Famous Monsters of Mexico II: CURSE OF THE CRYING WOMAN, BLACK PIT OF DR. M

October may not be the time when you look to our neighbor Mexico, but, mi hombre raro cinéfilo maybe you should start. They got crazy masked wrestlers fighting vampire women, la Lorna, a vengeful ghost who drowned her babies and then wails in grief and kills people; a middle aged female insane asylum patient with the strength of ten men; a dueling pair of sisters one an evil vampire, the other a beuena fuerte flaca con a cruz grande who ends up being the one who stakes the male vampire, not the hero, and frequent scenes where a monster breaks into a woman's boudoir while she's sleeping and rather than fainting she reaches into her nightable drawer, grabs her gun, and fires at them, scaring them off and sometimes wounding them -then going back to bed like it ain't no thang. And etc. Strong matriarchal through line, is what I'm getting at. Oodles of atmosphere, no frills, and if you love the 1931 Dracula, but have you've seen so many times you can do a one man show of it without even needing a script, (Bela is finally artist of the month on TCM!) and wish they stayed at the castle instead of going to London, then viola! And if you love Mario Bava, double viola!

Even when these mid-60s Mexican horrors were good, they were a blast. But when they were bad, sublime. I collated a YouTube playlist, Mexico De Macabre, so there you are/  

CURSE OF THE CRYING WOMAN

(La maldición de la Llorona)

(1963) Dir. Rafael Baeldon

Film adaptations of the "la Lorna" legend often bog down in costume soapiness or colonialist regret, but this 1963 definitive version says 'no one wants to see or shoot that shit," and just jumps, into the obsidian abyss of pure atmospheric horror, elements of Black Sunday and Dracula fused in with a nod to the legendary Crying Woman just the first in a while matriarchal lineage of brujas malvadas, whose eyes go jet black under the full moon, when they kill random people, for kicks. The the first time we see Selma (Rita Macedo), she's all in black, wreathed in fog, holding the leashes for three Great Danes, as Barbara Steele did in a nod to Black Sunday (above) is silently crying/laughing/orgasming while her servant kills most of the passengers in a passing stage coach, before siccing her the Great Danes on a fat guy in a huge hat, and rolling over the young girl passenger with the coach wheels. And now tonight at midnight, her newly arrived nieced Amelia (Rosita Arenas), to fulfill her destiny, pulling the spear out of the desiccated body of their great great great abuela, the original la Lorona, at the stroke of midnight --which is in a few hours! Amelia feels the destiny in her blood. She can't resist "In our world," Selma tells her, "nothing begins or ends." To prove it, Amelia almost strangles a passing coachman before a streak of eyes swirls down through the fog and her own eyes go jet black.

But one thing wasn't in the cards: Amelia brought her new husband, Haime (producer Abel Salazar), who is never without a giant erect cigar in his mouth, hinting perhaps at their luna de miel interrumpia. Seriously, that cigar, and his perfectly pressed clothes, is kind of ridiuclous but it works on that lievel Instead of a nice honeymoon, Amelia is realizing her destiny is to pull a spear out of her great great-great abuela's chained, desiccated corpse (above) at the stroke of midnight--which is in a few hours! She can't fight destino. And in this case, destino means her eyes going jet black whenever the moon is full (and not obscured by clouds), flashing back to a solarized tour of their lineages evil via clips from El Mundo des vampires, la Momia Azteca, and the next two films in this post: El Hombre y la Monstruo; and almost strangling a passing wagoner as he rolls through the fog and gnarled trees on the road past the hacienda. Seriously, does anyone ever make it past that place? You'd think the local policia might hear the dogs growling and the evil aunt flying around, and the deformed clubfooted servant (she rescued him from the gallows, so he's very loyal) and finally they knock on the door, and are immediately torn to shreds by the dogs, which for some reason the cops with their guns out, are too slow to shoot. They froze! They're dead. End of. the cops. 

