Folks kept making movies over the last 40 some odd years, but after Intrepidos Punks, why did they bother?

Imagine if you will. The best biker movie that you never saw in the late 1960’s, but instead of Bud Cardos or Russ Tamblyn, you have an army of punk rockers and luchadors that look like they emerged straight out of a 1980’s Capcom beat ’em up. Now, give them all the drugs, dress them like nuns while they rob a bank and watch as they play Russian roulette and have rough sex like there’s no tomorrow because there isn’t.

Everything the Satanic Panic feared has become true in this film, as these mowhawked and bemasked biker maniacs swear allegiance to every demon you can imagine when they’re not shooting off weapons, playing surf rock or assaulting the citizens of a small town before you know, setting them on fire.

Let me explain something about this movie. It’s not enough to kidnap the wives of every jail guard and abuse them. No, you have to cut off their hands and send it to their men, letting them know that you’re coming to kill them, too. Beast, the leader of the women, rescues Tarzen (El Fantasma, who was an awesome luchador and whose son is Santos Escobar in NXT now and he has a gang too) and takes off for a cave concert black mass orgy.

It’s that kind of movie.

There are two annoying cops and a mob association that the punks have to deal with, but thanks to their makeup heavy bedazzled forces, blasting around on trikes and dune buggies and predating even The Road Warrior and the post-apocalyptic cinematic magic of Italy and the Philippines, you know that they’ll win eventually.

They made another one of these — La Venganza de Los Punks — that’s just as good. If you ask me, they could keep making them until the world stops rolling around the sun.

Let me translate the lyrics to the theme song for you and explain why you need to watch this movie right now.

“On the roads and cities too / stealing from anyone they always break the law.

On motorcycles with their girls they go / Looking for adventures.

They worship Satan.

Sex, drugs, violence  / they always look for action.

Sex, drugs, violence and a lot of rock & roll.”

Princesa Lea, who plays Beast, was born in Montreal and made her way to Mexico via Miami, soon becoming Majestad de las Vedettes, a queen of cabaret, where she did acrobatic dance and appeared nude in a giant champagne glass. She’s a Russ Meyer-esque dream who isn’t afraid to be the toughest woman you’ve ever witnessed. She also appears in The Infernal Rapist, Midnight Dolls and 1981’s El Macho Bionico, an erotic film that dares to mix up The Six Million Dollar Man and The Incredible Hulk.

Vinegar Syndrome keeps tickling me with a feather promising this is coming out on blu ray. Until then, huff some paint and watch the scuzzy version of this — maybe that’s the best way to see this — on the Internet Archive.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This article was posted way back on October 30, 2019 and ignited my love of late 80’s Mexican horror. Please check this out and join me in bugging every horror DVD label about releasing this. 

It appears like director and screenwriter Ruben Galindo Jr. wanted to make his own version of A Nightmare On Elm Street but somewhere along the way he decided to he’d like to make a Mexican version of an American teen sitcom, too. Honestly, if you told me Ruben came from another dimension, I’d believe you just as much. This is one of the strangest movies I’ve ever seen — I’ve watched it three times just to try and get my thoughts together — and if you take a look through the films on our site, you can see that that is no idle boast.

Our hero Michael is going through some stuff. His parents are fighting so much that his dad sends him and his mom to Mexico City, where his mother decides to drink herself into oblivion. While trying to fit into his new school, he turns seventeen and his frien Tony gives him a Ouija board.

Now, unbeknowst to us, the viewers, Michael and Tony had a past session go wrong with a Ouija board, so this really was a bad idea. Virgil — what a name for a slasher villain — is released and begins killing people.

Now, up until this point in the film, this has felt like a teen coming of age movie, filtered through the lens of a Mexican filmmaker trying to create a movie that would make sense for American audiences. But just like how huge chunks of The Last American Virgin seem to make no sense to Western eyes, this movie also feels like it was beamed down directly from space.

How else do you explain the fact that our hero — who appears to be in his late 20’s playing a high schooler — wears dinosaur pajamas for nearly the entire film? This isn’t some Troma movie trying to play it all for laughs. This is a serious movie with such lunacy inside it that you can’t take it seriously.

