Three Films Make A Post: Toei Triple Threat

Kingdom of Jirocho 2 (1963): For large swathes of its running time, this second of Masahiro Makino’s remakes of his own material leaves behind honourable yakuza Jirocho (still Koji Tsuruta) in favour of the misadventures of “comedic” stuttering yakuza Ishi, and really strained my patience there. Apart from how badly stuttering-based humour has aged – it’s about as funny as US 30s films’ “cowardly black people” humour, so very much not at all – there’s a meandering quality to these scenes, very much leaving one with the feeling that half of this film is filler. Which is particularly disappointing because the other half is perfectly entertaining light ninkyo eiga business with one hell of a cast.

Kingdom of Jirocho 3 (1964): That last bit is also what makes the entertaining part of this third film. While there’s decidedly less – but still too much - of Ishi going around the third film mostly suffers from a lack of focus. There are perfectly cromulent subplots and even a bit of actual dramatic tension in the main plot, but there’s also a lot of side business that mostly feels unimportant and typically not terribly interesting.

Consequently, instead of an actual climax – what would be the climax in less woozy movie comes about an hour into the ninety minute film – we get another to be continued ending. Sure, part of the reason for this is the TV show like format in which these movies were produced, but it often feels as if the scripts were written while shooting on the film was already on the way.

Case of Umon: Red Lizard (1962): The Umon films, with Ryutaro Otomo in the title role, were one of several shogunate era samurai detective series. I have more experience with the somewhat darker Bored Hatamoto films, but my first foray into the adventures of this less pretend-lazy detective – in a film directed by Sadatsugu Matsuda who directed his first feature in 1928 and his last one in 1969 – is certainly promising. There’s some of the moody, near-gothic staging you get in many a Japanese mystery on screen, pulpy ideas like Edgar Wallace on speed (a killer known as the Red Lizard who is accompanied by a raven is certainly keeping in the spirit), some decent swordplay, and an actually pretty interesting mystery. Even better, the final sequence during which our detective explains what has been going on takes place during a stage play he has had a playwright write for the occasion.

To Kill a Mastermind (1979)

One of those huge cults of martial arts assassins that tend to plague the martial world in wuxia films has grown to become a huge threat for peace and stability throughout the whole of China. The cult is controlled by a mastermind so secretive, none of his underlings have ever seen him. He only communicates with his the eight chiefs stationed in his headquarters via a curious mechanical contraption, commanding them to do the most important dirty deeds.

Things have grown so bad, the emperor has ordered a group of men to find and kill the mastermind at all costs. Apart from the villains’ secrecy, there’s the little problem that the cult’s leaders are not to be beaten through a simple frontal assault, so the emperor's men work with the tools of espionage, subterfuge, and suicide attacks – all in an attempt to turn the leaders against one another.

In fact, the good guys, such as they are, appear to have managed to place an agent inside of the highest ranks of the cult. Their identity, however, is so secret, even the audience will only learn it during the final battle, when hopefully the mastermind’s identity will be revealed as well.

Wuxia films, particularly once Chor Yuen got into the genre at the Shaw Brothers, often have a particular closeness to the mystery genre (unless Jimmy Wang Yu, stars, of course), and the search for a mysterious mastermind certainly was a pretty standard genre trope at least during the 70s.

However, the approach Sun Chung (working from a script by Ni Kuang, who wrote about a million wuxia scripts, and novels) takes here is markedly different from the more typical tale of Ti Lung walking around the martial world, asking questions and getting into fights until the final showdown, and seems to take many of its cues from procedural spy material, while subtracting charismatic figures like George Smiley or Harry Palmer from the equation.

Instead, this is a film that spends a third of its time with nameless, thankless officials giving their lives for a goal that seems perpetual out of reach, and two thirds with eight – and then increasingly fewer – paranoid killers losing patience with one another.