This Lorona everything I love about classic horror: big atmospheric soundstage forests full of dry ice fog and twisted branches, a lineage of powerful, evil women villains; and a short 'all in a night' time tick-tockable (1) time span; haunted mirrors, voodoo dollas (right), a clever use of overlay (the la Lorona ghost appears over her corpse like she's merging in and out of her shell); a soundtrack of almost constant ethereal howling, whispering wind and weird slide whistle/theremin as if the wind sliding up a long twisty drain pipe; spider webs; big rubber bats; an evil knife-throwing servant pretending to have a club foot, so he always looks like he's walking upstairs, and who has to squint to keep his scars on, and nary a trace of realism, daylight, last second patriarchal wrap-up morality, religion, lite opera, or any of the other stuff US censors would have demanded. Horror movies should all start at sunset and end at dawn, if ya ask me! And this one doesn't even take that long - it's practically real-time with crosscuts from the dysfunctional boys upstairs with their insanity, deformities, and tobacco addictions, and hilarious fighting, crosscutting with the three super powerful witches down in the basement, about to take over the world. In the northern devil movies, matriarchal lineages of witches are generally destroyed by one brave hombre with a cross and a smug patriarchal attitude by the end, while the devil women are all either devouring mothers (Shelly Winters) or sexy 'recruiters' (ala Linda Christian). With Curse of the Crying Woman there are neither. The male gaze isn't indulged or challenged, or even exploited, but totally ignored. 

                                                                             
 

There's a big thing going on with eyes -- Selma's eyes turn jet black in moonlight; a failed attempt by the make-up artist to seem inky, but she just looks like she's wearing black eye patches or closed eyes with lids painted black. It's not convincing but is unnerving. She seems truly unhinged. Ask a Latina to play amok evil and you get a force of nature out of reach of most other actresses, great as they may be. It's just a whole different level of emotion. You can totally see the way the original La Lorna could kill her kids in an jealous rage, and then lament their loss so loudly she's heard clear around the world. The results are far grimmer than anything we'd get in North America or Europe--and we never quite recover from the blunt force shock of that opener. Even the flaws are creepy. The matte colored black eyes, the soundstage insolation clearly visible behind the rickety stairs to the top of the tower, the wagging tales of the dogs in the rapid cuts of dog mouths slobbering on glass panes, screaming gendarmes, and happy dogs out for treats, all snapped together in a howl of quick cuts--the results manage to magically becomes an unnerving Dionysian sparagmos and humane endearment distancing. 

As Selma, Rita Macedo avoids extremes without ever straying from her unrepentant evil stance, which is hard to do. Neither young nor old, stridently witchy, wanton or feigning innocence, she has a look that's snobby rather than sinister. It's like she saw how restrained Gloria Holden was in Dracula's Daughter--her closest relative in classic horror, and got so disgusted she vowed not to make the smallest feint towards censor-placating regret or longing to be good instead of evil and to love some smug patriarchal shrink, eager to give up her power in favor of a 'traditional' role as a housewife. And yet, she's very low-key haughty mixed with soapy sanctimonious faux emotion, a habit facing downwards and away from her scene partner, that Mexican soap opera cheating out which was once probably her doing 'demure' at the advance of a landowner or his son and now it just seems stuck-up/haughty, saying, almost boasting she rescued her deformed servant from being hanged for murder, or multiple murders that he did do, with the same bourgeois disregard as she might say, "my dear, the party was filled with the most common kinds of people" in a 'normal' movie. We can scarcely believe her evil as we're so used to the extremes of denial/deception or evil overacting, when someone gives us full evil while staying demure and aloof is so fresh it takes a few beats to react. The whole movie is kind of like that, which is why we're still getting over that opening shock during the rest of the movie, and getting over the rest of the movie never, but hey, we can go back and try again, and visit all the other Mexican horror films seen in the solarized tour of la Lorna's cursed lineage via a history of Cinematographica ABAS' other/earlier films:  El Mundo des vampires, la Momia Azteca, El Hombre y la Monstruo and..