It does, however, have awesome special effects courtesy of Screaming Mad George, including a face that emerges from a TV years before The Ring and huge chunks of gore, like a person stabbing through the chin and the blade emerging inside their mouth.

This film was a total surprise and delight to me. I’m shocked that Mondo Macabro or Severin hasn’t picked this up yet, because this is the kind of movie that would sell for them. I found it heartwarming just how insane and inane and odd this all was. Now pardon me, I’m about to watch this movie for the fourth time.

I am a complete fanboy for Ruben Galindo Jr. who made Don’t Panic and Cemetery of Terror. I’ve never been let down by any of his films so far and I am getting the idea that I may never be disappointed by them after reading the description of this film on IMDB — “Teenagers accidentally resurrect a Satanic killer who targets the local police captain’s daughter to birth the Antichrist.”

It’s like people are making the exact movies I want right now, except they made them in Mexico 31 years ago.

Like all great Satanic movies — I’m looking at you Black Sunday and Evilspeak — this movie starts in the past, as the executioner of the Mexican town of San Ramon throws in with the devil instead of God, assaults a virgin and battles the other monks of his order before he’s stopped with an axe right to the chest. He then says, “Some day someone will come and wrench the ax out. Then I’ll return with more power to father Satan’s son in one of your descendants.”

If you’re not all in, get out.

That descendent is Olivia, the lovely young daughter of Captain Lopez and she is the lone virgin amongst her slasher victim friends. Woe be to them, as they’re camping next to a cemetery that’s beset by — get this — grave robbers. That foursome includes Manolo, his psychic girlfriend Rebeca (trust me, Mexican films are not content to stay within one genre, they’re going to toss in every ingredient) Armando and Diana.

You may wonder if they’re about to find an abandoned church and tear the axe out of the body of the villain, setting this all in motion. Wonder no more. And when the first villagers die, of course the grave robbers are blamed by Olivia’s dad. So he does what any real cop would: he tells them to go find the axe killer themselves. Yes, two people are dead, they’ve been blamed and he asks them to be junior detectives.

I love this movie.

Nearly everyone dies — by axe, by magic, by getting mashed into a pulp, bye bye and adios — until a priest explains that a Satanic idol and the axe itself, not to mention a whole bunch of TNT, are what it takes to kill off the executioner. This being Mexico, the action is intercut with Padre Jeronimo conducting a midnight mass while the cop uses a machine gun to continually blast the undead killer.

This may not be the best movie I’ve ever seen, but it’s edging closer to that space every time I watch it, just by sheer force of will and my belief that if Fulci lived in Mexico, this is the kind of lunacy that he’d have made. As Mexican Nicholas Cage might say, ” Eso es un gran elogio.”

There’s a reason why Mexican late 80’s horror movies have an edge in my heart. It’s because they’re willing to make you a combo platter of all your favorites. Instead of just giving you Friday the 13th, they say, “What if we gave you a little Rambo: First Blood Part II, threw in some The Final Terror and then gave the bad guy Freddy’s glove and a crazy mask?”

Pedro Galindo III, yes, the same lunatic who made Vacaciones de Terror 2, was behind this movie and he brought its star, Pedro Fernandez, with him. What starts as several teens out to kill a bear — and if you’re asking why, you’re thinking too hard about this movie — ends with a battle for survival against a near-unstoppable menace.

I’ll tell you why. Nacho (Fernandez) and Maurico have had a paintball playing rivalry for some time, so killing a bear feels like the natural conclusion. They bring their friends along but no one told them that these are Jesse’s woods.

Yes, Jesse, the Vietnam vet who hides behind a porcleain mask, who isn’t afraid to fight back with machine guns, tear gas, grenades and when all else fails, a gloved with knived fingers, as if he were a South of the Border Springwood Slasher.

This movie is so 80’s slasher that despite an old townie warning them to stay away, the girls still dance around in swimsuits and the chubby friend still acts the fool and still everyone is positively shocked that bear killing transforms into near ritual sacrifice.