It’s an interesting and uncommon way to go about it, but also one that leaves the film at hand without any visible centre. There is no clear protagonist, and because the mastermind stays hidden throughout, there’s no central antagonist here either. The film emphasises this even more by eschewing any of the great – or even mid-level – Shaw stars. Everybody here is a somewhat nameless character actor – all very capable when asked, all great in the fight scenes – so there’s nobody for an audience member to project themselves onto.

This turns To Kill a Mastermind into a somewhat alienating experience, as if you’d watch a film from a place where a genre you know quite well worked under somewhat different rules you as a viewer can’t quite comprehend, and are not sure you want to.

If this is the film’s great success or its great flaw is probably more a question of personal taste than anything else. At the very least, it is certainly interesting to see so many standard tropes of the wuxia without the thing – people, it turns out! – that usually anchors them, floating in a strange sort of limbo of great fight sequences, its director’s sense for striking use of colour, and some of the prettier locations to be found in the Shaw corpus.

It’s certainly an interesting experience, and even if I more appreciate To Kill a Mastermind than love it, and am rather glad most wuxia have central characters, I am just as glad its peculiar kind of abstraction exists.

Three Films Make A Post: Where the cashiers have no name

Supermarkt aka Supermarket (1974): If you know German director Roland Klick mostly for his psychedelic noir western Deadlock or his Dennis Hopper coke freak-out White Star, you’ll be in a for a whole world of pain in the form of an hour of very earnest Hamburg-set naturalism pasted onto the beginning of a pretty great, naturalist, heist film. Needless to say, simple guy as I am, I don’t appreciate this approach much.

However, it’s not that Klick isn’t good at the earnest naturalism bit – one could imagine him going on to become a German Ken Loach figure in a more interesting German cinema – the problem is all mine. I just find earnest naturalism the least interesting mode for a fictional narrative possible and have never seen the point to it. Surely,if you want to go for straightforward representation of the world as it is, why not make a reportage or a documentary? Hell, I might even praise you for that one (if only with backhanded remarks that I prefer Herzog style documentaries all about poetic truth, of course). As it stands, this just isn’t a film for me.

Only the River Flows aka He bian de cuo wu (2023): Speaking of films that aren’t for me, this arthouse crime drama for the Cannes crowd by Wei Shujun suffers from what I see as a weakness of most of the minor wave of mainland Chinese arthouse noir cop films of this style: an attempt to make genre films so critical of their genre they go out of their way to extract all joy and excitement from it. No thrills in our serial killer thriller, sir! No excitement to finding the killer! Hell, not actually finding the killer clearly is the way to go.

This particular example of the form eventually descends into a vague kind of surrealism, akin to Lynch without a sense of humour or a heart (so not very much like Lynch at all), without the power to actually make its surrealism feel like anything of substance or with a point; indeed, things are so opaque in the end, I have no idea why the film exists at all.

Admittedly, it is very well shot, and decrepit 90s China is evoked just as well – I don’t have any idea why, though.

Fantomas (1947): This second attempt to drag Fantomas into the sound film era after one in 1932, as directed by Jean Sacha, certainly has no ambitions at being anything more than a potboiler.

As such, it has decent entertainment value eighty years later: there are a handful of nice, mad science-y sets, some of the action is staged on a more than decent level, and after pacing issues early on, things zip along nicely, and mindlessly. The whole affair suffers from a very flat Fantomas performance by Marcel Herrand, but kinda makes up for it with a very young Simone Signoret running circles around every other actor as the villain’s virtuous daughter Hélène.

In an uncommon move for 1947, Hélène is a rather competent heroine who even takes part in the physical parts of the plot, which obviously is the sort of thing I like in my pulpy nonsense films.

964 Pinocchio (1991)

Dragged out on the street by his owner for performance problems, an amnesiac, nearly mindless cyborg sex slave we’ll soon enough call Pinocchio (Haji Suzuki), crawls into the lap of also amnesiac homeless woman Himiko (played by a mysterious woman only known under the pseudonym of Onn-chan).