THE BLACK PIT OF DR. M

"Misterios de ultratumba"

(1959) Dir. Fernando Méndez

A movie both quiet and bombastic, a score rife with pounding timpani, a very large and empty expressionist dance/cafe, and a lush hacienda insane asylum --what could go wrong? Dr. Aldama lays dying in one of the rooms, while the tactless Dr. Mazali (Rafael Bertrand), the owner/director demands he follow up on their mutual promise that the first to die will arrange a means by which the other may experience death without dying. While a priest and colleague look on aghast, Mazali makes sure the last words he hears are Aldama's declaring his soul not rest in peace until this agreement is fulfilled. A pretty difficult thing to ask a dying man, especially as tactlessly and urgently as Masali does. But hey - a graveyard shovel shot later, his colleague’s spirit speaks through a medium during a seance to give him the date and time at which "a door will close in front of you, opening the way to the beyond".

There's no pit to be found unless you mean symbolically, or consider a grave a pit, or that big well/fountain in the center of the lush atmospheric garden sanitarium, the standing soundstage hacienda here it's at its most invitingly fecund and ultra-spooky under evocative high-contrast Stanley Cortez-style black-and-white cinematography of Victor Herrera. 

Aldama's ghost's first stop: Patricia (Mapita Cortés) the daughter he abandoned, now a beautiful modern dancer at the cavernous, underpopulated dream cafe--- a perfect example of liminal space), telling her of a box she shall inherit hidden in the sanitarium, sending her towards destiny in an elaborate chain of coincidence that will fulfill his colleagues the macabre request and lead her to love with some handsome young doctor caught in the wheels of destiny. First, Dr. Mazali must contend with as seriously deranged a female mental patient as you've never seen before or since, a justifiably embittered acid-scarred orderly, and his own gnawing love for the comely dancer daughter of the man he wouldn't let die in peace. Pobrecito!

Everything is all part of a long circular inevitable chain of events involving seances, a dropped locket, a secret key, dreams, coincidence, falling glass, a lost locket, a strange murder, malpractice , a monogrammed dagger, a music box that calms an insane gypsy schizophrenic with the strength of ten men, soul transference, unrequited desperate woo-pitching, frenzied violin self-identification, and the tall, caped figure of Dr. Aldamaa appearing at every step to kick Rube Goldberg the can of coincidence down the grim EC comics-esque twist trap.  Kind of sucks people had to die and an innocent orderly by disfigured by acid thrown in his face, all just to fulfill a macabre promise, but that's the medical profession for ya, and hey! We get to watch a middle-aged woman terrify a whole room full of orderlies and doctors, sending them all running out of the room. As with la Lorona, a strong matriarchal through line is off-a the chain. In Mexican horror, young women may start out innocent, yes, but once they age enough they become forces to be respected and feared. Good luck finding broads like la Lorona and this crazy gypsy in a yankee movie. 

What a movie...

Take back one kadam due to the overuse of Gustavo César Carrión bombastic score (that big timapanii roll and thunderous Da-da DA!! (Zarathustra-esque timapani roll). Da...da-DA! (Zarathustra-esque timapani roll) is great the first 20 times, but after that....) Another kadam taken due to a bland daylight pastorale scenes of Masali walking to a nearby church with Patricia, and her budding love for the age-appropriate new intern (the old triangle..), But soon enough all of them, and everyone else, are swallowed up by that screaming, dark, hushed mood, expressionistic lighting and ultimately satisfying, frenzied climax --you can almost visualize it as a final splash page panel in an old EC comic, the other doctors saying "gasp!' and 'choke!' as the full measure of ironic horror is unveiled.  Best of all is that high-contrast black-and-white cinematography, which wraps it all up in so many inky shadows and twisty fecund corridors, It's so clear that Mendez and Herrera have seen and loved the early Freund-shot Universal horrors as well as the Tourneur-Lewtons, honoring them in their devotion to thick Halloween-ready atmos. And remember: "science and art are equal!" 

