.
She certainly isn’t finished with killing. She seems to kill pretty regularly. But there’s also the person in the mask. It could be a man or a woman and the connection with the murders is unclear.
Lots of murders follow. Lieutenant Pons of the Mexican police and Inspector Cosgrove of the FBI are sure the murders were all committed by the same person. The pattern is always the same.
Or are they? The viewer is not entirely sure.
The police suspect Ben. They don’t have any evidence but he was in the right places at the right time.
Mary’s victims are usually men. But not always. Her lovers are also not always men. There’s also art dealer Greta (Helena Rojo). Mary doesn’t like killing people she knows. Nice girls don’t do that and she’s basically a nice girl, apart from the killing people and drinking their blood thing. She does have some Daddy issues. She doesn’t really remember her father although she has a picture of him that she painted. He thinks that’s what he looked like.
Mexican director Juan López Moctezuma only made a handful of movies. That handful included the wondrously bizarre Alucarda (1977) which I highly recommend.
Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary is a Mexican movie but was shot in English and obviously aimed at the American market.
I like Cristina Ferrare in this film. She plays Mary as a sweet vulnerable girl, easily frightened, craving love and who just happens to kill lots and lots of people. Somehow Ferrare makes this convincing. We like Mary. We want things to work out for her. We worry about her. We’d just like her to stop killing people. Her performance is odd but kind of chilling. Ferrare’s biggest claim to fame is having been married to John DeLorean.
John Carradine also puts in an appearance. Which is appropriate for a vampire move since he played Dracula in a couple of the 1940s Universal horror flicks. And he always adds a touch of creepiness.
The scenes in which Mary is chased through a graveyard by a figure in a Carnival mask are pretty effective. Compared to Alucarda the weirdness here is much more low-key but the weirdness is still there.
There’s some nudity and some gore but it’s all very tame by 1970s standards. It’s the movie’s subtly offbeat qualities and odd atmosphere that will draw you in.
The German Blu-Ray from CMV includes both German and English soundtracks. The transfer is anamorphic and it’s OK but there is some print damage. To be honest this transfer is only DVD quality. Sound quality is reasonable but not fantastic.
This seems like Moctezuma’s attempt to do a commercial horror film while Alucarda is much more self-consciously arty. Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary actually maintains a good balance - it’s slightly weird and arty but still entertaining in a drive-in movie sort of way. Recommended.
No comments:
Post a Comment