El Pueblo Fantasma (1965)

aka Ghost Town

Old Mexico. A mysterious gunman calling himself Rio Kid (Fernando Luján) strikes fear in the hearts of of the best gunslingers roaming the country, for he is seeking them out and killing them one by one with shooting skills that seem to border on the supernatural. There is something truly strange about the man, though. He has been working as a killer of killers for decades now, but still looks like a young man. And the bodies of the men he kills don’t stay buried, but simply disappear.

Manuel Saldívar (Rodolfo de Anda) is searching for Rio Kid. Not like the fools who seek the man out to test their mettle at gunplay and end up dead, but to learn the truth about his father, whom Rio Kid knew decades ago. Manuel’s father, also called Manuel, was a well-known, apparently particularly murderous, bandit. He even has his own corrida damning him, so he was probably a truly special kind of villain. Manuel seems to believe that hearing what Rio Kid has to say about his father will bring him some kind of closure and help him to tolerate the very special treatment most people give the son of a well-known, dead monster; Manuel’s upright, white hat personality isn’t doing the trick.

Our young protagonist manages to find the Kid’s hometown. San José was once a prosperous place but has been taken over by an air of doom, gloom and gothic decay. Only a few people live there still; they tend to avoid their famous co-inhabitant. Manuel does get a foot in the proverbial door of the town when he helps out Don Néstor Ramírez (Carlos López Moctezuma) in the desert. Néstor is just returning from a ten year stint in jail for a crime he didn’t commit and for which he holds Rio Kid responsible. He plans on taking vengeance on the man, but clearly doesn’t have a prayer against him.

While he’s in town, Manuel discovers that the case of Rio Kid might be even stranger than it appears on first view. Not only does the man not age, he is also bulletproof, can appear and disappear without a noise or trace, and only comes out at night. He’s also as malevolent as they come, so Manuel is bound to get into trouble with him.

Despite some flaws, Alfredo B. Crevenna’s El pueblo fantasma (which translates as “The Ghost Town”) is a nice entry into the Weird Western – or Weird Ranchero – genre. There are certain parallels to the US Weird Western Curse of the Undead in the nature and some of the habits of its villain, but this does turn out to be very much its own thing.

The film’s first half is quite a bit weaker than the rest of it, mostly because Crevenna (or Alfredo Ruanova’s script) has decided to squeeze most of the film’s comic relief and musical numbers into the first couple of acts. Which keeps the more dramatic parts of the film free from this sort of thing, but also makes the narrative’s beginning somewhat slower than it needs to be. Half of the musical bits are at least relevant to the plot – Manuel’s reaction to his father’s corrida is certainly important; there are no such explanations for the supposed comedy to be had.

Once the film gets into its groove, it does show some unique ideas on how to mix its very traditional Western/ranchero elements with its horror heart: there is a late scene that takes place after Rio Kid and Manuel have officially declared their enmity where the vampire (that’s not a spoiler, right?) publicly humiliates our hero by letting a frightened blind singer weakly sing parts of the corrida that doesn’t end in the final showdown but in a truly frightened Manuel getting the local sheriff to lock him up for the night for protection. This is absolutely not how you do this sort of thing in a Western, but works incredibly well in emphasizing how much the film’s vampire breaks the rules of the film world it is moving through, transgressing against genre borders as he does against human beings.

Luján’s portrayal of the vampire gunslinger is atypical and interesting as well. He’s not going for a big, charismatic Christopher Lee approach, but instead turns Rio Kid into a quiet, soft-spoken man, whose capital-E evil nature is hidden under what at first feels like reserve, but later begins to read as the sort of distanced calm you’d expect of a corpse. This does turn our undead gunslinger into an appropriately creepy villain whose malevolent influence on the world – certainly the town he calls his home – is believably hidden in plain sight.

De Anda’s performance works surprisingly well with and against Luján’s performance. Manuel’s acquired Western programmer white hat poise and his genuine fragility make a very human contrast to Rio Kid’s inhumanity.

Crevenna was generally at least a solid director in all of the dozen or so genres he worked in during a long career in Mexican popular cinema. Here, he certainly understands both of his film’s main genres, so there’s a solid foundation of stage bound B-Western filmmaking on which he can build a gothic house of horror (sorry). The film has a couple of very atmospheric moments. An early scene where Manuel crosses the shadow-heavy town at night is a fine example, or Rio Kid’s very traditional way of exiting his sarcophagus. Once the film goes all out on being a vampire movie, things evolve even more: the Kid’s attack on the the singer Carmen (Julissa), with Néstor’s attempt to fight him off that ends in him losing his mind when the vampire doesn’t react to bullet wounds is a very fine injection of Gothic horror into Western tropes indeed.

