Love After Death (1968)

Love After Death (also released as Unsatisfied Love) is a 1968 Argentinian erotic horror movie and it’s pretty crazy. Which is a good thing.

We start with a man named Montel being buried alive in a very Poe-esque scene. He’s subject to cataleptic fits and it appears that nobody checked to make sure he was really dead. He manages to claw his way out of the grave and as you might imagine he is not a happy camper.

Meanwhile Sofia, his wife of three months (now supposedly his widow), and his doctor are making plans for their life together. It’s pretty clear that poor Montel was deliberately buried alive.

Sofia assures the doctor (Dr Anderson) that she is still a virgin. Montel can’t perform in the bedroom because he’s terrified of sex.

Montel, back in the land of living, goes looking for women. He wants to prove to himself that there’s nothing wrong with him and that he’s quite capable of having sex. His first attempts are unsuccessful but then he picks up a pretty brunette and everything goes smoothly.

Montel has figured out that he was the victim of a plot by his wife and doctor and he has a score to settle with them. They’re already getting nervous after being informed by a police inspector that Montel’s grave is empty.

A large part of the movie is taken up by Montel’s pursuit of women and then the thriller plot starts to kick in. Dr Anderson decides that it’s essential to get Montel out of the way and to make sure he’s really dead this time. He’s a bit of a strange doctor. He has a couple of strongarm men working for him and they’re despatched to take care of Montel.

This leads to a shootout in the woods.

The opening burial sequence is quite effectively creepy but aside from that there’s not a huge amount of horror content. This is more of a deranged erotic thriller than a true erotic horror movie. There’s very little blood and there’s no gore.

There is nudity and sex, in copious quantities. It’s about as explicit as a typical 1968 US sexploitation movie, in other words it’s fairly tame but there are lots of naked ladies.

The acting is so-so. Guillermo De Córdova is quite effective as Montel, giving an odd detached performance which may have been due to a lack of acting ability but it ends up being quite appropriate. And he’s a weedy little guy with a subtly creepy look, which helps.

Love After Death is totally different from European erotic horror movies. It has a very similar feel to American sexploitation movies of this era. The look of the film, the grainy black-and-white cinematography, the tone, the craziness, the incoherence of the plot, the fact that it seems to have been made without synchronised sound (with a small amount of dialogue dubbed later), the amount of skin on display and the whole ambience make it very easy to mistake for a US sexploitation feature. In fact it fits fairly well into the roughie sub-genre.

It’s actually quite reminiscent of Doris Wishman’s wonderful off-the-wall voodoo nudie movie Indecent Desires (1967).

Love After Death seems to have been shot entirely in the United States (in fact in New York) and there is considerable doubt as to whether it really is an Argentinian movie.

The ending comes totally out of left field but it works for me.

Love After Death is pleasingly nutty and weird and very enjoyable. Highly recommended.

This movie was released on a triple-feature disc from Something Weird along with The Incredible Petrified World (a bad sci-fi movie that is unfortunately very dull indeed) and The Atomic Brain AKA Monstrosity (which is enjoyable sci-fi silliness). Love After Death gets a fullframe transfer (which is totally correct) which is reasonably good considering that it’s surprising this movie survives at all.

The Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy (1958)

I’m quite a fan of the Mexican Aztec Mummy movies of the 1950s but it has to be said that The Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy (La Momia azteca contra el robot humano) hardly qualifies as a movie at all. More than half of the movie’s 65-minute running time consists of flashbacks to the first two Aztec mummy movies!

Once we get to some actual new footage it has to be admitted that there’s enough high camp silliness to satisfy devotees of such things. The robot of the title is not just a human robot, it’s an atomic human robot! Because only a nuclear robot is capable of defeating the dreaded Aztec mummy. This is, even for the 1950s, a remarkably silly if rather entertaining robot. The mad scientist’s laboratory is fun as well. The budget for this movie must have been virtually nil.