Himiko slowly teaches Pinocchio to speak, eventually causing a radical – and pretty icky - bodily and mental transformation in Pinocchio and herself. Also, madness in at least one of them.

At the same time, the company producing sex slaves like Pinocchio is looking to reacquire the weird freak, by any means.

This is as much clarity as the plot to Shozin Fukui’s classic piece of indie cyberpunk cinema offers. And even this is hard won, for after half an hour or so, this turns into an intense assault on senses and tastes, featuring extensive scenes of vomiting, amateur actors freaking out in ways that border on the physically difficult to watch while real-life passer-by gawk or make wide berths, wildly speeding dolly shots and hand-shaken camera, intense editing and noise, noise, noise. The film puts a heavy emphasis on the punk part of cyberpunk going for a confrontational assault on as many senses as it can touch. I’m glad smell-o-vision never took off.

This assault is leavened by a peculiar sense of humour, a nodding acknowledgement that this is all very intense, but also a bit silly – not in the way of filmmakers not taking their work seriously, but of someone recognizing there’s something fun and funny in being confrontational as well. So perhaps, this isn’t so much an assault on the audience as an invitation to allow oneself to be assaulted by it while also having a bit of fun.

It’s really a rather special movie – unless you’re trying to eat while watching.

Brave Red Flower of the North (1970)

Original title: Nihon jokyo-den: makka na dokyo-bana 日本女侠伝 真赤な度胸花

Following the death of her estranged father in Hokkaido, Yuki (Junk Fuji) travels to the frontier he tried to tame by building a horse-breeding based economy where attempts at farming had not worked out too well. At least in his opinion.

The local horse-breeding association wants her to take her father’s place as their head to counter attempts of the yakuza-industrial complex – enemies in many a ninkyo eiga of the genre’s late stages – to take control of the area.

At first, Yuki isn’t too happy about that, but she’s played by Fuji at the heights of her star power, so she’s too morally upright not to decide to finish what her father started.

Obviously, the other side is not going to play fair, so quite a bit of violence and suffering lies ahead until our heroine is allowed to commit her own, final acts of violence against her enemies. Along the way, she befriends some ainu, breaks hearts, and has one of those longing with burning gazes and hot virtuous speeches relationships of the style we know and love with a somewhat mysterious stranger (Ken Takakura). Of course, the man has reasons to hate her family, yet oh! the honour! and oh! the barely repressed sexuality! It’s ninkyo eiga relationship perfection.

During my recent illness, I somehow stumbled into a Junko Fuji ninkyo eiga phase. Because fever is that way, quite a few of those films have by now dissolved in my mind into a mix of tears, blood and close-ups of Fuji’s face, so there will, alas, not be a series of write-ups of all eight Red Peony Gambler movies coming up this year.

In any case, this late period of ninkyo at Toei, centring around the incredible Fuji, the house troupe of character actors, romantic male leads like the triple threat of Takakura, Bunta Sugawara and Koji Tsuruta and great directors like Tai Kato, Kosaku Yamashita, Shigero Ozawa and this films Yasuo Furuhata is an incredible group of movies. Between 1968 and her too early retirement in 1972 (and her later reappearance as Sumiko Fuji), Fuji specifically does not appear to have starred in a single weak or even just middling film – everything she appeared in was good to golden.

Typically, the ninkyo eiga version of the yakuza film is treated as a rather limited genre, with too many strict beats to hold to, conservative and old-fashioned in its mores. But when you watch a lot of these films in close succession, you can actually see how different they are working inside their handful of rules. As long as your heroes and heroines are chivalric and everything ends in a ritualized bit of slaughter, there’s rather a lot of different things to be done in-between. It certainly helps that yakuza in the realm of the ninkyo does not need mean gambler or gangster, but also concerns all kinds of people that are part of the non-farming working class – coal-mining, transporting businesses and the entertainment world are all part of this world in one way or the other.

