As María Pérez (Ofelia Guilmáin) receives last rites, she tells Father Andrés (Enrique Aguilar) about the influence that a religious medal — The Scalpular — had on her sons’ — Julián (Carlos Cardán) and Pedro (Enrique Lizalde) — lives. Meanwhile, two robbers wait outside to attack and rob the priest.

Julián is a soldier who soon deserts the army to join the rebels — the film takes place on during the Mexican Revolution — blowing up a train before he’s arrested. A sympathetic soldier helps him escape, yet Julián denies the power of the medal — denying God — and is shot and badly wounded.

Pedro falls for a woman well above his social status, Rosario (Alicia Bonnet’s), and narrowly avoids being killed thanks to the power of the medal. It turns out her uncle wants their relationship stopped at all costs, so he sends a letter about an evening rendezvous from Rosario while hiring bandits to kill him.

Andrés and Federico, the other two sons, have been lost since being kidnapped by a gang, but perhaps the priest will soon meet them and they will all learn how the power of the scapular binds them all. And that strangely, the old woman has been dead for seven years.

Director Servando González makes a whimsical yet melancholy fantastic film here, powered by a script by Jorge Durán Chavez and Rafael García Travesi, who wrote 94 movies, including several Santo films and The Mummies of Guanajuato.

This movie looks beyond gorgeous, even as it shows scenes of condemned and hung men swinging after their deaths. Somehow uniting multiple genre and countries of cinema, as well as being folk horror by way of Mexican Catholicism, this movie finds death everywhere and still finds a reason to smile (and by frightened at the same time).

You can watch this on Tubi.

Miroslava was born Miroslava Šternová Beková in Prague, Czechoslovakia and in 1941, er family moved to Mexico to escape the war. After she won a national beauty contest, she made tons of movies in her adopted country and three in America — Adventures of Casanova, The Brave Bulls and Stranger on Horseback — and her final movie was Luis Buñuel’s Ensayo de un crimen (Rehearsal for a Crime).

A few months after making that movie, she took sleeping pills and died, being found in the morning clutching a photo of bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguín. The rumor is that she really was holding a photo of actor and comedian Cantinflas, but to stop any scandal, the photo was switched.

In this film she plays a reporter named Nora who becomes involved with plastic surgeon Dr. Ling (José María Linares-Rivas), who is truly a monstrous shape of a man who quickly falls in love with her. He then decides that she can never love him and creates a self-fulfilling prophecy by bringing a suicidal man named Ariel (Carlos Navarro) back from the dead, just in time for that man to fall in love with Nora.

Directed by Chano Urueta (El Baron del Terror), this movie was based on the Universal Frankenstein movies while adding in surgical scenes, which had to have inspired René Cardona, who made so many movies around doctors conducting bloody experiments. There’s some great makeup in this, lots of dark and foreboding mood and a pretty good story as well. If you like classic American black and white horror, you’ll like this too.

Alright, I know this isn’t a Mexican movie, it’s American, but it was a remix and reedit by Jerry Warren, who brought so many South of the Border movies to America. He shot new footage with John Carradine — who else? — and Katherine Victor to freshen up two twenty-year-old Chilean films, La Casa está Vacía (The House is Empty) and La Dama de la Muerte (The Lady of Death).

Seeing as how it’s two films, Warren decided to turn this into an anthology, if two stories can really be an anthology. The same house is supposed to be the setting for both stories, one in which a gambler finds a set of stone hands in the cursed house and uses them to play curses before joining a suicide club. This is La Dama de la Muerte (The Lady of Death), as that movie was an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Suicide Club. The second story has another owner’s son finding the hands — this is La Casa está Vacía (The House is Empty) — and using them to hypnotize his brother’s fiancee.

This is the closest that Warren would stay to his source material and therefore lacks the utter drug-induced insanity of his Mexican remake remixes. The dubbing is horrible, yet we can directly trace Godfrey Ho and the wildness that he dropped on us several decades later to the way that Warren could take any movie and chop it to pieces.

Warren once said, ” “I’d shoot one day on this stuff and throw it together. I was in the business to make money. I never ever tried in any way to compete or to make something worthwhile. I only did enough to get by, so they would buy it, so it would play, and so I’d get a few dollars. It’s not very fair to the public, I guess, but that was my attitude. You didn’t have to go all out and make a really good picture.”

Know what you’re getting into before you watch this!

Warren’s American Distributors Productions, Inc. teamed this up with another of his mixtape wonders, Face of the Screaming Werewolf, which is Mexican and is also two movies in one — La Casa del Terror and La Momia Azteca.

Also known as The Curse of the Monestary, Blood Screams and The Bloody Monks, this starts with a whole bunch of minks dying to satisfy the blood urges of a demon or to steal gold or who knows what, but it’s non-stop monk death and you know me, I’m in for this movie as of immediately.

Karen (Stacy Shaffer, Cannon’s The Naked Cage) is traveling through Mexico along with a magician named Frank (how if Russ Tamblyn even in this movie?) and she just wants to escape and she falls for a boy named Jaime (Rafael Sánchez Navarro). They jump the train and I start wondering, is Karen Frank’s wife? His daughter? Is there any connection? Is she one of those giallo heroines who is gorgeous yet brings death to everyone around her because she has some strange malady? And hey Jaime, take my advice from watching so many movies: don’t go back home and solve the mystery of your father’s death.

This movie has 75 minutes to share with you enough to fill up ten other films; the magician being racist to Mexicans who laugh at him, a witch (Isela Vega, Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia) who has possessed a woman, Karen’s mysterious past, Jaime’s mysterious past, Karen’s mysterious dreams of Jaime’s mysterious past, zombies who are the monks we saw die earlier, missing gold, Russ Tamblyn doing magic tricks and acting as his own stuntman as he dove off a train in a move that seems ill-advised for anyone much less an actor already 54 when this was made and oatmeal-based makeup.

Jaime and Karen get blamed for a series of murders when we know that it was the zombies that did it because we’ve seen enough Blind Dead movies. Perhaps the biggest mystery of this movie is that it was distributed by Roger Corman’s Concorde Pictures and released on video by Warner Brothers.

You can watch this on YouTube.

The Vampire’s Coffin is the sequel to El Vampiro, a movie that tool Universal monsters to Mexico and created a new way to see vampires.

A graverobber named Manson (Yerye Beirute) has been hired by Dr. Marion to take the coffin of Conde Karol de Lavud (German Robles) back to the hospital, the very place where Marta (Carlos Ancira), the heroine of the first movie, is being nursed back to health by her boyfriend Dr. Enrique (Abel Salazar). As she recovers, he follows her to the theater where she’s working on her dance career, all with the aim of possessing her forever.

How many movies will you see where a vampire makes a wax museum his lair? This one. Beyond having a basement with functional torture implements, Conde Karol de Lavud also has time to act as this movie’s Phantom of the Opera.

Beyond acting in this, Salazar wrote the script with Ramon Obon and Raul Zenteno. Director Fernando Méndez made both of this and the original film.

When this played in the U.S., there was a smiling skull-and-crossbones logo on the posters and lobby cards stating that The Vampire’s Coffin was “Recommended by Young America Horror Club.” This club did not exist and was invented by K. Gordon Murray in a strange shot at selling tickets.

I love the moment that someone puts a mirror up to the vampire’s face, he looks into it and just sees a skull. That’s cinema.

You can watch this on Tubi.