It also has to be said that Luis Aceves Castañeda as Dr Krupp is one of the greatest of all movie mad scientists. He is still determined to get his hands on the fabulous Aztec treasure, which is of course guarded zealously by the Aztec mummy. And the dedicated scientist Dr. Eduardo Almada, his daughter Flor (who had been destined as a sacrifice to an Aztec god in a previous life) and his faithful if not overly brave assistant Pinacate are still determined to foil his evil plans. Since there’s so little in the way of new footage and new plot it’s not really possible to say a great deal about this movie.

Interestingly enough the first three Aztec Mummy movies were apparently shot simultaneously, which would have been a neat way to keep production costs very low indeed. The producers were obviously confident they had a winning formula on their hands, and they were correct.

This title is included in BCI’s Aztec Mummy boxed set which also features the first two movies in the series, The Aztec Mummy and The Curse of the Aztec Mummy. Both of which I highly recommend. All three movies are in Spanish with English sub-titles and there are also English dubbed versions for two of the films. The prints are quite good.

I’m a fan of Mexican horror in general, but I’m especially fond of the Aztec mummy movies because they were a genuine attempt to include some actual Mexican legend and folklore, albeit mixed with a good deal of campy fun with diabolical criminal masterminds.

The Curious Dr Humpp (1967)

Argentinian exploitation movies are possibly something you never even knew existed, but in fact Emilio Vieyra not only made exploitation movies in that country, but several are now available on DVD, including Blood of the Virgins (1967). It’s not a bad little horror flick, but La venganza del sexo is something else again. Made in 1967, a distributor added extra softcore sex scenes and it was released in the US in 1971 as The Curious Dr Humpp.

The practice of adding additional nudity or sex scenes was fairly common back in the golden age of grindhouse movies. Mostly the results are jarring and disjointed but it has to be admitted that in this case it was done with a certain amount of skill, and in any case the movie itself is so bizarre and so sexual that you can’t really argue that any harm was done to Vieyra’s very strange vision.

Dr Humpp is a mad scientist, continuing the work of an earlier mad scientist on the prolonging of human life by the use of chemicals produced during sex. He kidnaps people, pumps them full of aphrodisiacs, and they then have sex until they literally exhaust themselves to death. Dr Humpp and his assistant collect blood from their victims at the moment of climax, and this provides the raw materials for his experiments. The disappearances attract the attention of both the local police and a zealous newspaper reporter. The reporter manages to get himself captured by the mad doctor, and falls in love with one of the other captives who has been assigned to him as his sexual partner.

Dr Humpp also has a small army of people who have been transformed into human automatons, to provide a security force and to help collect further victims. For some reason that is never explained they sometimes seem to end up looking like monsters.
This is a true camp classic, an amazingly odd but undeniably fascinating little movie. Vieyra’s movies have something of the outrageously campy feel of Mexican horror movies of the 50s and 60s with a dash of Swinging 60s vibe as well. Vieyra made a lot of movies and it’s to be hoped that a few more show up on DVD. It would also be nice to see more Argentinian exploitation features from other director, although a few have been released by Something Weird.

The Curious Dr Humpp is not a great film by any means, but if you’re in the mood for goofy weirdness then it’s an enjoyable romp. Something Weird’s DVD release isn’t one of their best. The film is presented full-frame and there’s quite a bit of damage, but considering they probably had very poor source materials to work with and considering the movie’s obscurity I’m sure they did the best they could. This is definitely one for aficionados of odd but appealing trash cinema.

The Curse of the Aztec Mummy (1957)

The Curse of the Aztec Mummy (La Maldición de la momia azteca), the second in the Aztec Mummy series, is one of those seques that really requites you to have seen the first movie if you’re going understand what’s going on. Which is a pity in some ways, because it’s a different type of movie to The Aztec Mummy. The first movie had its cheesy moments but it had some real atmosphere and some nice ideas. The Curse of the Aztec Mummy is just silly fun, although it’s still highly entertaining silly fun. Adding a mysterious masked crime-fighter known as The Angel (in a cape and spandex tights no less) inevitably increases the camp quotient considerably!

The diabolical criminal mastermind who meddles so diastrously in Dr Almada’s past life regression experiments in the first film has escaped from custody, and he’s still determined to get hold of the fabulous Aztec treasure. His plan to discover the exact location of the treasure involves kidnapping both Dr Almada and his fiancee Flor and forcing them to repeat their earlier experiment - to send her back to her previous life when she was to be offered as a sacrifice to the Aztec gods.