Or, in this case, horse-breeding. Stylistically, this is actually a successful attempt at mixing the ninkyo with the western (or, given the weather and geographical location, the northern), featuring the kind of musical score that mixes typical Toei style with Italian western trumpets, and features lots of horse-riding, and an emphasis on gunplay in the western style (though Fuji does get a couple of aikido moments, as is her right).

As many good ninkyo of this phase, this isn’t a film of quite as clear-cut morals than you’d expect. Yuki is as morally upright as any Fuji character – which only works because the actress is utterly convincing as the impossible ideal she is tasked to play again and again in these films – but the world around her isn’t quite as clear-cut. Her father certainly had good intentions, but we will learn he used methods not unlike those now utilized by Yuki’s enemies – the frontier business isn’t a clean one even with the best of intentions.

As always when Fuji and Takakura are together, there’s an impressive erotic tension for a genre whose loves are nearly always doomed and only seldom allowed to be expressed physically – there’s a reason these two were in so many movies together.

The Gorge (2025)

Two highly skilled and emotionally messed up sharpshooters (Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller) from what a couple of months ago were still the big international enemy blocks are stationed on opposite sides of a mysterious gorge of unknown location that’s covered with mines and auto-firing guns.

They are there to watch out for some kind of threat climbing up from the gorge. Communication between the two sides is forbidden – but apart from a dangerous abyss, there’s nobody around to police these rules.

So obviously, the two fall in love pretty much on first sight (who could blame them?) and end up learning quite a bit more about the place than the powers that be like. Also, they will shoot a lot of monsters and cause a more than sufficiently large explosions.

The Gorge is contrived, The Gorge is more than just a little silly, yet I found myself highly entertained by Scott Derrickson’s mix of horror, action and romance. It’s the sort of film that will always prefer a cool idea to a serious one, but it does so with the sense of joy and excitement, and the hidden glee at hiding away some cleverness you could find in the best films of Corman’s New World cinema phase.

Thus, this feels like the product of filmmakers enjoying themselves with the Apple money they somehow managed to get for making their high budget low budget movie, doing their best to get their audience to loosen up enough to enjoy themselves, as well. That’s how it worked out for me, at least.

Plus, Joy (whom I’d watch in anything, anyhow) and Teller have a pleasant degree of chemistry, there are some fun monster designs, sometimes great art direction, and the action is staged with verve as well as the expected professionalism. What’s not to like?

Three Films Make A Post: The monkey that likes killing our family …it's back.

The Monkey (2025): It has finally happened – Oz Perkins made a movie I don’t adore. In fact, I’d go as far as calling this bit of monkey business based on a Stephen King short genuinely bad. It’s the kind of horror comedy that believes a handful of gore gags and watching a bunch of characters the film itself can’t seem to find any interest in do little of note somehow does a movie make; that making this thin bit of nothing look slick (Perkins certainly doesn’t suddenly stop being a technically accomplished director) and professional somehow helps things along; that watching a film torture characters it clearly loathes for laughs is somehow funny.

Dark Nuns (2025): This takes place in the same nonsense version of exorcist South Korean Catholicism as The Priests. As such, I was hoping for a film with an equal amount of involuntary humour as that dubious bit of horror. Alas, Kwon Hyeok-jae’s spin-off doesn’t reach the heights of a movie whose dramatic climax is priests hunting for a possessed piglet; it is certainly as pompously self-serious as the original film, but never becomes quite weird enough with it to be interesting.

As a straightforward horror film, this suffers from the fact its – not completely uninteresting – attempt at mixing Shamanist and Catholic exorcism movie tropes only leads to double the amount of clichés, as much effort as poor Song Hye-kyo as a renegade exorcist nun puts into the whole thing.

