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Hey Classic Mexican horror fans, this is Mil Errores, escritor que lucha libre de adicciones y ego monstrouo y, here to offer this October a whole series "Famous Monsters of Mexico" - because all of it is, if nothing else, imaginative and just plain crazy AND with a strong matriachal through line thanks the numero uno monster of Mexico being la Lorona, the Crying Woman, Mexico's big crossover horror icon, recurring again and again in one form or another -- evoking a very strong matriarchal through-line - devouring aunts and mothers luring her niece to the hacienda for a sacrifice, to inhale her youth and/or drown and kill children, to keep the devil happy. Yes, queen... of evil!
Repetitious, threadbare movies, the same passages of bombastic score over and over, endlessly recycled sets and props--sound familiar!? but unlike Monogram or PIC North of the border, the imagination on display is pretty jaw-dropping. So let's get in on the madness! Starting (according to some half-memory of a documentary extra seen ten years ago).,
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Kicking things off we salute Abel Salazar (
left) the Mexican Carl Laemmle Jr, if Carl was also an ex-matinee idol, with a more than passing resemblance to Sheldon Leonard. He generally shows up as the good lead in the thankless role of hapless husband, passing stranger, etc. the shaky heteronormative alternative to the evil seduction of the heroine's maternal ancestors, i.e. the ultimate wicked stepmother/s, but with his name as producer in the credits as well, so you can understand why he might come off a tad distracted
The big notable differences between these Mexican horrors and ours, besides language/dubbing involves the big soundstage standing set of a hacienda, which appears over and over in many many Mexican movies of the era: it looks great, with front gate, a well in the center of the courtyard, a row of balconies like a motel, all visible and overlain with big soundstage surrealist atmosphere, and a strong matriarchal through line thanks to the power wielded by older Mexican women in the social structure, and Mexico's big crossover horror icon, recurring again and again in one form or another, devouring aunts and mothers luring her niece to the hacienda for a sacrifice, to inhale her youth and/or drown and kill children, to keep the devil happy. Yes, queen... of evil!
Yes, Mexico is muy viejo. America can't find its own la Lorona, or Inquisition, rather than just wipe out the native inhabitants, the Spanish had children with them, Catholicism making it all OK in a way super-racist America never understood --and that's how Mexicans, LatinX-ers were born and that's the root of la Lorona, the Native mistress and the Spanish nobleman who fathered her children, but then mistreated her and triggered a Medea reaction. In the US horror movies if we do luck out and get a woman monster, she has to fall for some bland young white cipher who prefers Evelyn Ankers or something, to appease our uptight racist censors. We have to set our films in Europe to evoke ghostliness, but Mexico... it's gotta go nowhere - it's already home. And the monsters are in their blood, in the sand, in the bull ring, the wrestling mat, the spooky hacienda engulfed by evil...
THE VAMPIRE (EL VAMPIRO)
(1957) Dir. Fernando Méndez
Producer Abel Salazar is the nominal mortal hero here, playing the super skittish and inconsistent psychiatrist Dr. Enrique, who's been called to the Sicomoros, a remote, crumbling, spooky villa way out in Sierra Negra, under the guise of helping fellow traveler an all-around clueless naif Marta (Ariadne Welter) get 'home' safe after they get off the train (they hitch a ride on a wagon with a big coffin full of earth, so you know whassupa. She hasn't been there since she was a kid, and it was sunny and normal--now; she find the whole landscape is twisted and foggy and dangerous; the hacienda is rundown, cobwebbed and twisty tree roots and fog. Servants have all fled or bled- Oh dios mio. She's been working in a shop, now called back because the good aunt who raised her-- Maria (Alicia Montoya)--is sick, or crazy; and actually dead, or at least has a funeral procession to Sicomoros' atmosphere drenched crypt. She is the one who Enrique was called in to diagnose since she was raving about vampires --now she's dead, and the medical association is pretty strict about psychiatric diagnoses once the patient is dead. On the other hand, the bad sister, Eloisa (Carmen Montejo) is alive, but not really. She hasn't aged a day since Marta left. Now she sleeps all day, dresses all in black, can't be seen in mirrors, is averse to crosses but--you know, the idea of vampirism is scoffed at. In between, a milquetoast uncle Emilio (José Luis Jiménez) tries to stay out of it. Salazar's shrink however just can't leave without diagnosing someone, so spends his time trying to put his clumsy flirt moves on Marta rather than letting her grieve. But vampiros?! Dr. Enrique would much rather commit the dead body of Amelia to the sanitarium than risk his standing in the scientific community by believing his own eyes. Any layman can easily to diagnose a vampire--and in case he forgot there's a book from the library that the not-dead Maria pushes out from her hideout behind the bookshelf, to catch him up. But he only thinks it's fiction; leaves Marta foolishly exposed to Eloisa and her urbane, hip vamp novio Count Duval (the amazing German Robles), then promptly pronounces her dead after she drinks drugged wine, and declares its "impossible" when her finger moves. This guy is really a terrible doctor! Marta's aunt is less than 48 hours dead but he doesn't want to believe she might still be alive in her crypt, either. He pronounces Marta dead but she's alive too, and he thinks Eloisa is alive, but she's dead!