It plays out very much in the style of an old Hollywood movie serial, with the good guys being captured by the bad guys, then escaping, then being recaptured, then re-escaping, and so on. The diabolical criminal mastermind behaves the way any good movie diabolical criminal mastermind should - when he has the hero at his mercy he doesn’t simply kill him, but instead devises a complicated and ingenious method of execution which of course fails, as such methods always fail in the world of the movies.

The acting is pretty basic, although Rosa Arenas is quite good as Flor. It lacks the wonderful gothic mood of the best Mexican horror movies, it lacks the genuine frisson of terror that the human sacrifice sub-plot in the first movie provided, and Rafael Portillo’s direction isn’t overly imaginative. It does however offer non-stop if somewhat bewildering action and plenty of unlikely plot twists and narrow escapes from certain death.

It can be found in BCI’s three-movie Aztec Mummy boxed set, nicely restored and including both the original Spanish soundtrack with sub-titles and an English dubbed version. It’s all good campy fun, and the boxed set is well worth picking up.

Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Mummy (1964)

How can you possibly resist a movie with a title like Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Mummy (Las Luchadoras contra la momia)? Especially when it’s a sort of sequel to Rock’n’Roll Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Ape (otherwise known as Doctor Doom). And this 1964 Mexican horror flick is as much fun as the title would suggest.

This is one of a long series of Aztec mummy movies. This time a Japanese diabolical criminal mastermind known as the Black Dragon is trying to locate the fabled Aztec treasure. And he has his two sisters to assist him - both deadly martial arts experts. It’s up to those gutsy women wrestlers again, to prevent the Black Dragon from unlocking the occult powers to which the treasure holds the key. Will Gloria Venus and the Golden Ruby (the two chief lady wrestlers in the story) be up to the challenge?

It will come as no surprise that this is a very cheesy movie indeed. But it’s good cheesy. Fun cheesy. The Black Dragon is a suitably sinister villain. It has lots of action and plot complications. There’s some fun Aztec mummy folklore. And it has an epic fight scene between Venus and Ruby and the Black Dragon’s sisters! 

The actual Aztec mummy provides the excuse for much enjoyable silliness. He seems to be a part-time vampire as well, since he turns himself into a bat on several occasions. This is explained by the fact that he is really an Aztec sorcerer with shape-shifting powers, buried alive after an illicit tryst with a virgin who had been destined for the great honour of being sacrificed to one of the gods. 

There’s the usual comic relief character, but he’s not overly annoying. And there’s the usual slightly dotty scientist, an archaeologist and expert on Aztec legends and the occult. But it’s Lorena Velázquez as Gloria Venus and Elizabeth Campbell as Golden Ruby to whom the movie belongs. I’m not going to claim that they’re great actresses but their performances are energetic and enthusiastic and that’s exactly what is required.  

You can find this movie, along with five other wonderful Mexican cult films, in the Crypt of Terror: Horror from South of the Border boxed set from BCI. Only the English dubbed versions are included unfortunately, but the set is cheap and the films are thoroughly enjoyable. Highly recommended.

Doctor of Doom (1963)

The 1963 Mexican movie Doctor of Doom (Las Luchadoras contra el médico asesino, released in the US as Rock 'N Roll Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Ape) is based on the simple and obvious premise that the two elements whose presence is most likely to guarantee the success of a film are mad scientists and female wrestlers. So if you make a movie that features both mad scientists and lady wrestlers, you’re bound to have a sure-fire winner. Since it kicked off a sub-genre of wrestling women movies, the producers were obviously right.

The mad scientist in question is working on brain transplants. He believes female subjects are most suitable, since women have more endurance than men. Unfortunately to date all his experiments have ended in failure, although he did manage to successfully transplant a gorilla’s brain into a man. He obtains his experimental subjects by the simple expedient of getting his criminal gang (like any self-respecting mad scientist he has a criminal gang working for him) to kidnap women.