International Gang of Kobe aka Kobe Kokusai Gang (1975): With Noboru Tanaka taking time out from his brilliant Roman Porn work for Nikkatsu to make a jitsuroku style yakuza film for Toei, and Ken Takakura and Bunta Sugawara in the leads, this should by all rights be a slam dunk. Despite appropriate amounts of sex and violence, it isn’t, alas. There’s a lack of focus and coherence, and while some scenes look and feel well enough, they never cohere into much of a whole. Even Takakura’s and Sugawara’s performances seem slightly distracted and off, as if the filmmakers couldn’t decide if they needed them to act or to take on their star personas, leaving them adrift somewhere in the limbo between these states.

The Invasion of the Vampires (1963)

Original title: La invasión de los vampiros

Dr Ulises Albarrán (Rafael del Río), comes to small town somewhere in the Mexican countryside. He’s not a doctor of medicine, mind you, but of the occult arts, and he has been sent here by his master Cagliostro. Cagliostro (whom we, alas, never meet on screen), has had dreams about vampires and this particular place, and has sent his student to do some good as well as to do some practical research on vampires.

He’s got his work cut out for him, for the town is already haunted by regular vampire attacks that began with the disappearance of one Count Frankenhausen (Carlos Agostí) and the mysterious death of his wife. The only member of the family left alive is the couple’s daughter Brunhilda (Erna Martha Bauman). She now lives in the creepy Frankenhausen manor with her grandfather on her mother’s side, the delightfully named Marqués Gonzalo Guzmán de la Serna (Tito Junco) and his not the least bit suspicious housekeeper Frau Hildegarda (Bertha Moss). Frau Hildegarda is very loyal to her master, you understand – and if not, she’ll tell you, in her absolutely not suspicious manner.

Brunhilda is suffering from bouts of illness that may very well be more in the wheelhouse of a doctor of occultism like Albarrán than a proper man of medicine. She’s also clearly the heroine to romance here for him. That is, whenever the good doctor isn’t involved in making boric acid (a very important weapon against vampires), staking corpses, investigating the vampire business with the town’s mayor, or trying to not get obstructed by the very unhelpful town priest who’s rather quick with threatening excommunication and making people anathema for a parish priest.

Ah, Mexican Gothic horror, how much do I love you. Miguel Morayta’s Invasion of the Vampires splits the difference between the pulpier side of the Mexican version of the genre and the darkly atmospheric, jumping between wonderfully and outlandish action and name-dropping of occult matter of the sort that would not have felt out of place in a Weird Tales story of the less reputable sort (Jules de Grandin versus Count Frankenhausen would certainly have been a possibility) and scenes of moodily lit – or rather shadowed – crypts, foggy landscapes and decaying opulence set to a score of highly variable weirdness.

The contrast between these two modes of the Gothic gives parts of the film the whiplash quality of one of one’s more vigorous dreams, a uncertainty in tone that fits at least this particular tale of the supernatural rather well. This is the kind of movie having a character called Frankenhausen is not the most outlandishly psychotronic element but rather par for the course.

Speaking of the psychotronic, the final act features a delightful fight between our occultist hero and a huge, fuzzy vampire bat just a couple of minutes before a genuinely eerie sequence during which an already staked horde of vampires rises from their graves to surround the manor and attempt to call characters to their doom – there’s even a visual hint of Romero’s zombies here, though those gentlethings typically lack the handy stakes and the sirens’ voices of your dead loved ones.

Other delights are the incredibly overdone performance by Moss, who makes most Renfield performances in cinematic history look restrained without having to eat a single spider, and the complicated vampire lore that has vampirism as a family curse, as a supernatural disease and as a dubious way to world domination (tariffs are apparently the way to go in the real world).

I’m sure Cagliostro approves as much of all this as I do.

Three Films Make A Post: Never bring a knife salesman to a gunfight.

Invoking Yell (2023): The late 1990s. A trio of women make their way to a supposedly haunted far-off forest site to shoot material for a video for their black metal band. For one of them, bringing the camera, it’s also supposed to be some kind of initiation into the kvlt.