I’d have been happy with a film about vaqueros against vampires, but I’m certainly not going to complain about El pueblo fantasma adding a degree of thoughtfulness and rather a lot of gothic atmosphere to the proceedings.

La Dinastia Dracula (1980)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

In Ye Olden Times of cheap school play conquistador costumes, the inquisition gets rid of the rather nasty noble vampire Duke Orloff who likes to transform into a dog and disregards the cultural and churchly rules about keeping one's shirt buttoned in public. But woe! The men of the church completely ignore the vampire's female partner and witch lover, despite her wearing a shirt with a flame imprint that can only come from the future.

Three hundred years later, in Ye Not Quite As Olden Times of school play late 19th century costumes, witch woman goes under the name of Madame Kostoff. She seems to have been absent from Mexico for the last few hundred years, but now returns to her former home with a coffin in her luggage and a revivification plan in her mind. She'll just need to buy the mansion that stands close to the place where her vampire lover was buried, and everything will be set. It's just a wee bit unfortunate that the Solórzano family living in the mansion now doesn't want to sell.

The good lady's coffin isn't empty, of course. Kostoff has brought with her a vampire (Fabian Aranza, looking like disco vampire Elvis, and - also just like Elvis - going only under his first name in the titles) who might be a descendent of Orloff or of Count Dracula, or both, and works under the pseudonym of Baron van Helsing(!). Or something. Upon first arrival, the vampire only comes out of his coffin to hiss into the camera, turn into an especially sad looking rubber bat, suck a few families dry, and do some bat-form snogging with Kostoff, but after some time, he becomes more sociable and starts to apply all his charm to convince the Solórzanos of selling their mansion.

When the family still shows unwilling, the vampire kills off the mother of the house, which might be enough to convince her widower to leave, but doesn't fly with the Solórzano daughter Beatriz at all. Van Helsing would rather have the girl as his own private vampire bride anyway, so her reluctance does rather fit into his plans.

Now only Beatriz' fiancée, the supernatural-lovin' doctor Fuentes and the sceptical local priest can help the forces of good to triumph. It's just too bad that Fuentes is the kind of guy who goes into the lair of the chief vampire only armed with a communion wafer, and that the priest is so ineffectual he surely must make the Baby Jesus cry. The material a godhood has to work with on Earth!

Among the one hundred and fifty films (at least that's the number the IMDb gives; experience with the site suggests that it might well have been a few dozen films more) Alfredo B. Crevenna directed are some of my favourite pieces of Mexican pop cinema (Santo vs. the Martian Invasion, for example), but of course - inevitable with a body of work this large produced in a filmic environment so prone to the type of cheap-skating Roger Corman wouldn't approve of as the Mexican genre film industry - also some real stinkers.

If you're going by any sane standards, La Dinastia de Dracula with its script that never even seems to try to make too much sense (why do the bad guys even need to buy that mansion, seeing that they can teleport, turn into bats and dogs and fog at will and really can come and go everywhere how and whenever they please?), its hoary melodramatic acting and its utter disinterest in staging anything in any interesting way surely belongs to the latter group of the director's films. Fortunately, as you probably know already or else will now realize, my standards when it comes to movies aren't necessarily sane. I'm only all too willing to let myself be convinced by the most basic stimuli to my bad movie appreciation glands (say, a vampire looking like Disco Elvis Dracula) that a film that will look perfectly dreadful for everyone else is actually a pretty great time for me. Which is in fact what happened with me and Dinastia's particular charms.

The film's beauty doesn't even lie with the vampire (and/or his incredibly tacky looking stag-evil type fangs) alone. Rather, Dinastia wins the receptive viewer over with the time-honoured technique of just piling improbable, weird and/or downright disturbing stuff in front of her and treating it all as if it were part of some high, serious drama, like Shakespeare rewritten by Lord Bulwer-Lytton and staged by a group of actors trying to keep their dignity but not actually remembering any more how dignity looks.

At times, the film becomes just completely baffling, like in the scene in which the stupid doctor enters the Baron's lair to entice his enemy into the final fight and the Baron quizzes him about the weapons he brought with him in the tone of a slightly exasperated teacher. Is it supposed to be funny? Is it supposed to be suspenseful? I surely don't know, but - and that's the exciting part (for me, at least), I'm pretty sure Crevenna doesn't know, either. I'm not even sure he cares. Not to go all Sonic Youth here, but confusion is sex, or does at least make for a nice time in front of the TV.

