Released in the U.S. as The Fearmaker, this movie finds opera singer Sarita Verdugo returning home to claim her inheritance after the death of her father. Yet when she gets back, everyone is against her and she has to deal with a near-maniacal level of greed as money — and the hint of supernatural menace — has made everyone an enemy.

Director Anthony Carras — I’m assuming IMDB lists the American reedit team instead of José Luis Bueno, who many Mexican sources list as the director yet he mainly served as a producer — only directed one other movie, Operation Bikini, while editing plenty of Roger Corman movies.

It’s like the filmmakers wanted to make a giallo, decided on a soap opera, and then remembered that they needed a giallo twist to end things. It’s not great or maybe even good, but there aren’t many Mexican giallo movies, which should maybe be referred to as amarillo.

The Screaming Death was directed by Fernando Méndez, who also made El Vampiro, The Black Pit of Dr. M and Ladrón de Cadáveres. It was written by Ramón Obón, the screenwriter of the first Mil Mascaras movies, as well as the director and writer of Cien Gritos de Terror.

The American version — The Living Coffin — was remixed for U.S. audiences by K. Gordon Murray, who did a lot of that and really didn’t ever bother consulting the source material.

Gastón (Gastón Santos, a former bullfighter who played himself in many of his movies) and his sidekick Coyote Loco (Pedro de Aguillón) arrive in a town haunted by La Llorona, the crying woman. Maria (María Duval) believes that the red idol that Gastón is carrying was carved by her deceased aunt Clotilde. And the locals think that that woman is, in fact, the crying woman killing the townsfolk.

The film looks great and mixes gothic horror with western action, but never gets going. But it’s an awesome idea and I’ll keep looking out for the perfect horror in the west.

With a subtitle of Yo Soy La Ley (I Am the Law) — a title it was re-released under a year later — the fourth Siete en la Mira film moves away from the gang on gang violence to just featuring two killing machines. Roberto “Flaco” Guzman (a man with more than 200 credits, mostly from the VHS era in which he poses with a revolver on the cover; he also directed 1989’s Pánico en el bosque, a movie that ups the video box ante by having a woman with long white hair holding a machete in one hand and a man’s severed head in the other) is Tulio Rodriguez, an absolutely ruthless murderer who teams up with Lorena Herrera’s female assassin. Herrera was a model who won the famous “Look of the Year” content in Mexico, then became an actress in movies like this, Policía Secreto and Octagon and Mascara Sagrada in Fight to the Death before finding her way to being a pop singer and telenovela star.

They’re opposed by Jorge Reynoso (Siete En La Mira 2: La Furia De La Venganza) who is one of those tough Mexican guys who shrugs off multiple bullets and keeps on coming. Both the heroes and usually the main villains of these violent Mexican films are able to do as if they were Miguel Myers.

This movie has some harrowing — and therefore entertaining — moments, like when a man about to be lynched has the stage beneath him destroyed piece by piece or when a child interrupts Tulio assaulting his mother and shoots him in the eye with a BB rifle. Tulio then shoots the mother — who he’d just been inside — once to drop her and then another time in the head before unloading an entire clip into her now dead body. There’s also the sight of the short and somewhat chubby 56-year-old Guzman making sweet love to the 23-year-old  Herrera who is quite literally a statuesque vision. Maybe there’s hope for all of us.

There’s no hope for most of the people in this movie, because everyone gets shot repeatedly and that’s the ones who were lucky. The end has the three leads exchanging gunfight before Tulio gets shot in every appendage, kind of like some wild Catholic saint painting that you’d stare at and wonder why religion often indulges in such bloodlust, all before he dies and falls directly into an already dug grave.

Damián Acosta Esparza, who also made the third movie in this series, made El Violador Infernal, a movie that still makes my heart race, and thirty other movies with words like trágico, sangre, muerte and venganza in the title.

You can watch this on YouTube.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joseph Perry writes for the film websites Gruesome Magazine, The Scariest Things, Horror Fuel and Diabolique Magazine; for the film magazines Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope and Drive-In Asylum; and for the pop culture websites When It Was Cool and Uphill Both Ways. He is also one of the hosts of When It Was Cool’s exclusive Uphill Both Ways podcast and can occasionally be heard as a cohost on Gruesome Magazine’s Decades of Horror: The Classic Era podcast.