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The atomsphere is great, though, when you're in the Halloween type of mood. The problem with this film alas is that we spend way too much time with the fussy Enrique--Salazar vacillating between trying to be romantic lead and Van Helsing at the same time, regularly giving the distraught Marta a kind of super lame "let's see a smile" come-on, saying she shouldn't cry over her aunt because he thinks it makes her less attractive--one can't tell if he's meant to be so creepy about hitting on her, invading her space. One really appreciates Bob's tact and light touch in The Cat and the Canary all the more after this. And Marta isn't any better. Her crazy scream seems uncalled for, and refusal to believe her own eyes--over and over, stretches credulity and patience to the limit. Vampires are pretty easy to spot, so you really need to not think about it too closely. Just how old is she supposed to be?
And thus it's hard not to root for Eloisa and her Dracula-esque novio. Soaking up the night vapors, standing very straight and still deep in the great soundstage forests wreathed in fog, webs and twisty branches, her black scarf whipping out behind her like the lady version of a cape, staring out at nothing and then slowly vanishing or turning into bats, what a kind of a love story! He bit her first (before the credits) and now wants to own the Sicomoros and has made a good offer, alljust so he can visit his brother's crypt (Duval backwards!) which adjoins the property and maybe disinter him. I'm not sure why he doesn't just marry Eloisa and not have to deal with real estate taxes. Instead Duval puts the bite on Marta and maybe Eloisa suspects he won't be the freshest nest in the roost, or whatever. But hey, dig his crazy mirthless laugh where looks like Richard Devon as Satan in The Undead.
Luckily, all those dumb little narrative points vanish in the bat-filled breeze once Aunt Maria appears, creeping in and out of her niece's bedroom via secret panels to plant little straw crosses on her pillow and otherwise save the day. She's the only cool, good person and she's been driven half-mad from fear and trying to convince the glass-eyed normals around her that vampires are real. There's a fine line, as we learn in our undergraduate feminist lit courses, between being driven crazy by no one listening to you and no one listening to you because you're crazy. At a certain point, even that fine line is gone.
Sights of the aunt wafting around closed-off bedroom clutching a giant cross to her chest, her hair long gray hair and grey dress taffeta trails flowing behind her like ghostly afterburn, her huge eyes wide, stricken with having to behold too much horror-- it all gives her a kind of
wild/wise woman sex appeal one-off archetype: the good undead Christian spirit who wields the cross instead of fears it. I've always wondered why being entombed alive seems to automatically turn people into monsters once they escape (ala Corman's Poe films, Lewton's
Isle of the Dead, etc.), so I'm glad Maria stays nice, if still a a little rattled and unworldly. We need more of these vampire fighting eccentric aunts with long hair and big crosses and huge eyes, countering each vamp machination from behind her secret passages.
In the end it's all about real estate -- and, take it from me in the 90s: after a long night of decadence and potent potables, a conveniently located crypt you can reach before dawn is worth any price.
