Cinema Blog #2: Alucarda

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I had the hardest time selecting a film last night. I stared at the titles for a good hour. I knew I needed to watch a horror film, since the reviews on Classic-Horror had been sparse this month. I wanted to get something up tonight or tomorrow night (and my review of The Black Room has been stalled). After a lot of kvetching and some completely unnecessary drama on my part, I settled on Juan Lopez Moctezuma's 1975 Alucarda la hija de las tinieblas or just Alucarda for the English-speaking world.

Alucarda Source: Mondo Macabro DVD

This one starts out like Heavenly Creatures on acid; two convent girls create a little world all to themselves, but their increasingly unhinged reliance upon each other opens a path to the devil himself. Unfortunately, as the film progresses, it ends up losing even that much narrative coherency. The second half of Alucarda a hysterical maelstrom of Catholicism, lesbianism, and Satanism, very little of it making any sense. Sense, however, doesn't seem to be Moctezuma's intention. His bond with surrealism is quite strong -- he co-produced his friend Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo and cited Luis Buñuel as an influence -- even if he never quite grasps it. Too often his film makes a jump for a real narrative, but then gets distracted by a brilliant piece of imagery that doesn't fit at all. Those who heavily favor logic in their film watching will probably resort to making their own MST3K commentary to survive. Watching Alucarda for a storyline is ridiculous, however, and the viewer that may be best off is the one watching purely for the visuals. Moctezuma's eye for the disturbing is keen. The nuns in his film are in weird habits: wrinkled, white, and covering everything but their faces. These habits pick up the red dust of the extremely organic-looking convent, so many of the sisters' skirts appear to be stained in very old blood. A stern priest gives a lecture against Satan with a half-dozen gigantic crucifixes looming behind him. A Satanist initiation becomes a crazed orgy. A dead girl is found in a coffin filled with blood -- and then rises from it, soaked from neck to foot and grinning maniacally (this last is probably the most memorable sequence in the entire film). Alucarda is the first American release from British cult DVD company Mondo Macabro, and as such, a little extra care is put into it. On top of the typical production notes (here lodged in amongst the director's biography), there is a text interview with Moctezuma (who died in the early 90s), a featurette that explores his work (which includes the Poe-Marat/Sade hybrid Mansion of Madness), and a video interview with Moctezuma admirer/Pan's Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro. Mondo Macabro is an excellent go-to if you're looking for weird foreign films off the beaten path -- with few exceptions, every title in their catalog will give you an experience that's worth talking about the next day (and see, here we are). Other really interesting titles in their line include Mill of the Stone Women and Jess Franco's The Diabolical Dr. Z. As a side note, there's demonic breathing noises throughout Alucarda, and I'm pretty damn certain they're all sampled from Regan's labored breathing in The Exorcist.

Tonight, I'm going to a 1970s double feature at desertwillow's theater, featuring kidnapping thriller The Candy Snatchers and a personal favorite, the world's only turkey monster/anti-drug/pro-Jesus/gore film, Blood Freak. Look for my full report tomorrow!