Overall: WOOF
Taking a stab at both horror and juvenile comedy, René Cardona co-wrote and directed Capulina contra los vampiros, (Capulina vs. The Vampires), which finds the title, "The King of White Humor" actor up to relentlessly not-hilarious hijinks against the undead. Gaspar Henaine, (Capulina), generally paired with actor Marco Antonio Campos in a decade's worth of films, but this solo venture finds him with a dwarf-sized co-star dressed as a jester who can teleport at will as the two stumble around like buffoons after Count Dracula gets accidentally resurrected. There are also a slew of vampire babes who pose no threat whatsoever, two guys who run an inn and try to steal a treasure, and an early scene where Capulina makes a job headhunter practically pull his hair out in frustration. None of it is remotely funny, but at least the movie somehow manages to steer shy of being a torturous viewing experience. The set design has a fun, macabre haunted house vibe with red/purple lighting, fog, and preposterous vampire teeth making the whole thing about a tenth as "scary" as a Scooby-Doo episode. If only any of the jokes worked, it might just be worth somebody's time.
(1972)
Dir - René Cardona/Jerald Intrator
Overall: MEH
The English language version of René Cardona's initial 1969 film La Horripilante bestia humana, (The Horrible Man-Beat, Horror y sexo, Horror and Sex, Gomar - The Human Gorilla), was re-titled Night of the Bloody Apes three years later and is a ridiculous mad scientist/lucha libre hybrid. To be fair, the script by Cardona and his son René Cardona Jr. is not any sillier than any other D-rent, pseudo-science monster romp from the previous two decades and is itself a remake of Cardona's own Las Luchadoras contra el medico asesino, (The Wrestling Woman vs. the Killer Doctor, Doctor of Doom). In this regard, both the material and style are familiar to international genre hounds, but the gore is kicked up several notches here with several close-ups of surgery and the title beast ripping a man's scalp off and squeezing another's eyeballs out. There is also ample amounts of nudity, usually of the casual variety where Norma Lazareno takes showers and hangs out in her birthday suite when not in her red devil wrestling costume. Nothing that transpires is worth paying attention to as it is severely padded with the usual bouts of repetitive dialog exchanges, but it is garish fun when it decides to wake up a bit here or there.
(1972)
Overall: MEH
A wacky, action/mad scientist hybrid and the first of only two movies to star Mexico's Houdini Professor Zovek, the apply titled The Incredible Professor Zobek, (El increíble profesor Zovek), is pure ridiculousness that is mostly enjoyable once the stagnant first act is done away with. After a series of lengthy "characters in rooms saying the same things over and over again" scenes, we eventually meet our world-domination-minded bad guy who is hiding away in a giant castle so that he can perform nonsensical experiments on people in order to control the world or whatever. The crude, ghastly make-up effects are a riot, plus we have bikini clad women in executioner masks, hunky Mexican thugs showing off their oiled chests, diabolical midgets, robots, monstrous brutes, and a hawk that apparently likes to feast on human eyeballs, so we are told. As far as our superhero tittle character, Zovek is hilariously lacking in screen charisma and has kung-fu skills that are merely a few notches above Rudy Ray Moore's, but his escapism/hypnotism/wrestling powers still come off as childishly charming. The production values are assuredly minute and director René Cardona's skills behind the lens are as inconsistent as ever, (especially where the pacing is concerned), but the movie delivers the dumb in as noble a manner as possible.
(1973)
Overall: WOOF
A nonsensical follow-up to the previous year's The Incredible Professor Zovek, The Invasion of the Dead, (Blue Demon y Zovek en la invasión de los muertos, Blue Demon and Zovek in the Invasion of the Dead), is unfortunately infamous for its escape artist star dying during production in an unrelated incident. A celebrated figure in his homeland, Zovek had apparently just embarked on a nine picture deal when he fell to his death performing a helicopter stunt in Japan, leaving the production no other choice but to bring in luchador enmascarado Blue Demon, (Alejandro Muñoz Moreno), to shoot extra scenes to pad things out. The resulting movie is a mess of incoherency, but more to the point, is it persistently sluggish and embarrassing on a technical level. Cardona's script throws together Bible quotes, Tibetan prophesies, zombies, werewolves kind of, and invisible aliens with very little money to make any such random components interesting. Granted some of the film's problems can be explained due to the tragic demise of their lead actor, but to be fair, Zovek is hardly the world's most charismatic thespian to begin with. Also, he is still present in most of the movie anyway, with Blue Demon and his utterly pointless and unfunny sidekick simply adding to the boredom as they have very little to do for large parts of the running time.
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