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Though he gets star billing and positioning as "The" vampire," Spanish actor German Robles only shows up about 1/3 of the time, but what an entrance he makes, arriving in an ominous black carriage that rolls through the mist-shrouded villa gates with ominous fanfare. Dressed to the nines in prime Lugosian formal finery, he's like a brooding and sublime mix of Christopher Lee and George Chakiris. After the ineffectual tio being the only other man to counterbalance Salazar's light-footed ineffectual doctor, it's nice to have someone with some swagger. While the doc runs high and lo, hands waving in a perpetual tizzy, struggling to believe his own eyes as he vacillates between Van Helsing savvy, skepticism-masked denial, and Lou Costello st-st-stuttering, Roble's poised charismatic Duval majestically arrives in full award ceremony regalia, replete with badass hypnotic pendant, manages to loom over everyone else even while looking up from the ground floor. Would that we spent more of the film's running time with him and Eloisa, perhaps in some kind of Addams Family-style Morticia/Gomez macabre courting ritual, or back in the shadows with the good aunt. But you can't have everything. And the score is pretty epic, booming and hissing like some Mexican Max Steiner (it would be recycled frequently in the films to come); the idea of the good vs. evil aunt thing is relatively original, and there's misty, gnarled tree and spider web atmosphere coursing through, in and around the hacienda in the best Halloween perennial sort of way. Fans of the Spanish language version of the 1931 Dracula may rightly wish Robles had been old enough back then to take the role away from the miscasted Carlos Villarías. Now that would be a classic. But this is definitely worth your time anyway. Maybe I've been too hard on it. Truth is we have to love it because its success launched the Mexican horror mini-boom of late-50s-60s; many of which showed up on US TV thanks to K. Gordon Murray and his Florida dubbing team (whose voices one grows quite fond of as the films accrue). And dig the short diegetic time period - it's over in the course of two nights and a day ... and it's the good old lady does the stakin' - and you got to like that. Es verdad!
You can find this on Blu-ray, usually paired with El Vampiro's goofy sequel....
("El ataúd del Vampiro")
(1958) Dir. Fernando Mendez
One issue with having Salazar as a producer and a star: who's going to tell him to stop hamming? Or that his romantic co-star Amelia from the previous film shouldn't be playing a professional dancer as she seems pregnant and it's a marked deviation from her goody-two-shoes from last film. Both actors seem determined to unveil their weak areas but Salazar is especially insufferable. Determined to wreak every last drop of comic tic-indulgence from his nervous l-l-l-line readings, he tries to convince his now hospitalized novia that everything from the last film was entirely her imagination. Why he deliberately endangers her life by not even giving her a cross and some wolf bane or something, even after his idiot fellow intern (?) steals Duval's coffin to run some scientific tests (he finds out that, among other things, that when a vampire is staked you can see his skull in a mirror rather than nothing.... that's science!).
What the idiot intern doesn't bank on of course is that the thug he hired to help steal the coffin (Yerye Beirut, i.e. the Mexican Marc Lawrence) sneaks in later to pull out Lavud's stake in order to get at his jeweled hypno-necklace. Big mistake, Yerye! Unless of course you like being a Renfield/ henchman to a vampire who wastes no time launching a reign of terror at the hospital Marta is staying at, appearing and disappearing, putting the bite on a small kid just like the last film(irregardless of the giant cross above her bed) and angling to make Marta his bride - as fate suddenly decrees. Why he should fall in love with her of all people, remains a mystery, outside of script convenience. Wasn't he all up in her evil aunt? Make up your mind, Duval! Fans of Halloween 2, and I hear there are some, might note the obvious similarity in plot points - heroine in hospital cuz the last film's trauma, now has her justified fears smugly disregarded by overconfident staff, the killer wiping out the whole hospital in an effort to get to her -- and it makes a good comparison in quality as well as, while both sequels are fine in their own right, they're rather inferior to their antecedents.
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Furthering the disconnect, Abel Salazar dyed his hair blacker and lost some weight for this film, making him seem younger than he was in the first film (just as he's now an intern instead of a psychiatrist), and if you can get past his senseless gaslighting of Marta you're bound to despise him for trying to rat out his vamp-stealing fellow intern to the head of the hospital (say what you will about Abbot and Costello, they weren't narcs). Eventually, he realizes he'll come off like a tattletale, even to the hospital director, so he takes full blame ("I stole a corpse last night,") then ups the ante ("it was a vampire.") Jesus Marta and Joseph! What is a stressed Mexico City hospital director supposed to do with that information, aside from firing you and/or locking you up, tonto? With the count using his hypno-necklace to get her under his will on one side, and the overacting hysteria of Salazar's amorous doctor trying to overprotect/gaslight Marta, one wonders if this competing 'control' of the 'feminine agency' is a backlash from last film's relative matriarchal strengths. A jumpy gaslighting narc convincing you it's all in your mind, or a sophisticated urbane necrophile who has to anesthetize you before busting a move--what a choice of suitors for a young lady! Hell you're better off with Claude Rains in Notorious. At least she gets a big comfortable king-size bed.