See also:

For More Mexi-Monster Madness

Mexico De Macabre, (YouTube list)

Monsters of Mexico 1: El Vampiro, The Vampire's Coffin

Hair of the Dogmatizer: The Brainiac (El Baron del Terror)

Slide, Vaquero!; Ship of Monsters

1. Tick-Tockability is an all too rarely used horror trick of slowing time down and having the film occur in a single night or short period of time, where a five minute scene crosscut from three perspectives takes 15 minutes instead of 5, etc. First used by Carpenter in Halloween, though Griffith might have invented it back in the day, like he did damn near most everything else. 

Famous Monsters of Mexico I: EL VAMPIRO (1957), THE VAMPIRE'S COFFIN (1958)

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).,

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! 

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, all just 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....

THE VAMPIRE'S COFFIN

("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. 

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. 

Telly on the Plane / Telly on the Mountain / Telly on the Train: LISA AND THE DEVIL, HORROR EXPRESS, ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE

I'm not saying times are tough, I'm saying now more than ever we could use a man like Aristotle "Telly" Savalas to toss us a shiny lollipop and/or a cigarette and regale us with that marvelously sonorous poli kala voice, that deep octave Greek zest for whatever comes along, that signature oral fixation. And ain't it our good luck he didn't just do Kojak? That show was and is a little too rugged for my taste, but I'm a fan of the man from Garden City, NJ, especially a bunch of wild and wooly films he made in Europe during the early 70s. Sometimes he just pops in for a few scenes, but he always leaves an impression. He steals the show and sometimes saves it from the abyss. Like an actor version of the counterpoint melody in an Ennio Morricone theme, he instinctually recognizes dead areas on the spectrum and fills them in, and always without seeming to ever act at all, at least not in any other role but himself. 

Who could forget his sonorous cooing ("remember when you came here? How you hated chiggens? ") as the best of all Blofeldts in maybe the best of all Bonds? How about his swaggering Cossack officer in Horror Express ("Who are da killers? Who? Who are da troublemakas?")? And of course, the the mannequin-toting mephistophelean butler in Lisa and the Devil  ("Very little escapes me")? Those films are all classics in their respective ways, largely, or at least partly, because of that charismatic bald-headed, chain-smoking, stuffy nosed Greek-American with that wonderfully sonorous boom of a voice. Paradoxically debonair and earthy, larger than life yet hardly a ham, he'd be perfect doing one man show about the Russian revolution, oscillating between Rasputin, Czar Nicholas, Lenin, Marx, Stalin and even Peter III, crushing every part without even needing a wig. Regardless of whether he's supposed to be Italian, Russian, or Swiss, his characters all disappear into his oceanic vastness. He encompasses them, devours and forgets them without so much a waiver in that groovy New York accent. 

Every moment in his company is a treasure. I can't really watch Kojak (too gritty) but man do I want to hang out with him every moment he's in Europe, gluing cracked mannequins back together with him while knocking back cognac and cakes at his fog-wreathed Italian villa, knocking back cognac and cigarettes in his wintry Alpine mountaintop fortress, or knocking back vodka and cigarettes in a cozy Trans-Siberian train station.

On that note, here are the troublemakers. 

 LISA AND THE DEVIL

(1974) Dir. Mario Bava 

Lisa (Elke Sommer) is a German tourist on a bus tour in Spain who gets left behind after getting lost at one of the stops, a maze-like small Spanish town. Her time is thrown of of joint after spying a jolly demon in a Middle Ages fresco that looks just like Telly Savalas. Then she sees a swaggering man in a natty beret who looks just like him buying a mannequin at an antique shop. The dream symbolism has.... begun. She can never find her way back to the bus. She's thrown into what Carlos Castaneda might call 'non-ordinary reality' and what Lisa's director Mario Bava might call purgatorio, but what we, today, call 'surreal 70s Euro-cult heaven...' 

Or hell, of course. It is the same. 