Then there's the rather peculiar relationship between Kostoff and the Baron. When she's not kissing him while he's a bat, she turns into a dog and accompanies him to social visits she might more appropriately share in human form. Of course, then the Baron couldn't describe her as "my constant companion" and do those rather illegal things they are probably doing (I just might make assumptions influenced by pink cinema here) when they are alone in their coach.
Sandwiched between these absurdities and the frequent return of the rubber bat least feasible to make repeat appearances are what might be real proper gothic horror scenes in a less interesting movie. The Baron's attacks on families (and this guy eats children too) and the staking of Beatriz' mother are staged as if they were moments of high drama, but the utter ridiculousness of the acting (especially Fabian Aranza brings tears of laughter into me eyes whenever he's trying to be menacing) can't help but pull what is supposed to be terrifying into the realm of the stupidly fun.

It's all very baffling, very confusing, and really rather entertaining.

In short: Santo Contra La Magia Negra (1972/3)

In his part-time job as an agent of Interpol, most heroic masked wrestler El Santo (El Santo!) is given the mission to travel to Haiti and protect a certain Professor Jordan (Guillermo Galvez) and his new-found formula to transform uranium into something "worse than an H-bomb" from The Enemy.

As soon as Santo arrives, he is attacked by zombies. The local evil secret voodoo priestess Dejanira (Sasha Montenegro) - for inexplicable reasons called Bellamira in the subtitles - has thrown in her lot with foreign agents (as played by good old Fernando Osés and good old Carlos Suárez) and now tries her damndest to get rid of Santo, acquire the professor's formula, and dig up a lot of uranium.

Did I mention the Professor has a daughter played by good old Elsa Cárdenas? Well, you know what will happen to her in the end, though Dejanira does not use her to blackmail the scientist - she prefers her scientists zombified. Turns out dead people can do science pretty well.

In theory, the idea of El Santo, the idol of the masses, travelling to Haiti and fighting against zombies, an evil white voodoo priestess - there's a also good black(!) voodoo priestess -, and agents of what the dubious subtitles call "the orient", is one to let my heart beat a little faster with joy.

Alas, veteran director Alfredo B. Crevenna's film isn't the awesome pop cinema concoction I dreamt of. Rather, it's one of those movies where the film crew seems to have taken the opportunity of an international co-production to get in some choice vacation time - producing a film seems to have been a mere secondary affair. Expect a bunch of shots of Haiti, then another bunch of shots of Haiti, then a scene of Santo looking tired and bored, then a scene of a mock-documentary styled voodoo ceremony with a real animal killing (classy), then a minute of sped-up action, then Osés and Suárez being very relaxed, and then some more hot voodoo ceremony action, and so on, and so on.

I'm all for shooting a film like this on location and giving it a certain amount of authenticity and local colour, a sense of place, but Crevenna overshoots that goal with way too many scenes of dancing and the carnival in Haiti, until "look at this awesome place!" turns into more of a "let's take a long, long look at my vacation pictures!" situation.

It sure doesn't help that most of the actual action of the film is so pedestrian. Fights between a masked luchador and zombies just shouldn't look so damn disinterested.

On the positive side, there's some damn frightening 70s fashion worn by Montenegro and the horribly underused (yeah, I know, it's her vacation) Cárdenas, some Mexican-Haitian funk on the soundtrack (for once just possibly not library music), and at least half a dozen scenes that have the pleasant goofiness that is all I demand from my lucha movies - I'm especially fond of the zombie professor. It's just unfortunate that these joyful elements are buried under the nastiness of the unnecessary cruelty to a goat, and Crevenna's holiday videos.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: mexican movies,in short,lucha,horror,el santo,elsa cardenas,sasha montenegro,fernando oses,carlos suarez,alfredo b. crevenna

On WTF: La Dinastia Dracula (1980)

What better way to follow up last week's earnest-minded write-up of an earnest-minded film in my weekly stint on WTF-Film.com than to follow it up with a hysterical Gothic horror film from Mexico that doesn't seem to know what it's doing and frankly doesn't care?

While Alfredo B. Crevenna's film is really kind of terrible, it's also very fun and gives me the chance to post screenshots of rubber bats and a priest in his undies. All this and more you'll be able to find in my write-up of La Dinastia Dracula on WTF-Film.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: mexican movies,horror,wtf,reviews,alfredo b. crevenna,fabian aranza,other places,gothic

El Latigo contra Satanas (1979)

A small Mexican or Guatemalan town way out in the wilderness has more problems than can be fair. If you ask me, living beside a vulcano that is just starting to get active again should be enough trouble for one community. Alas, parallel to the promise of a fiery death, a weird group of halfnaked satanists in spandex trousers holds regular meet-ups in the ruins built on the vulcano. From time to time they ride down into town to attack and burn someone.

An unpleasant mixture of religious fanaticism and plain stupidity runs high, and the less educated part of the town's population has need for a scapegoat - for the vulcanic activity as well as the satanists, which the people take to be demons from hell. Their spokesman, a certain Ramiro (Noe Murayama), finds them a fine scapegoat without problems in the daughter (Yolanda Ochoa, I think) of one of the richer people in town. I'm sure his declaring of her as a witch and the fact that she had refused his love and had escaped his attempts at sexual assault have nothing at all to do with each other. It can't help that she's often acting like a classical oracle either.