Despite some pacing issues, this Chilean POV horror movie by Patricio Valladares isn’t a bad little example of the form at all. The 90s would-be black metal church burners mood is pretty believable, and once things get going, the filmmakers demonstrate a nice eye for making the traditional running through the woods interesting again.

The Last Stop in Yuma County (2023): A couple of decades ago, I’d have yawned and called this tale of a varied group of people threatening each other with violence in the last diner stop in Yuma County yet another Tarantino-alike. Of course, for better or worse, QT couldn’t make a movie as concise and focussed as Francis Galluppi’s debut feature to save his life, and once you’ve gotten over the shock of this being something of a throwback to 90s filmmaking, you might very well appreciate that, as well as the control about rhythm and shape of the film Galluppi shows.

With a cast featuring the kind of indie darlings I like – particularly Jim Cummings, Jocelin Donahue as well as some beloved horror people like Barbara Crampton and Alex Essoe in very minor roles – and filmmaking this controlled, this actually turned out be a very pleasant surprise.

Bells in the Moonlight aka Klokker I måneskinn (1964): Kåre Bergstrøm’s anthology movie about a group of mostly men telling each other three tales of the supernatural that are then debunked by a fat Freudian unfortunately isn’t as great as the director’s Lake of the Dead. It is very well shot and expertly staged, and there are quite a few eerie little moments here, but the tales themselves are harmless and gutless, have a tendency to moralize – the adultery-destroying elf doll is particularly painful – and go on much longer than their thin plots allow.

My general dislike for tales of the supernatural that never actually commit to the supernatural and make a big thing out of their not committing to either the supernatural or the rational certainly doesn’t help matters here, but even without it, this is mostly one for the completist who needs to have seen every horror anthology. A group that, alas, includes me.

Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018)

Jake Pentecost (John Boyega whose performance only isn’t the most lifeless and dull one in a movie full of lifeless performances because Scott Eastwood is even more of a zombie), rogue yet boring – and retconned in so the lazy script can include Hollywood’s daddy issues fixation - son of Pacific Rim’s Stacker Pentecost is roped in to help train a bunch of teen cadets as the next generation of Jaeger pilots. They may or may not be obsolete soon, for a Chinese company has invented piloted drone Jaegers. Returning to die – and if you think that’s a spoiler you haven’t seen any movies at all, have you? – Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi) isn’t quite convinced of the concept. Soon a mysterious evil – it is painted black, after all - Jaeger attacks, and other supposedly exciting things are bound to happen later on.

As someone who liked Guillermo del Toro’s original Pacific Rim quite a bit (well, actually loved it to bits), I was going into Steven S. DeKnight’s sequel with a degree of optimism despite the bad write-ups for the film at the time it came out. Alas, this one’s really just barely better than a Transformers film of the Michael Bay era, dropping basically every bit of interesting world building (drift compatibility between pilots as a form of intimacy for example is written out completely except for one scene that repeats a plot beat from the first film but much worse), and misusing the returning characters badly. As a matter of fact, quite a bit of the film feels as if the filmmakers feel more than just a little loathing for the first one and go out of their way to tell you. It’s not just the identity of the villain – whose plans and actions being undetected by the way makes no logical sense whatsoever even if you’re applying tolerant blockbuster logic – or the undignified way Kikuchi’s character is written out, the film’s whole approach to mecha, kaiju and human beings is unpleasant and cynical where del Toro’s film goes out of its way to be anything but.

One might think the high diversity of the kids playing the cadets would at least be a nice step in the right direction, but the script just doesn’t bother to provide anyone with any characterisation going beyond their skin colour at all. This thing’s so badly done, you often don’t even know who is supposed to be in which mecha. The writing as a whole is atrocious: there’s no concept of how a film can make shorthand characterisation work, the plotting is vague, inconsistent and anti-dramatic, and there’s nothing here that doesn’t come directly out of the big book of Hollywood blockbuster clichés. Now, the first film did use said book quite a bit too, but it also knew how to give a cliché a little twist and how to put some heart and excitement into it when done straight. Where the first film understood clichés and knew how to use them creatively, Uprising just reproduces them, badly.