Obsessed by a little musical carousel of macabre figures chronicling the looped procession of love and death and back around, Lisa begins to wake into that special nightmare we've all had wherein you turn around on a cool autumn afternoon and suddenly its dark and you're all alone and lost in an empty narrow streeted maze in a foreign land, all the windows shuttered and no one in sight. You finally catch a ride in old car from a rich couple (the younger wife having an affair with the chauffeur, the older husband too world-weary to care) But then their car breaks down near a weird old villa where you run up against a cockblocking Hitchcockian matriarch played by Alida Vialli (Suspiria, The Third Man) keeping her deliriously John LaZar-eyed son Maximillian (Alessio Orano) from hooking up with you. And he's..... so lonely. And of course, emceeing the show is Telly as their mephistophelean butler, replete with white gloves and a lollipop since Madame doesn't like smoke in the house. 

Naturally, Lisa looks just like Alessio's dead wife and--when he later corpses her in the same bed as his dead wife's sleeping skeleton, his lonesome kinkiness gets so creepy on so many levels you just have to laugh a mirthless mocking laugh. Then it's like he hears you, and thinks it's his dead wife's ghostly mocking, ringing out at what was probably his inability to get it up with a girl who could look back at him; eventually she takes a lover, who of course ends up cracked in the head, and of course he's also the cracked mannequin she sees in the beginning. 

Yes, this is a zone where mannequins come to life and play the parts of long dead lovers or whomever is needed, and the killer kills them. Funeral marches are held on the spot, as the latest body is wheeled around on a serving cart through the vast semi-decayed mansion, around in an endless procession, life to death, two by two, in procession, crib and corpse cart all bound up in one ornate dessert tray. So much death being around, a whole lavish room of the mansion has been converted to a wake/funeral parlor, which Alessio later tries to change into a marriage chapel by kicking over the plethora of decaying wreaths. Of course for him it's really all the same, but he's too far gone to see the music box procession tightening around his neck with a song i

n its black heart. And that song is of course Rodrigo's Concerto of Aranjuez. 

Depending on your affection for that 'giant pointed 70s collar out over smoking jacket lapel' look Alessio sports you may not like the fashions. And if the score was Morricone twang instead of lush, endlessly repeating orchestrations of Rodrigo's Concerto of Aranjuez or if Bava was his own cinematographer and giving us his usual deep painterly colors instead of the twinkly romantic haze offered by DP Cicilio Panaqua (union rules dictated the film needed a Spanish DP), this would be Bava's best 70s work, but hey, there's interesting giallo-esque sing-song motif playing under all the broken clock cutaways, of which there are enough to rival Bergman's Wild Strawberries. 

And I almost forgot, whether macking on a lollipop the color of Elke's raincoat, dropping double meaning Satanic inferences like "very little escapes me," sneaking one of the chauffeur's cigarettes before loudly admonishing him for smoking indoors when the blind Madame complains, or wryly talking to himself and having a good time drinking cognac and repairing mannequins, Telly loves the screen, and he loves you, baby, and the screen loves Telly.  Devil or not, he's divine.  Some say his performance swamps the rest of the film; it becomes the Telly show. But you can't blame the devil for doing the devil's work. 

HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE:

(1969) Dir. Peter R. Hunt

George Lazenby's first and last Bond is also the one where he goes undercover as a posh British snob and then later gets married and then cries when he loses her. He also goes undercover as a poncy genealogist to infiltrate Blofeldt's top of the Alps allergy clinic. Between the crying and the poncy airs, and all falling in love and showing weakness, Lazenby was derided as a weak, bland, snobby Bond. But criticizing Lazenby for having range isn't really fair. I can't even imagine Connery being vulnerable or actually dimming down his swagger and actually turning dull, stiff and pompous to go undercover as a dull genealogist or falling in love, not in a tacky way, but in a real way. Especially in the 60s, for some reason, the public rejected a good actor as Bond-- they want a handsome mannequin tough guy to project themselves on. So Pierce Brosnan is picked over Timothy Dalton, and it's not really until Daniel Craig that we finally get both, and then some. But for Craig's era, men were allowed to cry. We'd all gone WEAK! 