Just as the good people of the town are starting to string her up on a tree besides a crossroad, a stranger (Juan Miranda) comes to town. He seems to be your typical snake's oil salesman (if a little bit weirder dressed than most), but when the need arises, he dresses up exactly like Zorro and gives evildoers whatfor with his trusty whip. El Latigo, as he is known when in costume, doesn't take too well to attempts by supersticious nutcakes to murder women, and goes to the rescue.

Rescuing women isn't the real reason El Latigo is in town, though. He is looking for a man (what the realtionship between the two is, is something a certain obtuseness in the movie and my bad Spanish decided to keep as their little secret) who has been murdered by the satanists. Of course, being a masked hero and all, El Latigo isn't going to stand for satanic murders and sacrifices to vulcanos.

Between the evildoers and the supersticious townsfolk he's going to have to whip a lot of people into submission. At least the local priest (Ruben Rojo) turns out to be quite helpful.

As a film about a Zorro variant fighting against a satanic cult, El Latigo contra Satanas wouldn't have needed to do much of interest to find my approval. Director Alfredo B. Crevenna, who has 150 films in his IMDB filmography, seems to have had one of his more ambitious weeks when flying out to Guatemala to film this one, though. Crevenna is keeping the film surprisingly fast-paced, even dynamic.

The action scenes might be a far cry from even a mediocre Shaw Brothers production, but work out quite nicely in the enthusiastic style of old serials, even though someone in postproduction seems to have forgotten to add soundeffects to them. The film even utilizes some classical cliffhanger moments, complete with a certain amount of cheating when it comes to the way it keeps its hero alive.

The true core of the film however are some creatively staged and lighted scenes from the pulpier edge of gothic horror, utilizing a set of moods Mexican popular cinema by 1979 had mostly discarded.

Candles, bava-red and bava-green and various multi-coloured fogs in combination with excellent location shots (if you ignore the unwillingness of the film to stick to one time of day for any given scene) of Guatemalan ruins give the film a unique look I haven't seen much of before.

I was also positively surprised by the acting, especially Murayama and Rojo give very rounded performances, working from a script that is willing to give its characters a little more depth than strictly necessary, making their fate that small but important bit more interesting.

All in all, the movie is an impressive and entertaining mixture of Mexian western, pulp-style adventure and gothic horror I wouldn't have thought the director of La Furia De Los Karatecas had in him.

 

Technorati-Tags: mexican movies,western,adventure,horror,gothic,alfredo b. crevenna,noe murayama,juan miranda,reviews

In short: Aventuras Al Centro De La Tierra (1965)

After a couple that prefers snogging in a cave to walking through a cave has a meeting with a terrible creature which leads to a dead male and a mad female snogger, world famous scientist Professor Diaz (Jose Elias Moreno) comes to the obvious conclusion: somewhere in the snog-hating cave system must be the remnants of either some ancient civilization or some nice pre-historic creatures just waiting for a scientist to discover them.

Under this circumstances Diaz just has to mount an expedition, so he grabs himself a few random scientists - one even a woman (Kitty de Hoyos)! That makes two women in an expedition that also includes the Professor's female assistant Laura (Columba Dominguez) and a black man! Don't worry about those evil liberal mind control rays though (unless you want to buy some tinfoil - in that case, send me an email), the black guy's the cook and not allowed to say much, while one of the women is of rather dubious character and Laura the designated kidnap victim.

It turns out that there's really a lot going on in these caves: there are quite aggressive rubber bats, a blood-drinking cyclops, lava rivers, river rivers, snakes, random lizards and even more random armadillos, as well as giant spiders and even a fuzzy-furry, flying and swimming man-bat dude who takes quite a shine to Laura. Unfortunately, he does not know that most women don't like to eat raw rat and his shot at love does not end too well. As if this wasn't enough trouble for one expedition, the discovery of diamonds leads to...MURDER!

Directed by Alfredo B. Crevenna who was also responsible for Santo's epic fight against certain Martian invaders, Aventuras is a nice little adventure film with horror bits, stylistically not far from lucha movies of the same time, just without masked people, but still of a very agreeable pulpy snappiness.

The whole thing is very straightforward and does not lead to much deep philosophical thought for the viewer, nor does it present itself with great aesthetic flourishes. Instead the film tells a fine tale about a silly little expedition that meets a few equally silly (but cool) monsters in a cave. Which is obviously more than alright with me.

 

Technorati-Tags: mexican movies,adventure,horror,alfredo b. crevenna,in short