Four conscience-deficient men visit Haiti to learn more about Voodoo - watch rites they aren't allowed to see, steal the idol of a local god, this kind of thing. As if stealing religious icons wasn't stupid enough, the four also let themselves be cursed by the voodoo high priest.
At least, this is what they tell the guest of a dinner party, among them our heroine Dr. Karina without a surname (Elvira Quintana) and her fiancé Dr. Armando Valdes (Ramon Gay), as if stealing and being cursed was the most normal thing in the world. Since of the four seems to be a gangster boss and that seems to be not worthy of comment for anyone, it probably is.
The only one who takes the curse seriously is Karina, who is a doctor and therefore a scientist, but seems to know too much about voodoo to exclude its effectiveness - and as the first of the men soon finds out, is absolutely right with her doubts.
Karina's armchair detection work takes some time, but after the second death (if you can call someone dead who is still moving after his heart has stopped - a strange fact the movie soon ignores completely), she deduces the murders are performed by living, moving dolls, controlled by a sorcerer.
This will teach me looking down on the work of a director after just two films. Benito Alazraki (of Spiritism & Santo contra los Zombies infamy) directs a mostly old-fashioned but effective Mexican horror film of the classier variant, with some very fine usage of shadows and light, successful pacing and a script strong enough to survive a Gordon K. Murray dub without losing every bit of sense.
The killer dolls are created in a simple but surprisingly effective way: dwarfs wearing cheap, stiff masks that have immobile features looking just enough like the faces of their earlier victims to be quite disconcerting, especially with the added ingredient of some very artificial looking body language of their actors. Let's face it - these guys are just creepy.
That the role of the "scientist who understands the supernatural" (think Peter Cushing as Van Helsing) is played by a woman was a pleasant surprise. Even more surprising to me was that the movie didn't stop letting Karina be an intelligent, independent woman - the last strike against evil is hers. (Well, there is one scene I consider pretty out of character for the woman we had seen up to then, but this is Mexico in the early 60s).
I can't find very much to dislike about the film, apart from the dub and the usual muddle-headedness about Voodoo it is a perfectly fine example of its type.
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