Saturday, October 21, 2023

70's Mexican Horror Part Four - (René Cardona Jr. Edition)

BLOOD FEAST
(1972)
Overall: WOOF
 
Not to be confused with Herschell Gordon Lewis' 1963 crapfest of the same name, René Cardona Jr.'s Blood Feast, (La noche de los mil gatos, Night of a Thousand Cats), is rightfully regarded as a terrible piece of celluloid in its own right.  His first straight foray into horror, director René Cardona Jr. makes a thoroughly pathetic attempt at the genre, turning in something that is catastrophically boring even in its butchered, American cut which runs a measly sixty-three minutes long.  About half of such a running time is spent with Hugo Stiglitz flying around a in a helicopter, essentially pulling the Night at the Roxbury "Eh...me...eh?" gag as he hovers above scantily-clad women by their outdoor swimming pools, landing by the ones who pick up on his asinine attempt at wooing them over.  He then brings them to his castle, shows them a bunch of disturbing Gothic decor, and murders them in order to grind them up and feed the chunks to his plethora of felines.  This structure gets rinsed and repeated until a woman's car stalls during her getaway at the end, making the whole thing as insultingly lazy as it is stupid.
 
TINTORERA
(1977)
Overall: WOOF
 
While Jaws: The Revenge is commonly recognized as the worst movie to spawn in the wake of Steven Spielberg's aquatic terror blockbuster, (unless we are to count the purposely terrible Sharknado boom in later decades), René Cardona Jr.'s wretchedly dull Tintorera, (Tintorera: Killer Shark), is easily the most misleading.  Despite the fact that the movie does in fact include shark hunting, the first proper attack happens a whopping hundred minutes in, rendering over two-thirds of it as nothing more than the saga of vacationing gigolos.  Both Hugo Stiglitz and Andrés García get more ass than a toilet seat as women come in and out of the proceedings, with a top-billed Susan George receiving the most screen time during the second act.  Those hip to its casually sleazy agenda, (i.e those who are not waiting in endless frustration for the tiger shark-munching mayhem to finally commence), may appreciate the violence towards animals, moronic character behavior, copious amounts of nudity, and tropical ocean bloodshed in the last twenty-odd minutes of the mercifully shorter American cut.  For the rest of us though who have far better things to do with our time, this must honestly be viewed as an insulting piece of trash that misses its intended mark by untold miles.
 
THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE
(1978)
Overall: MEH

During the late 1970s, René Cardona Jr. seemed hellbent on torturing his audience with two hour long, boring-ass movies set on a boat and The Bermuda Triangle, (El Triángulo diabólico de las Bermudas, Il triangolo delle Bermude, The Secrets of the Bermuda Triangle, Devil's Triangle of Bermuda), is another textbook example.  Featuring frequent on-screen collaborators Hugo Stiglitz and Andrés García, John Huston of all people joins the festivities as well, presumably to pay off gambling or tax debt.  Based on the sensationalized "non fiction" book of the same name by Charles Berlitz , it is indeed set in the infamous ocean mass that was long fabled to hold supernatural powers and the premise itself of trapping a boat full of people there is not in and of itself a poor one.  The hopeless vessel suffers navigation and machinery malfunctions, several of its passengers drown or are mortally injured during a hurricane, and their S.O.S. messages seem to float around cryptically with others that are decades old.  Cardona Jr. as well as fellow screenwriters Stephen Lord and Carlos Valdemar even throw in a stupid creepy kid and her stupid creepy doll who nonchalantly spouts cryptic warnings the whole way through.  A sluggish watch that is at least thirty minutes too long, (with an unacceptably low amount of exciting set pieces at its disposal), it fails to maintain the right ominous vibe.
 
CYCLONE
(1978)
Overall: WOOF

Imagine Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat except without a single solitary line of interesting dialog, interchangeably miserable characters, a dog getting murdered and eaten, cannibalism, wah-wah guitar music, sharks, and about two hours long.  This will give one a proper grasp of what René Cardona Jr.'s survival horror tragedy Cyclone, (El Ciclón, Terror Storm), entails.  Once again containing a misleading title, the tropical storm only shows up in the very first scene, so anyone that was expecting a Mexican Twister full of wailing-wind set pieces will be even more disappointed than the already disappointing film is.  Instead, we have lots of people trapped on a boat in the middle of the ocean and then the movie ends.  This is not an exaggeration as things grow both dire and boring throughout the running time, with the only deviation being another new obstacle for our rag-tag group of survivors to endure.  The only character whose name you are likely to remember is Carroll Baker's aforementioned survivor food dog Christmas since everyone else merely lays around exhausted and famished, only coming alive to bicker with each other.  Cardona Jr certainly sticks to his dour guns as far as the tone is concerned, but with the stakes quickly established and then stubbornly stuck to with no one to care about, it is a merciless chore to sit through.

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