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.
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2 comments:
The Latigo films are one area of Mexican pulp cinema I've yet to venture into, but, judging by this review, it sounds like they're worth the effort.
Honestly, if the Latigo film with the satanists is good, how much fun will the Aztec mummy adventure be?
I'm sure I will regret saying this.
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