Cazador de Demonios (1983)

aka Demon Hunter

A peasant I don’t think whose name we ever learn is convinced Indio sorcerer Tobias (Jose Tablas) is responsible for the dead birth of his son. Seeing as how Tobias chased away the praying women surrounding her and slaughtered and bled out a cock over her belly while her husband was away fetching town doctor José Luis (Rafael Sánchez Navarro), there just might be something to the theory.

Our peasant friend doesn’t take this too well and murders the sorcerer a short time later. Unfortunately, this rather seems to help the guy more than hinder him, for Tobias now turns into a nahual, which in the interpretation of this film is an undead, Satanist were-animal (I never could puzzle out which kind of animal it’s supposed to be exactly). The peasant, ineffectively trying to make up for his badly done job, is the monster’s first victim, but soon enough, it starts to slaughter the sheep of “mayor” (which amounts to “town owner” here) Franco (Andrés García), as well as a few people a night. The former makes Franco very angry, so he puts police chief Aguilar (Roberto Montiel) – a basically decent man clearly chafing against being owned by this particular rich arse – on the job to kill the animal responsible right quick, or else…

The Aguilar’s problem is that he – somewhat reasonably - believes the killer to be an animal and not a monster, and it will take him quite some time to come around to the truth and more effective action. José Luis on the other hand, despite being a scientist, rather quickly teams up with the town’s rather fire and brimstone priest Padre Martín (Tito Junco) to put an end to the horror with the power of God (as embodied in a snazzy dagger with the suffering Christ as a handle, which seems rather dubious to my irreligious eyes, but what do I know) and bullets made out of a communion cup. He’s getting particularly zealous once the monster has realized killing alone just isn’t any fun and kidnaps the doctor’s wife Rosa (Roxana Chávez) for reasons of procreation.

Like quite a few Mexican horror films from this era, fruitful director Gilberto de Anda’s very first feature film Cazador de Demonios is a bit slow-going for the course of its first act, clearly struggling with establishing the characters and their social connections while also shoving in two odious comic relief deputies, and including at least a bit of supernatural fun, all the while having to stay in a tiny budget. Consequently, there are quite few scenes that are meant to give the audience a good understanding of the way the village is built on corruption (not that this point is going to be resolved anyway) but tend to get bogged down with unimportant stuff.

Fortunately, once things do get going, the film gathers speed and drive very quickly, turning into a cheap yet highly entertaining variation on the classic werewolf tale with changes appropriate to a film taking place in the boons of Mexico. I suspect there’s the typical thing about urban filmmakers looking at country people askance going on here, too, but I might very well misreading the state of things in Mexico in the early 80s. In any case there’s much more machismo than in most werewolf movies not featuring Paul Naschy on display, a rather bloody version of Catholicism, an actively Satanist were-creature, and a deep distrust towards worldly authorities, all served up in a picturesque countryside and a very fine looking mission ruin while rather more international things like a torch-wielding peasant mob and very traditional monster stalking are happening around them.

Once he lets loose, de Anda also turns out to be an effective horror director, putting much coloured light, clever camera angles, and the traditional and always appreciated spooky play of shadow and light in the service of some surprisingly creepy scenes, like the Priest’s costly encounter with what amounts to the Devil in the nahual’s lair, the calmly yet nightmarishly staged burning of an innocent by Franco, and the suspenseful (and very pretty) final encounter between Rosa and the nahual.

It’s good stuff, much more in the tradition of that part of Mexican horror cinema that was influenced by Universal horror than I had expected going in, neatly crossed with what I always interpreted as a 70s grimness (and hey, what’s 3 years?). One just needs to be patient with the slow start.

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Masacre Nocturna (1997)

This Mexican anthology movie features three very lightly connected stories. In the first, a strapping young actor does a Very Bad Thing to learn the secret acting and make-up powers of his very favourite actor. Turns out the secret is black magic, and murdering a black magician for his spell book never ends well.

The second story concerns the attempt of a quartet of criminal punks (oh, Mexican cinema, never change) to rob an aristocratic couple and their butler. But why are these aristos so damn sarcastic to the people with guns? And why is there a dismembered man in the fridge? Are these people from Transylvania or what?

The final story sees an elderly hunter (confounding action movie star Mario Almada) packing his nagging odious comic relief wife into an RV to finally hunt down the large, hairy creature - our hero prefers the name "Yeti" for it - he once encountered as a child.

By 1997, the Mexican genre movie industry had long since made the typical step towards generally indifferent direct-to-video material you can find all around the globe (at least that's how the situation looks from here; it may well be there's a deluge of great Mexican genre cinema of the era that never reached northward or eastward, though I highly doubt it). From time to time, though, someone like prolific director/actor/writer/producer Gilberto de Anda did (re-)stumble into the particular oddness that made up half of the charm of many a Mexican horror movie, and a film like Masacre nocturna appeared (I imagine out of a dry ice fog bank).