Lazenby's Bond has since been reappraised in today's more socially enlightened clime, and we can't help but admire how he fearlessly puts on a posh droning bore professor demeanor that--on closer viewing--is a dead-on impression of the posh genealogist who briefed him. So rather than label Lazenby dull, why not blame Salzman and Broccoli for daring to expand a working, beloved formula into something more meaningful. I guess it's like if Michael Myers started talking, or Groucho Marx decided to do a serious dramatic role, sans mustache and cigar and glasses. Even if they nailed it, and the movie was great, maybe later on hailed as a masterpiece, the damage to the characters cohesiveness would be done. Fans would consider it a betrayal. And rightly. The movie is not made for them, but for the future audiences to finally appreciate. 1969 was a year of major upheavals, of course, so Bond was simultaneously an imperialist relic for the hippies and a source of macho comfort for the hard-hats. This sensitive Bond was a source of alarm for a core audience whose idea of a swinging sexually-satisfied super-hipster was being directly threatened both onscreen and off. 

And another one who got slightly drubbed is Savalas, who for some makes a funny Blofeldt. And he is, but there's no way you can say a line like "to begin with, I was born without ear lobes" and keep a totally straight face and yet let you know he's cracking up deep inside?

Me, I always crack up when Bond's mountain fortress conquest throws herself to sleep at the sound of Telly's voice booming out with mind control tape and color lights: "You remember when you first came here? How you hated chiggens?" Savalas' nicotine perma-cold nasal voice can't do the hard-K but he makes up with it by turning the cooing Telly magic on full blast. It's just so random ---no chickens have even been mentioned up to now. Nor are any ever seen. Filthy things. But Telly gets the ladies over that hump: "But all of that is over now.. I've taught you to love chickens.. to love their flesh, their voice..." 

But I love that he doesn't put on any phony airs--he's already bald so that's covered but rather than get all feline like Dr. No or Donald Pleasance's or Charles Gray-ish like Charles Gray, he just stays himself but with more of a self-satisfied air. You get the impression he could be launching this cockeyed 'Vida Omega" scheme, or speeding along in his luge, or doing any other macho cool thing Bond can do as well as, in the end, getting the ultimate revenge by sten gunning Bond's bride and then making him cry like a little bitch!  

And though she's nowhere near the level of Lotte Lenya, Ilse Stepatt  comes off like Divine crossed with a German shepherd as Blofeldt's butch administrative assistant/enforcer. Together they're as tenacious and relentless as Bond in that justifiably renowned downhill skiing to parade to ice rink, to car chase sequence, the grim shadow to Bond and Emma Peel - who does some great defensive driving to show she's just as capable and cool as anyone else, and so there's a much more even match between them, which is refreshing, as it's almost always Bond and his target gallery while the villain just boasts of his master plan and then maybe blows up.  Savalas is more like a gypsy than royalty, but unlike so many others in his role, he seems at ease and believable as someone who enjoys being evil for the sake of it, like a true megalomaniac, which explains why he's so quick to brag out his plan to Bond, that's what those guys do - they can't not do it. Yet he's also legit believable as a leader--the type who wouldn't throw a lackey to a shark just for failing some difficult task 

HORROR EXPRESS

Original title: Pánico en el Transiberiano

(1972) Dir Eugenio Martin

This Spanish-British horror union of Horror Express (1972)  is really the best of everything--the best pairing of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing (as posh scientists), Alberto de Mendoza as a superstitious priest playing the Rasputin to a bemused young countess (Silvia Tortosa) and her older inventor husband), and the best 'frozen ape man/alien defrosts aboard the Orient Express' film ever. The Chariots of the Gods-savvy script zips along most pleasingly and in addition to the countess there are several strong female characters, including Miss Jones ((Alice Reinheart) the droll older assistant to Cushing who wryly sizes up the other women and delivers acidic bon mots: a sultry corporate spy (Helga Liné) and a lady passenger, friend for the countess (Faith Clift)

I love train films in general but when they switch tracks as deftly as this one, like when a drop of ocular fluid from the ape man's eye is seen under the microscope revealing images of dinosaurs and what the earth looks like from outer space. But that's not the reason that superstitious beady-eyed monk steals it off the tray and offers it to its new host, the detective investigating the first murder, now possessed, flipping over to worship him as the devil ("thy will be done as it is in Hell!"). Hey, he plays the favorite, you can't blame him. Or can you? 