At first he thinks that perhaps he needs more intelligent women, so he tries the operation on a female scientist. That fails also, so then he hits on the idea of using a woman with great physical strength. And it just so happens that his most recent victim has a sister who is Mexico’s most famous female wrestler, Gloria Venus. But kidnapping wrestling women turns out to be hard work, and Gloria and her wrestling partner Golden Rubi beat the mad scientist’s minions to a pulp.

Our two intrepid wrestling women are now working with the police to track down the mad doctor. The two male police officers assigned to the case run into a few problems though, and have to be rescued from the jaws of death by the wrestling women. But the mad doctor is still on the loose, and he has his gorilla/man hybrid monster to protect him. Things get really difficult when he creates a super lady wrestler to take on Gloria Venus.

This movie has everything you could possibly want. If has beautiful glamorous female wrestlers. A mysterious masked mad scientist. Incompetent policemen. A plot that is so obvious that if you don’t know the identity of the villain within the first ten minutes you’re just not trying. Bad sets. Terrible make-up effects. It has an unstoppable monster. Lots of wrestling scenes with the aforementioned beautiful glamorous female wrestlers. What more could you want?

The acting is fairly dodgy, although Lorena Velázquez and Elizabeth Campbell are energetic and likeable as the wrestling women. And the obligatory comic relief actor playing one of the cop is less annoying than is usual with comic relief actors in old horror movies. Some of his exchanges with Golden Rubi (with whom he has fallen passionately in love) are actually quite amusing.

It’s included in the Crypt of Terror: Horror from South of the Border DVD boxed set. It’s presented in an English dub only, and the image quality isn’t fantastic, but you get six movies for a very low price. And it includes another wrestling woman film! So there is certainly no cause for complaint. It’s not Citizen Kane. It’s not even the Citizen Kane of wrestling women movies. But it is lots of extremely cheesy fun, and I loved it.

El Vampiro (1957)

Although Hammer’s The Curse of Frankenstein is generally credited with triggering the revival of horror movies, and particularly of gothic horror, in fact it seems that the rediscovery of gothic horror happened more or less simultaneously in three different countries. In Britain, with Hammer’s film, in Italy with Riccardo Freda’s I Vampiri, and in Mexico with El Vampiro (The Vampire).

Of these three movies, El Vampiro is the most traditional. It’s closest in feel to the Universal monster movies of the 30s and 40s. On the other hand, it is an attempt to make the vampire overtly sexy, so in that respect it resembles Hammer’s first vampire movie, Dracula, which came out a year or so later.

A young woman, Marta, alights from a train at a rural railway station in Mexico, only to find that it is impossible to obtain transport to Los Sicomoros, the hacienda where she grew up. There’s another traveller stranded at the station, a young man who claims to be a commercial traveller, and he eventually persuades a mysterious wagon driver to take them both to Los Sicomoros. On arrival, Marta is told that her much-loved aunt died the previous day. The hacienda itself appears to be slowly falling apart, and there’s an uneasy atmosphere. Her uncle seems worried, while her strangely youthful-looking remaining aunt is behaving a little oddly.

It transpires that an offer has been made for the purchase of the hacienda by a neighbour, a Mr Duval. This had caused a rift between her uncle and her aunts, and this had been complicated by the now deceased aunt’s growing conviction that she was being stalked by a vampire. In fact the young man from the railway station is a doctor, called in by the uncle to make a medical determination on her sanity.

There’s nothing especially original about El Vampiro, but the traditional ingredients are blended with considerable skill. The sets are superb, and the gothic atmosphere is overwhelming. Rosalío Solano’s black-and-white cinematography is stunning. The overall look is similar to the Universal films, and there are distinct resemblances to the underrated 1943 Son of Dracula in particular. The special effects are simple but the bat transformations work better than they have any right to do.

Germán Robles makes a smoothly sinister vampire, while Abel Salazar (who also produced the film) is a likeable hero as the doctor. Ariadna Welter is an effective (and remarkably beautiful) heroine as Marta. All the supporting players are extremely competent. There’s nothing cheap or shoddy about the style or the look of this movie, and there’s nothing campy about its treatment of the material. It relies on atmosphere rather than shocks, and the end result is an impressive horror film.

Casa Negra’s Region 1 DVD looks as wonderful as all their other DVDs, and includes plentiful extras.

