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.