As a fan of classic Mexican horror I also notice a lot of weird similarities between the Horror Express alien and its habid sucking brain contents through the victim's eyes and the comet-riding, brain-sucking baron in The Brainiac (1961). They even both drink the brain of an inventor of a new steel that can withstand a flight to space, so they can each presumably build a rocket to finally leave this shitty brain-dead planet, if they ever get a chance. The alien may be relentless here, hopping from body to body, but his possessed characters hint at the intense centuries of loneliness it's gone through and we also feel for it. Crash-landed here long before life even began, working his way up from single cells up to the caveman he was then frozen in since the last Ice Age; it's bound to make anyone a little desperate. 

All that is rather marvelous, but then comes the final perfect late-inning addition as scene stealer Telly Savalas and his Cossack crew come barging onto the train once it stops on the Siberian border, rocking his usual awesome ridiculous hamminess after receiving orders to board the train and take charge, rounding up everyone in first class in the dining car and giving them the collective third degree: "Who are da killas!? WHO!??" he shouts at them, waving his gun and whip around. "Who are da trubble makers!?" We love you, Telly! 

"You're excellency," says the possessed cop, "I'm a police inspector." He shouts back "Everybody here Is UNDER ARREST!

And there's so much else to love, especially if you grew up watching this on TV all panned, scanned and truncated into oblivion and you still loved it. Now it's like you pinch yourself to see if you're dreaming, because what a beautiful world to have such clear, anamoprhic pictures. . Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing make an engaging Holmes-and-other-Holmes style duo (aided well by Tortosa's countess) and the Orient Express makes a perfect setting for a tale of existential steam-powered escape, where the steady movement of the train makes a fine metaphor for the ever-increasing momentum of early 20th century progress, with an alien who has spent so long trying to guide life on earth into a form that can build a rocket so he can escape at last, after all these billions of years. His devouring red eye pairs poetically with the train's lone guiding red light, hurtling through the snowy Siberian tundra like the Ice Age is still in effect; the train whistle's scream perfectly folded blended into John Cacavaslectric guitar score, and the whistling refrain that passes from one character to another like "Isn't it Romantic?" Love Me Tonight, is an ingenious way to remind us where the alien is now (he picks it up from the baggage car guard who picks it up from the Countess playing piano in their private car, and whistles it through the rest of the film, even from his frozen ape form. And it all makes a perfect metaphor for human evolution on this fickle earth--roaring through the cold vastness, blazing across the aeons, ripping through time and space like a steam-powered mega zipper. 

The alien red eyes sucks up information way fast, especially the count's knowledge of metallurgy, but we get a tragic and profound sense of science still having a long way to go before we can escape the gravity of these archaic bone machines, and return to our true home... out there, in a galaxy far away. 

With plenty of droll humor, lush atmosphere, nonstop action, no wasted time on pathos or some lame romance, instead there's this liberating feeling that everything that happens is quickly disseminated through the passengers and crew, taken as fact rather than scoffed at, "you mean to tell me a two million year old ape man is alive on this train, killed the baggage man and locked him in the crate all neat and tidy!?" / "YES!" and all of it building to its apocalyptic finale as Telly's men get their brains wiped out by those glowing red eyes (but that's just the start of it, once the light goes out. The result of all this makes Horror Express a shining jewel in the Euro-horror crown. And Telly, you bald-headed bounty of badass bliss, who loves ya? Europe, since it's smart, and me of course (don't ya think ahm smaht?!). You're the walking talking equivalent of a warm fire, ready to burn you or save your life if you need thawing. And damn do we ever.