Blood of the Virgins (1967)

Emilio Vieyra’s Blood of the Virgins (Sangre de vírgenes) is a 1967 horror movie from Argentina. I have to admit that I didn’t know there were horror movies from Argentina. In fact it’s a vampire movie.

At some time in the 19th century a woman has to choose between two men, not realising that one of them is a vampire. On her wedding night she finds herself the victim of the vampire. Cut to 1967, and a group of young people are on holiday when their car runs out of petrol. They reach an apparently deserted house, where a mysterious servant has a meal already prepared for them. But of course the vampire and the vampire bride are still there, haunting the house, and the girls in the party are bitten and start to transform into the undead.

What’s surprising (apart from the locations in the mountains of Argentina) for a 1967 movie is the amount of gore and nudity. Other than that it’s a fairly well-made low-budget horror flick. It’s strictly B-movie stuff, but it’s entertaining enough. Being a Mondo Macabro release it comes with some fascinating extra, which are actually even more interesting than the movie itself. There’s a documentary about the exploitation film industry in Argentina, the existence of which I had never even suspected.

Emilio Vieyra, the director of Blood of the Virgins, made several other horror films in the 60s, including the gloriously titled The Curious Dr. Humpp (a movie that sounds very bizarre indeed). Blood of the Virgins includes some groovy 60s clothes and some rather naughty go-go dancing, both of which add considerably to the fun. It was filmed in colour and the DVD release looks terrific. Definitely worth a look.

The Aztec Mummy (1957)

The Aztec Mummy (La Momia azteca), released in 1957, was the first of a fairly extensive series of Aztec mummy movies. While it’s fairly cheesy compared to some of the Mexican gothic horror classics, and is certainly not the equal of movies like The Black Pit of Dr M, The Curse of the Crying Woman and The Witch’s Mirror, it is at least more original. It does represent a genuine attempt to create a distinctively Mexican horror film.

Dr Almada has become convinced that hypnosis can unlock memories of our past lives. all he needs is someone willing to offer themselves as an experimental subject and he is sure his theory will be triumphantly vindicated. His girlfriend rather unwisely volunteers herself for this role. She is regressed to a past life, as a young woman destined from birth to be a virgin sacrifice to an Aztec god. Unfortunately she has fallen in love with a young Aztec warrior, and when their love is discovered he is punished by being buried alive and damned for all eternity. As a result the pyramid temple and the tomb associated with this sad tale is under a perpetual curse.

Being a horror movie scientist, Dr Almada naturally ignores all the warnings he receives abut tampering with Aztec curses. You just can’t tell these scientists anything. To complicate matters, Dr Almada’s house is being staked out by the gang led by the mysterious masked diabolical criminal mastermind known only as The Bat. They’re not interested in his scientific work, but they do see a chance to get their hands on a fabulous buried Aztec treasure.

While it bears some superficial resemblance to the Universal classic The Mummy, this is actually a very different sort of movie. The Aztec practice of human sacrifice makes the Aztec mummy far more sinister and purely monstrous than Boris Karloff’s rather sympathetic Egyptian mummy.

At around this time there were many in Mexico who, for political reasons, wanted to idealise the Aztec past as part of a process of forging a distinctive Mexican national identity. The movie’s sceptical attitude towards the glories of Aztec civilisation would have given it considerable resonance for a contemporary Mexican audience. There’s also the theme of modernism in conflict with traditionalism, which adds an interesting additional layer to the film.

It’s one of three films included in BCI’s Aztec Mummy Collection. While the image quality isn’t up to the standards maintained by Casa Negra in their Mexican horror DVD releases, it’s perfectly acceptable and the movie appears to be complete and uncut. It is cheesy, but it has some nice ideas as well. And it’s certainly fun.

Alucarda (1975)

Mexican director Juan López Moctezuma, a one-time collaborator with Alejandro Jodorowsky, made just a handful of films during his career. His third feature film was Alucarda, la hija de las tinieblas, made during the mid-1970s.