Further rubbing in the patriarchal revisionist agenda, the coolest, strongest character from the first film, the cross-wielding, wild-haired wild woman archetype Maria (Alicia Montoya) gets the short shrift. She follows the coffin to the hospital and starts running high and low and carrying on about the danger, only to be prevented from visiting Maria by Salazar, still in full denial - and then after bravely stalking Yerye to the wax museum, meets her fate, unheralded and forgotten, in the iron maiden before the movie is halfway over and no one ever wonders where she is or if she's OK --she's just totally forgotten about. Does the doctor's 'treatment' include pretending she doesn't even have an aunt? Seriously between him and Charles Boyer in Gaslight, you're better off with -
But all that aside, once again the cool Halloween horror atmosphere is in abundance thanks to a weird interiority dream space where hospital, theater, outdoor cafe, wax museum, all seem linked as if on a giant soundstage, all of it connected by weird ladder systems and twisty stairs leading up to the light rigging rafters. When Duval whisks Marta away from her dance troupe, and up to the rafters, he only has to cross a few ladders to come down into his wax museum hideout. The almost empty all-night indoor/outdoor (?) cafe where one of the dancers goes to relax between rehearsals has a weird expressionist Edward Hopper glow, with the welcomely ominous deep black shadows offset only by high-contrast diegetic electric light sources; streetlamps, stage lights, hospital nighttime track lighting, all of it barely holding back the dark thanks to the Stanley Cortez-esque work of cinematographer Victor Herrera. Compare that to the comparably banal 'every corner of every room must be visible 'somehow the old castle is all lit up with no visible light source'-style look of Hammer and Corman (and even post-code Universal) and you realize how precious that inky black is. It must be savored and celebrated. It helps fill in the empty spots in the sorriest looking wax museum you'll ever see. It just seems like damaged mannequin storage space. The bit where Yerye lurks and poses like a waxwork to evade discovery evokes Marc Lawrence in Charlie Chan at the Wax Museum or Bronson in House of Wax. They even bring out the old guillotine demo gag and the one where the killer stands next to his uglier wax image, you have to take their word for it they look alike. They missed the opportunity to replace the figures with real actors holding very still, a trick very well implemented in the original 1935 Mystery of the Wax Museum, and in Tourist Trap. Mostly they're all mannequins whose heads were melted and reshaped or just given a head made in papier mache by a blind five year-old. In case you can't tell, that means I love them.
Performances other than Salazar's are all pretty choice, too. Nobles is back, as Lee/Chakris-hybrid charismatic as ever and Adrianne Welter is a much more animated Marta this time, except onstage, where she's shockingly half-assed as the lead dancer. She's strong, too -- she even shoves Duval at one point and he goes spinning into the opposite wall. Those same thunderous library music cues from the last film may repeat endlessly, but I love that, in the big climax, though I've been hard on him, Salazar gets to demonstrate his athletic side. That he can full-on fight with a giant bat without getting tangled in its visible strings indicates some nimble dexterity to balance out his hamming, never missing a chance to show off his fencing or bannister leaping, and I love the weird final ending ("Those stairs lead to the roof," says the incredulous police chief after Salazar and Marta try to walk up into the sunlight ala the end of 1931 Dracula.) When they take the front door, it's still night out, and the diner across the street still has its noirish ambient Hopper's Nighthawks kinda vibe. You can see them cooling off with a drink at the outdoor cafe before going home. It's a pretty good, meta way to end things, with the flippant attitude of Salazar finally making contextual sense. Well, like they always say, you don't come to Mexico for the meta resonance or lush production valies, you come for the oomph, the imagination, the shock to the senses. In Mexico, the power of myth is right there, in full form- alive like a fire that's never gone out. It may not give much of a flicker at times, but it never has to be re-lit.
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