The latest film to feature the cinematic version of real-life Wing Chun master Ip Man is Chinese feature Ip Man: The Awakening, which finds the titular character, played here by Miu Tse, arriving in Colonial-era Hong Kong as a young man.  He runs into old friend Bufeng (Chen Guan Ying), whose sister Chan (Zhao Yu Xuan) and mother Ip Man has just saved from a robbery on a streetcar. Bufeng advises Ip Man to keep his head down in Hong Kong, but when the pair sees women being kidnapped for a human trafficking ring, Ip Man gets involved to try and free them.

Naturally, this leads to all kinds of trouble for the friends, and if you guessed that Chan would play a part in being captured by the villains — whose ringleader is a British character — you are obviously no newcomer to action films. The result is a rather predictable plot heightened by some fun, well-choreographed fight scenes, some of which feature Wing Chun being pitted against the British martial arts mash-up known as Baritsu.

There are plot holes aplenty — at a lean 80-minute run time, it seems that another 10 minutes explaining how some characters who seemed to be dead at one point are miraculously fine again, without showing how or why. If you are willing to overlook instances like this, codirectors Li Xi Jie and Zhang Zhu Lin deliver a perfectly serviceable martial arts action outing headlined by Tse, who acquits himself well in the lead role.

Ip Man: The Awakening, from Well Go USA, debuts on Digital, Blu-Ray, and DVD on June 21, 2022.

An older Mexican horror film that actually played in the U.S. — American-International Pictures offered it for syndication in 1965 — The Curse of the Crying Woman is another film that attempts to translate the legend of La Llorona, the crying woman, and does the best job of any I’ve seen.

The film starts with full realization of the weirdness and wildness within, as a carriage ride is interrupted and all three passengers are hunted down by a mysterious woman in a long black dress served by her three monstrous dogs and an even more frightening henchman. In case you wondered, “Did Black Sunday play in Mexico?” this scene will definitely answer affirmatively.

That’s when the film introduces us to Amelia, our heroine, who has come to stay at the home of her Aunt Selma, a place covered with cobwebs, where the cries of a woman can be heard at night and bodies of generations of relations decompose in the basement. One particularly relative was a powerful witch who will come back to power and take Selma to an afterlife filled with black masses and blood drinking, a fact that she excitedly relates to a shocked Amelia.

From there, the film descends into wild scenes of Selma transforming into the Crying Woman, an eyeless creature surrounded by thousands of eyes, as well as a black mass filmed in negative and dead bodies coming back to life. It’s a movie that transcends its inspiration and delivers its own artful — and scary — take on a legendary story.

Alfredo Salazar wrote 65 movies (Frankestein el Vampiro y Compañía, Doctor of Doom and The Panther Women to name a few) and directed 11 and none of them prepared me — not even the black magic clown movie Herencia Diabólica for this movie.

Somehow, this movie seems Italian despite being made in Mexico and that’s a supreme compliment in my world. Josefina Hill (Ana Luisa Peluffo) and her sister Sonia (Anaís de Melo) have purchased a run-down mansion for a too good to be true price and you know how that goes in a horror movie.

Josefine is the more level headed of the two, a college professor, while Sonia has had mental powers since she was a child, using her abilities to predict the death of their mother and find lost items. And I say they’re sisters, because the movie tells us so, but they also indulge in topless massages and discuss that they’ve never been married so that they can always be there for one another.

There’s a painting of a mean-looking woman over the fireplace that ends up being the portrait of the madame that once ran this house of the rising sun and if we’ve learned anything from The Nesting, if there’s a bordello being turned into a house, there are ghosts. The madame was killed by a lover she hurt, but she may have also have been the person who sold them the house. Seeing as how the girls have already left their lease, they decide to move into the mansion with no electricity or telephone, because what could go wrong?

The madame begins to visit Sonia and comes between the sisters — psychically — and then the ghost — is it a ghost? — ends up seducing both of them. This movie is completely unconcerned with being incredibly sleazy, so perhaps this ghost is seducing me by knowing exactly the strangeness that I want from my entertainment.

Panties are stolen, rats run wild and the real identity of the madame is probably going to upset a lot of people if they ever see this movie. It doesn’t explain the flying objects, little earthquakes or the fact that the madame’s hands glow blue when she appears. There’s also a lovemaking scene that sends Josefina into the kind of bliss that makes her imagine that she’s dancing around a piano.

Peluffo was one of the first Mexican actresses to appear nude — in 1955’s La fuerza del deseo — and she’s also in a movie that may challenge this for being as weird as it gets, El Violador Infernal, which has her play El Diablo and give a condemned man the chance to live forever as long as he sexually assaults people, kills them and then carves 666 into their bodies. Trust me, Mexican sleaze horror defines the term problematic and then pisses all over the dictionary.

You can watch this on YouTube.