Sam Peckinpah said, “For me, Hollywood no longer exists. It’s past history. I’ve decided to stay in Mexico because I believe I can make my pictures with greater freedom from here.”

With the exception of a few key individuals, Peckinpah made this movie with a Mexican crew, including cameraman Alex Phillips, Jr., who had a preference for wide-angle lenses and loved zooms. This setup allowed Peckinpah to essentially edit the film in his head as he shot.

It also allowed him a lot of creative freedom and to capture the bleak world he wanted. Shooting at a bar called the Tlaquepaque, he said out loud that this place was real. It was — the owner had once killed a woman on the premises and bribed the right people to make it go away.

And the results, sure, they ended up in the Medved co-authored The Fifty Worst Movies of All Time, but Roger Ebert said, “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is Sam Peckinpah making movies flat out, giving us a desperate character he clearly loves, and asking us to somehow see past the horror and the blood to the sad poem he’s trying to write about the human condition.”

Who is Garcia? He was once the man selected to be the successor of El Jefe (Emilio Fernández), but he messed up when he knocked up the boss’s daughter Teresa, putting a million-dollar bounty on his head. Two months pass before two hit men, Sappensly (Robert Webber) and Quill (Gig Young), walk into the saloon where Bennie (Warren Oates) plays piano.

He claims he doesn’t know who Garcia is, yet he surely does. He’s the man whose lover, Elita (Isela Vega), cheated on him with. He confronts her as to the man’s whereabouts and learns that he died in an accident. Easy money — he gets $10,000 for Garcia’s head, plus a $200 advance for expenses, and takes Elita along with him to dig the grave. On the way, he proposes to her, telling her that she can retire and they can live in peace. Still, we know that can never happen as the moment they get there, they’re attacked by bikers (Kris Kristofferson and Donnie Fritts) who nearly assault her before Bernie comes to and dispatches them both. As he starts digging the grave despite Elita’s protests, he’s knocked out. He wakes up buried alive with his girl dead by his side, the body of Garcia already missing its head. Oates took mushrooms before this scene, so he’s really living this experience.

Arguing with the head, which has been packed in a sack with dry ice, Bennie leads a death march across Mexico, with everyone in his way dying, death always at his side, waiting for him, as he begins to realize that the head means nothing at all to him or anyone else. The money was meaningless. The revenge doesn’t matter. Yet he must follow through.

Warren Oates copied Peckinpah to play his part, right down to borrowing a pair of sunglasses from the director. This was the only time that the maverick creator ever got the final cut on one of his movies. The twosome also bonded over cocaine, which only added to the air of paranoia and doom that fills every single second of this movie.

I can see why some would dislike and even hate this movie, but for me, it just plain sings. The song may be abrasive, filled with anger, but it’s a song nonetheless.

Known as The Brainiac in the U.S., this was directed by Chano Urueta, who helped Blue Demon get on the silver screen and was written by Federico Curiel, who would make The Champions of Justice, several Santo movies and Neutron.

All the way back in 1661, Baron Vitelius was burned at the stake during the Inquisition and claimed that the next time a particular comet passed by the Earth, all of the children of those who did him wrong would pay. I mean, you would think a bunch of religious folks would treat a necromantic sorcerer better, but such is life in ancient Mexico.

Three hundred years later, Baron Vitelius rides back in on that comet and is now able to change at will into a monster able to suck out the brains of his victims via a gigante-forked tongue, which is incredibly easy to do thanks to his ability to hypnotize his victims.

How bonkers is this movie? No less than Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart paid tribute to it in their song “Debra Kadabra,” saying, “Turn it to Channel 13 / And make me watch the rubber tongue / When it comes out! From the puffed and flabulent Mexican rubber-goods mask / Next time they show the Binaca / Make me buy The Flosser / Make me grow Brainiac Fingers / But with more hair!”

In America, we’d be satisfied with an evil alien. In Mexico, it was added that he was a wizard who brought people back from the dead before he was burned alive and ascended to a heavenly body for three hundred years. Viva la peliculas de terror!

You can watch this on Tubi.

I will not call this by its main title, as I’m a white person and have no right to use it. Instead, I’m going to call it Boss or The Black Bounty Killer. And despite its incendiary title, it is a major movie in black film history, as Dana M. Reemes’ wrote in Directed by Jack Arnold: “Jack Arnold seems to have been artiste exécutant on this picture; content-wise, we must regard Fred Williamson as the film’s auteur. He is like a black Clint Eastwood in a Cottafavi western. William’s bounty hunter turns the tables on the town’s White establishment with an intelligent and biting wit. He is very popular in the nearby Mexican village and is generous to its inhabitants—a kind of cinematic third-world unity. From an ideological standpoint, it is interesting to note that the only White male who turns out to be worth much is the blacksmith, a simple, honest tradesman.”

