Amando de Ossorio's La Noche de los Brujos has one of the most entertainingly trashy pre-credits sequences ever...
Bumbasa, 1910: natives perform a ceremony in the jungle, tying a beautiful woman to a tree and flogging her until her blouse falls open. She is lashed some more until her underwear falls off (these guys have got some serious whip skills!). The natives dance while the chief rapes the poor woman, after which she is placed on a sacrificial altar and beheaded with a machete. As the tribe smears themselves in her blood, a squad of soldiers arrives and shoots the lot of them. Suddenly, the woman's decapitated head springs to life, baring a mean pair of fangs - she's a vampire!!!
All of this was so insanely over-the-top that I decided to watch the whole film despite discovering that my copy was in Spanish with no subtitles.
The rest of the film takes place in Bumbasa in the present day. A group of people - two men and three sexy ladies (a brunette and two blondes) - set up camp by a river; before long, the women are strutting around in varying degrees of undress, which is nice. The brunette has some sexy time with her one of the men in the river, while one of the blondes spies from the bushes and takes photographs (without using the flash, which means that the pictures would be rubbish). Meanwhile, deep in the jungle, the natives that were killed in the opening scene rise from their graves as zombies (or ghosts, or zombie ghosts)
The next day, the blonde with the camera (who looks muy tasty in a denim mini-skirt) wanders off into the jungle, where she encounters the zombies and the vampire woman, who grab her and tie her up. The vampire whips her, and blondie's top comes open. The vamp pulls the woman's skirt off, bites her on the neck, places her on the tribe's chopping block, and hacks her head off with a machete. Again, the severed noggin comes back to life with fangs. The whole whipping/decapitation/vampire thing was great the first time around, but the same routine repeated is less impressive. So when it happens for a third time, with the second blonde, I was not happy.
The film ends with the brunette almost getting the whip and machete routine, but being rescued by her lover in the nick of time, the man destroying most of the zombies and vampires by throwing his bullet belt into their fire.
Given the amazing opening, the rest of the film, with its repetitiveness, has to be deemed a bit of a disappointment.
5/10. I nearly docked a point when the roll of film in the blonde woman's camera is developed, and all the pictures come out fine, but a gratuitous naked washing scene easily made up for that.