A young woman (Justine), newly arrived at a convent in Mexico in the mid-19th century, makes a strange and unsettling new friend. After a meeting with a gypsy the girls’ behaviour becomes increasingly disturbing until, during a sermon, they start cursing God and announcing that they have pledged themselves to the Evil One. The nuns, and the priests who act as their confessors, react in the way you’d expect them to react – they start flagellating themselves and they tie the girls up and torture them (for their own good of course). After that things get increasingly weird and bloody. When an attempted exorcism goes disastrously wrong the local doctor is called in, setting up a conflict between the forces of science and the forces of religion.

What distinguishes Alucarda from the average exploitation horror movie is its deliberate ambiguity. We’re never quite sure how much of what we’re seeing is objective reality and how much is being filtered through the viewpoints of the various characters. We’re also never entirely certain whose viewpoint we’re seeing. The divide between good and evil, and between madness and sanity, is even more ambiguous. While the girls appear to be genuinely possessed, the nuns and priests are clearly deranged right from the start and they’ve just been waiting for something to light the fuse to set them off on an orgy of sadistic fanaticism. The doctor’s story seems to follow the classic horror movie arc, from scepticism to a belief in the reality of evil, but the audience is left with an uneasy feeling that his original scepticism may have been the correct response to the situation.

Extra layers of doubt are added to the mix by the practice of having several of the actors playing multiple parts. The acting is effective. Moctezuma had a limited budget but with imaginative lighting and camerawork, a few striking sets and some bizarre costumes (the nuns look like blood-stained walking corpses or Egyptian mummies) he still manages to deliver a visually arresting movie. The movie works as a horror movie, with enough blood and mayhem to satisfy most fans, but it has more than just the blood and mayhem going for it.

The Mondo Macabro DVD release is fullscreen, which is actually quite correct since that’s how the movie was shot. It was also, interestingly enough, shot in English. It looks pretty good, and there are some worthwhile extras. This movie is a must for fans of demonic possession movies, and for anyone who loves non-mainstream horror from the 70s.

The Curse of the Crying Woman (1963)

Rafael Baledón’s The Curse of the Crying Woman (La Maldición de la Llorona) starts off with a scene taken almost directly from Mario Bava’s Black Sunday, released a year or so earlier. The twist here is that in Bava’s film the evil witch-looking woman turns out not to be what you expect, whereas in Baledón’s movie she most certainly is a witch, and a particularly malevolent one. She has the usual plans to gain immense powers, and she also intends to restore to life one of her ancestresses, the finder of a line of witches. To do this she needs the help, willing or unwilling, of the dead witch’s youngest female descendant, Amelia. She summons Amelia and her new husband to her very gothic mansion. It doesn’t take Amelia too long to figure out that her aunt (who looks much younger than she has any right to look) is up to something sinister, but can she thwart her diabolical plot?

Like the other Mexican horror movies I’ve seen, The Curse of the Crying Woman is absolutely dripping with gothic atmosphere – there’s the house itself, there are the spiderwebs, there are the three enormous dogs looking like hounds from Hell, there’s the physically deformed servant who looks exactly like the sort of henchman that a horror movie villain would employ, there’s the ever-present fog, in fact there’s every gothic horror cliché you can think of.

The sheer excessiveness of the atmosphere actually works, aided by some rather nice black-and-white cinematography courtesy of José Ortiz Ramos. The special effects are mostly crude, but fortunately Baledón doesn’t overdo them. The acting is fairly impressive, with Rita Macedo making a wonderful villainess, while Rosita Arenas makes a spirited heroine. It does have a few rather nice touches – the floating eyeballs provide an impressive visual effect. And Baledón keeps the action moving along at a cracking pace.

The Casa Negra DVD release looks superb, which is what we’ve come to expect from this company, and there’s also a commentary track. It’s not quite in the same league as the other Mexican horror movies I’ve seen, The Black Pit of Dr M and The Witch’s Mirror, but it’s a competent and thoroughly entertaining little movie.