Boss and Amos (Fred Williamson and D’Urville Martin) stop a stagecoach robbery and save Clara Mae (Carmen Hayworth). They then learn that several of the bodies in the aftermath have rewards for their capture, while one was due to become the sheriff of the town of San Miguel, as recommended by Jed Clayton (William Smith). Does Mayor Griffin (R. G. Armstrong) know that this man was a criminal?

They end up becoming the lawmen of this town and Boss even romances the white Miss Pruit (Barbara Leigh), which starts off on the wrong foot when she has fond memories of the slaves her father once owned. This may not be the best way to handle things. But by the end, Boss and Amos are defending the town from Jed, who has killed Clara Mae and kidnapped the Mexican boy, Poncho, who has become friends with them. Then, the mayor shoots Boss twice, who somehow is able to kill him with a knife. He tells Amos, “Don’t let me die in a white town,” before they leave. Does Boss survive? I’d like to think he does.

Jack Arnold did so much, like The Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Mouse That Roared and The Space Children. He produced this with Williamson, who wrote the script. It’s way better than you’d expect, made at the height of the Black Power movement, yet it makes the hero the outsider who is fighting the sins of white America.

When Willy and Lacey were kids, they watched their mom and her boyfriend, who wore her stockings on his face, make out. Their mother was so upset that she sent Lacey to her room and tied Willy to his bed. It didn’t work, though. Willy would get out and stab the guy to death with a giant knife in front of a mirror. And that’s only the first few minutes of this one!

Now we’re in the present, and Lacey (Suzanna Love, who was married to the film’s director, Ulli Lommel, and appears in all the sequels) is married with a young son, living with her aunt, uncle, and Willy (Nicholas Love, Suzanna’s real-life brother) on a farm. Willy’s never gotten over killing a man, so he doesn’t talk and often steals knives.

Over dinner, Lacey announces that their mother wants to see them one last time before she dies. Willy burns their letter, and this starts off a series of dreams where she is tied to a bed and nearly stabbed, which makes her husband send her to a shrink.

And that shrink? Skinny Dracula himself, John Carradine, who shot everything in one day. He tells them that they must face their fears and return to their childhood home. As they look at the house, we see the dead boyfriend reflected in the mirror he died in front of. Lacey goes shithouse and smashes it, which is totally not what you should do. Nor should you take those pieces and try and fix the mirror. Mirrors are cheap. Go to Wal-Mart. Buy a new and uncursed mirror.

The pieces left behind start to glow red and kill everyone in the house after Lacey and Jake leave. Speaking of mirrors, Willy hates them. One of them made him strangle a girl, so he paints them all black.

The shards of glass start doing evil things, like levitating pitchforks, ripping off Lacey’s shirt and impaling young lovers with a screwdriver. I was cool with the shards of glass until then. You’ve taken it too far, shards of glass! I guess we can blame them for the aunt and uncle dying, too, right? In 1980, Jake decides to bring in a priest to fix everything. This causes Lacey to get possessed by a mirror shard and attack everyone. She kills the priest, too, but not before he removes the mirror’s control over her.

That’s when the best solution comes up — let’s just throw the mirror in a well. This releases all of the souls, with Lacey, Willy and her son exiting a graveyard. Oh, no — a piece of the mirror is on her son’s shoe!

I was wondering where many of the plot points of this movie would go, and they often get lost, as if this were a foreign film. But it isn’t!  So, I did some research on the director, Ulli Lommel.

Lommel had one crazy career, starting with appearing in Russ Meyer’s Fanny Hill, then acting in Fassbinder’s surreal western film Whitey (as well as several other of the director’s films). Moving to the U.S. in 1977, Lommel became connected to Andy Warhol, who was involved in his films, including Cocaine Cowboys and Blank Generation, a movie that starred Richard Hell and was filmed at CBGB.

Seriously — a movie that rips off Halloween, The Amityville Horror and Argento lighting while feeling like more than two movies mashed up into one that also features a girl cutting her own throat with scissors, a child getting his neck broken, and a priest getting his face melted? The acting is horrible — but are you here for that? Nope. You want to get freaked out when people’s eyes get replaced with a piece of a mirror.

Part of me wants to make fun of this movie. But another part of me wants to protect it from mean people who say things like it lacks attention to detail. Or the fact that none of its characters appear to be actual human beings. And the camera angles are more reminiscent of Dad not knowing how to use the video camera than art. But yet, I love this. I want to love it more, but I love what it can be more than what it is.

The Boogeyman was followed by two sequels that utilize footage — a lot of footage — from the original.