Of course, nobody conversant with my tastes or the sort of film to expect under these circumstances will be surprised to hear that Masacre isn't a "good" movie by anyone's definition: the stories are basic and rather stupid, de Anda's direction just not very interesting, and the jokes in the final two episodes - comedic and semi-comedic respectively - are particularly unfunny. This is a film that gets you (or rather me) by way of curious ideas and odd little moments, and not by being an effective horror movie or comedy.

However, if you're willing and able to appreciate a film for its sheer oddness, de Anda has quite a bit to offer. There's the bizarre decision to cast the young, jealous actor of the first story with a balding middle-aged guy (in fact, everyone apart from the thugs in story number two is at least middle-aged, even a band of "rapist indios" tend to the geriatric), the fact that everyone in the story speaks about the old actor's acting as incredible and his make-up as unbelievably realistic when he is in fact hamming it up like a champ, and his monster face looks like nothing so much as a rotting onion. Or the fact the police are absolutely sure the young actor is the killer of the elderly thespian despite their only clue being his fingerprints on a coffee cup (which isn't exactly the murder weapon). Everything in the movie is ever so slightly - or pretty damn heavily - off, as if de Anda (of course also responsible for the script) had never in his life stepped outside of his apartment, ever.

Further moments of greatness include the fluffy bigfoot, sorry, yeti costume, a gang of rapist indios who only seem to appear because Almada's annoying wife had complained of her fear of them three times, turning a bad tasteless joke into friendly lunacy, the adorable and friendly looking dog the werewolf in story number two transforms into (an inspiration for True Blood?), Mario Almada's romance with his friend Yeti (honestly, I would not have been surprised if the two had gone off into the sunset with each other, leaving Mrs Nagging Wife behind), or the sudden and ridiculous influx of bad gore effects when Yeti takes care of that gang of rapists.

"Delightful" is the word that comes to my mind as a descriptor here, so as "the delightful Masacre nocturna" the movie will be known forever more in my household. If you disagree, Mario Almada will complain about his lack of endurance, threaten you with a knife larger than his head, and stare at you disapprovingly.

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In short: Cazador De Demonios (1983)

aka Demon Hunter

A small town in Mexico. The shaman Tobias (Jose Tablas) is clubbed to death by a farmer believing the old man to be responsible for the stillbirth of his child. He might even be right about that, what with the shaman slaughtering a chicken over the wife's belly during delivery. Be that as it may, death doesn't stick with Tobias, and so he returns as a floating image by day and a murderous nahual/sasquatch/furry/demon/whatever by night. Tobias starts off with killing his murderer, but the dead guy isn't just satisfied with one single killing and so continues a random killing spree throughout the next nights that culminates in the kidnapping of the town doctor's wife Rosa (Roxana Chavez) for procreation usage. Unpleasantly, he's not as romantic as the Creature from the Black Lagoon when going about things.

The town's sheriff (Roberto Montiel), priest (Tito Junco) and doctor (Rafael Sanchez Navarro) will have to join their forces of authority to conquer the creature that is threatening their peaceful (well, if you can call a place where everyone's a violent jerk even without a supernatural threat going around peaceful) town and/or marriage. After the sceptical sheriff has stopped hunting for a bear with human saliva, that is.

Cazador de Demonios is one of those sad little films that could be contenders either in the league of cheap-but-good little films transcending their poor circumstances through tightness or cleverness, or in that of so-bad-they're-fun ones, but doesn't manage to get any further than to be sort of boring, kind of alright.

The film's budget doesn't seem as low as that of other Mexican horror films of its period, so there's a surprising amount of varied outside locations to see, no filler needs to find its way from the library on screen, and the actors are all perfectly competent. Unfortunately, the film's director and writer Gilberto de Anda doesn't know what to do with any of it, and so decides to very slowly set up a bunch of thematic threads (the typical duel between reason and faith, the fact that everyone in town seems rather…well…evil, the shaman demon's need to live out his physical cravings) that never build up to any kind of actual pay-off and instead just seem to hang in the film's air for no good reason whatsoever.

For a film about a murdering and raping creature, Cazador also turns out to be just very unexciting, which just might be caused by the film's complete lack of dramatic tension and the absence of ideas about how to sensibly fill its running time. You could probably cut out twenty minutes and would not lose anything important, except some of that feeling of tedium.

There's some skulking around in the dark, some screaming, some body parts, people wandering around and talking, a torch bearing mob appears at random, and in the end the movie's monster dies in one of the limpest final confrontations I have ever seen.

It's all so joyless and perfunctory I don't even have it in my to make fun of the hairy guy (understandably barely on screen) who is supposed to be the monster.

 

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