Indicator celebrate four macabre titles from the vaults of one of Mexico’s best-known film companies, the legendary Alameda Films, offer eerie Mexican tales for lovers of South-of-the-Border horror and fantasy. This extras-laden set includes Fernando Méndez’s Black Pit of Dr. M (Misterios de ultratumba), Chano Urueta’s The Witch’s Mirror (El espejo de la bruja) and The Brainiac (El barón del terror), plus Rafael Baledón’s The Curse of the Crying Woman (La maldición de la Llorona). This premium set a strictly limited (to 6000), individually numbered Blu-ray box set, which includes plenty of new extras, including four new audio commentaries, original Spanish and rare English-language dub tracks, new featurettes and interviews, trailers, a set of art cards and a fully illustrated 100-page book. This edition also marks the worldwide Blu-ray debut of all four films.  The atmospheric and oftentimes surreal Gothic flick Curse of the Crying Woman (1963) opens on a fog-shrouded night as a carriage is transporting a trio of people through a particularly creepy stretch of woods, said to be haunted. The carriage comes to an unexpected stop when it nears eyeless woman with three mammoth Great Dane and a creepy man on the side of the road. The driver is killed when the man throws a a dagger into his chest, the passengers inside are dispatched by strangling, attack by the giant dogs, and the young woman is crushed by the wheels of the carriage. It's a potent set-up that brought to mind the Maria Bava's Black Sunday as well as Dracula with it's intense and heavy black and white atmosphere. We then meet young Amelia (Rosa Arenas, The Witches Mirror) and her new husband Jaime (Abel Salazar, The Brainiac) who have come to visit her Aunt Selma (Rita Macedo, Spiritism) after being summoned. It turns out that Selma is the creepy lady from the prologue (but she has eyes now), and themurderous man is her servant Juan (Carlos Lopez Montezuma), and they're obviously up to no good. Right from the start Amelia senses something is off at the creepy cobwebbed old house and wants to leave, but before she can get away Selma reveals to her that they are descendants of a great and powerful witch, whose rat-gnawed remains are kept in a dungeon at the mansion, and that in just a few short hours they will both inherit awesome dark powers and immortality.  it's a spooky and atmospheric flick that channels several classic Gothic classics and filters into it the Mexican folkloric tale of The Llorona to great effect. The special effects don't always hold up, but we get some great pulpy old school movie magic by way of mirror tricks, some dissolves, and the make-up effects that create the eerie look of the eyeless Llorona. Aunt Selma's eyeless Llorona incarnation is also a bit on vampiric side, she has no refection in mirrors and in one scene she transforms from a flying bat into the eyeless terror, and also quite skilled in the practice of voodoo, at one point creating a wax effigy of Jaime which she uses to enthrall him.  Down in Selma secret dungeon there's a rotting corpse of their witchy ancestor with a spear driven through it's chest, meanwhile up in the belfry her supposedly dead husband is rotting away in a cell, driven mad by what could only be unimaginable horrors, and as the hour of resurrection draws near the cobwebbed old mansion turns into a pretty exciting place - the corpse in the dungeon begins to reanimate, Selma's tortured husband escapes his cell, and Jaime tries to free his wife of her ancestral curse, while the creaky old castle mansion crumbles all around them. This is a highly entertaining slice of Mexican Gothic, chock full of ancestral curses, witchery, cobwebs galore, plus it's pretty stylishly shot, creating the appropriate mood and atmosphere needed to propel the witchy story.  read the full review here: http://mcbastardsmausoleum.blogspot.com/2023/06/mexico-macabre-four-sinister-tales-from.html?m=1 Buy it here: https://amzn.to/41Cw3tK #ad

• published: 30 May 2023
• views: 205