The kids never find that bear. They do, however, find death. Lots and lots of pure death, delivered by a killing machine that keeps going even after you rip his hand clean off. The end of this movie got me so excited, I thought that I was on a coke binge. It’s that kind of manic energy and zeal that only comes from these kind of Mexican VHS masterworks.

This is 77 minutes long. Literally all killer, no filler. Other countries should take note.

La Noche de Los Mil Gatos — known as Blood Feast, despite there being an entirely different movie with that same title — comes from Rene Cardona Jr., who past films have already proven to me must be some kind of maniac. I mean, the dude threw cats at his actors and filmed scenes where cats are launched into the air with no cutting away. He did much worse to birds and other actors in later films, which makes him, well, a movie director.

Luckily, he has Hugo Stiglitz (Nightmare City, Bermuda Triangle) in this to play, well, Hugo. And what does Hugo do? Oh, just chase down gorgeous women with his helicopter, pick them up with his sexual charisma and then take him back to his castle where he and Dorgo kill them in increasingly disgusting ways before feeding. them to the cats — rumor there are a thousand of them — that live in a pit. He also keeps the women’s heads like pickled punks in a jar.

Finally, he picks the wrong girl — Cathy (Anjanette Comer, who we all know was in The Baby and that makes anything she does perfect and good and wonderful) — who tears a hole in the fence and lets the cats savor a Hugo smorgasbord. Such is life, where it is cheap!

You can watch this on Amazon Prime.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This originally ran on October 26, 2017. If we’re discussing Mexican horror, we need to talk about this movie.

Alucarda is:

A 1977 nunspolitation/vampire/Mexican horror/Exorcist inspired film about two girls who become possessed by Satan.

The source of many My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult samples, specifically the song “And This Is What the Devil Does.”

A movie filled with so much screaming, it upset my dog.

All of the above and so much more.

Juan López Moctezuma, the director of the film, was close with Alejandro Jodorowsky (some claim he was behind the camera for El Topo). So you should expect something much stranger than your average horror film.

In a Mexican convent and orphanage, a new girl named Justine arrives. She becomes close with another orphan named Alucarda, who was born in a mysterious barn and may be evil before this film even starts. In fact, she often appears in the film out of the shadows, filled with menace and questioning everyone’s faith.

While the two girls — whose relationship is nearly sexual — play in the forest, they discover a band of gypsies and the barn where Alucarda was born. Then, of course, they open a casket and unleash Satan, who possesses them. They take part in an orgy where the literal goat-headed one himself shows up, which is only stopped when Sister Angélica prays for Jesus to intervene. The witch conducting the ritual is struck down in bloody fashion.

A title card comes up telling us that this is the end of part one. I stood up and cheered. I was home alone.

Justine and Alucarda start questioning every mass and even praise Satan out loud, questioning the faith of every member of the convent. Father Lazardo demands an exorcism, one that costs Justine her life. Alucarda is saved at the last moment by Dr. Oszek (Claudio Brook, who also appeared in Del Toro’s Cronos and who also plays the hunchback who leads the women into the forest). Now, Alucarda has a new love interest, the Doctor’s daughter Daniela.

Alucarda isn’t done. She must have her revenge. She possesses a nun and sets her on fire. Father Lazardo beheads her and the entire monastery must self-flagellate to prepare themselves to fight Satan.

Justine’s body is gone — it’s in the barn where Alucarda was born. When they open it, it’s filled with blood and she emerges, now a vampire. While Alucarda kills everyone else. Sister Angélica attempts to save Justine. The doctor tries little spurts of Holy Water but it’s not enough. He barely escapes with his life, while the sister pays the ultimate price. Only Angélica’s dead body can stop Alucarda, who screams and disappears.

You know how I get evangelical about movies? Well, Alucarda is one of them. From the sets to the clothes to the acting to sound design to the just plain weirdness of it all, there’s never been a movie quite this weird. And with the movies I’ve seen, that’s an achievement.

You can get this movie from Mondo Macabro.

The artwork for this post comes from Ink Rituals and you can buy this shirt at Pallbearer Press.