The mecha and kaiju action are a huge step backwards, too. It’s supposedly bigger, better and more fun, but in actuality, there’s no heft, no excitement and no verve to any of the action set pieces. They are joyless, pointless and lack any sense of wonder. Which actually make them perfect fit for the rest of Uprising.

The Vampire (1957)

Original title: El Vampiro

Called back home to the Sycamores, the country estate where she grew up, to help care for her sick aunt María Teresa, young Marta (Ariadna Welter) steps into a more sinister situation then caregiving. It’s never a good sign when the local villagers don’t dare go out at night, and when the only vehicle willing to take one home is a cart carrying imported Eastern European soil.

On the plus side, Marta meets strapping, stupid and cowardly Enrique (Abel Salazar) just after she steps off the train carrying her to Gothic Mexico, and he is her contractually mandated romantic lead (as well as the obligatory odious comic relief), so there’s that. In fact, we will later learn that Enrique has already been involved in the business of Marta’s family before they meet, for he is secretly a doctor of medicine, called in by Marta’s uncle Emilio (José Luis Jiménez).

Once Marta and Enrique arrive at the Sycamores, they learn María Teresa died two days ago and has already been buried. Marta’s other aunt Eloísa (Carmen Montejo) has changed a bit since our heroine last saw her. She looks rather young for an old lady and has gotten into the habit of glaring sinisterly. Of course she’s wearing a cape now. The servants and uncle Emilio are clearly disturbed by more than María Teresa’s death, something that may very well have to do with their new neighbour, Count Duval (Germán Robles), a cape-wearing gentleman we the audience have already witnessed sucking the blood of a child. Duval has plans for the estate, the family, and Marta, many of them involving further bloodsucking, both literally and metaphorically. Worse still, Marta slips into gothic heroine mode rather quickly and become utterly useless, so all that stands between her and vampirism is Dr. Enrique.

El Vampiro is the movie that really put gothic horror as a mainstay on the map of Mexican cinema, seeing as it combined a smidgen of the modern age, Mexican cultural concepts concerning the supernatural, much of Universal horror with even more expressionist shadows and made a box office hit out of it. The country’s cinema would take a couple of decades of eventually pretty threadbare productions to cure itself of the macabre on screen for a while, but before that, it was one of the great countries of gothic horror together with Italy and Great Britain (one might argue Japan’s kaidan movies belong here as well, and glance longingly at Corman’s Poe cycle).

While not a perfect film, Fernando Méndez’s vampire movie hits so many of the pleasure points of gothic horror it is difficult not to swoon as often as Marta does. The whole mood of the film is lovely, how everything is drenched in shadows, every inch of screen estate looks and feels decrepit and decaying (art director Gunther Gerszo’s work is breath-taking), and even the silliest rubber bat with the most visible strings can’t change that.

Of course, silly rubber bats are a gothic mainstay as well, as are madwomen (Alicia Montoya) hidden away somewhere, premature burials, poison rings, superstitious villagers, smug vampires and their hatred of consense in relationships, cobwebs so thick, they might catch a bat, dramatic climaxes in burning rooms and so on, and so forth. Whatever you might wish for in this kind of production, Méndez and co. have probably found a place for it, and most certainly one that makes it look incredibly good.

Along the way, the film does things differently from time to time: romantic lead and comic relief are typically not united in the same character, nor does the romantic lead usually come over as quite as much as an idiot as Enrique does. This isn’t the only mix of two usually distinct character types in one role here: eventually, the film’s hidden madwoman character will also turn out to be its Van Helsing, and frankly, the actual hero of the piece. Which is a very satisfying development.

As satisfying as is all of El Vampiro – it’s no surprise that it made a lot of money and awoke the gothic instincts of Mexican cinema again.