Satánico Pandemonium (1975)

Satánico Pandemonium is another slice of Mexican nunsploitation from the 70s brought to us by the good people at Mondo Macabro. It’s not as over-the-top as the marvellous Alucarda. In fact it’s surprisingly restrained and subtle in execution. There is gore, but it’s used sparingly and therefore it actually has an impact when it is used (if only a few other film-makers would learn this simple lesson). A young nun with a reputation for extreme piousness encounters a naked man in the woods. He turns out to be Lucifer, and he sets out to tempt her. His temptations include the pleasures of the flesh, but they also include power – he offers to secure for her the position of Mother Superior. She battles the temptations, but not very successfully, and soon finds herself caught up in events that are running out of control. The movie was helmed by veteran Mexican director Gilberto Martínez Solares, with a screenplay by his son Adolfo Martínez Solares. An interview with the latter is included as an extra, and he has some fascinating snippets of information about the filming, such as the fact that many of the nuns were actually played by prostitutes from a notorious brothel. Satánico Pandemonium is one of those movies that combines exploitation with some political critiques of society in general and the Church in particular, and it combines the two quite effectively. The actual meaning of the movie remains ambiguous, but I can’t say any more for fear of giving away spoilers. While it isn’t quite in the same class as Alucarda it’s still a great little piece of trash cinema and it’s lots of fun. It hardly needs to be added that Mondo Macabro have done another sensational job, the movie looks terrific, and there are some very worthwhile extras.

The Witch’s Mirror (1962)

The Witch’s Mirror (El Espejo de la bruja) is really two movies. The first half is a ghost story/revenge from the grave story, and the second half is a surprisingly grisly mad scientist movie. A woman is murdered by her husband so he can marry someone else, but the first wife has a godmother who dabbles in witchcraft, and this allows her to return from the dead to seek vengeance. It was made in Mexico in 1962, and although on occasion it suffers from what was clearly a very low budget – some of the effects are very crude indeed – on the whole it’s an efficient piece of gothic horror. The acting is generally adequate, the sets are wonderfully gothic, there are some nice visual touches, and the atmosphere is effectively creepy. Not as good as The Black Pit of Dr M, but still good enough to have me seeking out more Mexican horror.

The Black Pit of Dr M (1959)

If you see The Black Pit of Dr M (Misterios de ultratumba) expecting something in the so-bad-it’s-good or the amusingly camp categories you’re in for a surprise. This 1959 Mexican production is a serious horror film, and a very good one. This is no camp classic - not that I have anything against camp classics, in fact I adore them, but The Black Pit of Dr M is not that type of movie. It reminds me quite a bit of the Val Lewton RKO horror movies of the 40s – there’s the same emphasis on atmosphere, and the cinematography and set design have a similar feel. Like Lewton’s movies it has at times almost a film noir feel. You can also see the influence of the best of the Universal horror classics of the 30s, and there are definite touches of Expressionism. There is nothing cheap or shoddy about this production. While it was undoubtedly made on a very limited budget, it doesn’t look low-budget; in fact it looks classy and very very professional. I doubt that anyone could teach Víctor Herrera, the director of photography on this movie, anything at all about the use of shadows and fog and noirish photography. I don’t think anyone could teach director Fernando Méndez anything about directing horror films either – he does an extremely assured job.

The plot is delightfully twisted and nasty. Don’t worry, I’m not going to reveal any spoilers – this is much too good a movie to ruin for anyone by doing that. The movie starts with three eminent doctors who make a pact with each other that whoever dies first will find a way to get a message to the others, revealing the means by which a person can travel to the world of the dead and return to the realm of the living, and thus reveal the secrets of the world beyond the grave. As you might expect in a horror movie, things don’t work out as nearly as they had hoped! The acting is very competent and it’s nice to see all the players in a horror film taking their roles seriously – there’s no scenery-chewing going on here. Rafael Bertrand is particularly good as Dr Masali, the man who receives a communication from the afterlife from the deceased Dr Aldama. The movie is essentially an exercise in psychological horror, with very little reliance on gore. The special effects are simple and used sparingly. And I can’t recommend the Casa Negra DVD too highly – the picture and sound quality are both absolutely superb, and the extras include an exceptionally good commentary track. It’s great to see a fine movie getting a high-quality DVD release. I’m looking forward to buying more DVDs from this company. Overall this very entertaining, very stylish and genuinely chilling little movie is a must for any serious horror fan.