‘My cousin Paco’s brain is very docile.’
A vampire plans to conquer America using Frankenstein’s Monster. However, the creature needs a new brain, and the bloodsucker sets his sights on the one belonging to a slow-witted postal worker…
Mexican horror spoof from director Benito Alazraki starring comedy actors Manuel ‘Loco’ Valdés and José ‘Ojón’ Jasso. Roberto G. Rivera, Quintín Bulnes and Alberto ‘Chiquilín’ Villanueva play it straight as the three most famous monsters in film land.
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After getting fired from his last job, Agapito (Valdés) finds work with his cousin Paco (José Jasso) at an express delivery service. Two crates have just arrived from Rome for the owner of the local wax museum, Señor La Valle (Antonio Bravo). These supposedly contain wax figures but are actually the real thing: the bodies of Frankenstein’s Monster (Villanueva) and The Vampire (Bulnes). Also newly arrived in town is Doctor Chon Chon (Rivera), who has been tracking the monsters and plans to destroy them with the aid of brilliant research scientist Dr Sofia (Nora Veryán).
Valdés and Jasso deliver the crates to Bravo’s museum, only for the contents to be hijacked by Veryán and her hired men. Unfortunately, Rivera is indisposed at the time due to his little problem with lycanthropy, and Bulnes turns Veryán and her assistant into slaves using his hypnotic powers. Planning to take over America, he needs the help of the semi-comatose Villanueva, but the creature is unreliable and hard to control. Deciding that the monster needs a more compliant brain, the Vampire has Veryán invite Valdés to the castle as a prospective donor.
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If the above story summary rings a few bells, that’s no surprise. This is little more than an unlicensed remake of Universal’s ‘Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein’ (1948), which starred Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney Jr, reprising their iconic Dracula and Wolf Man characters in the last gasp of the studio’s classic monster cycle. It also mines much the same vein of humour, with physical gags, misunderstandings, scaredy-cat antics and some dreadful mugging to the camera by the dreadfully overacting Valdés. The script stops short of cribbing actual jokes, but there’s no comic invention to take their place and a weary air of ‘seen it all before’ soon settles in to stay.
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To be fair to the cast, they are trying (insert joke here!), and those playing it straight just about escape with their dignity intact. Martha Elena Cervantes is an appealing heroine as Bravo’s naive secretary, and Rivera is admirably straight-faced as the unwilling werewolf. Bulnes certainly has the physique to play an undead creature that lives only on blood, but the actor has little screen presence and is neither sexy nor threatening. Despite his supernatural powers, when faced with our hapless heroes at the end, he simply runs away, which is kind of funny, I suppose, if incredibly lame.
The lack of budget isn’t that much of a drawback, although the sets are clearly a little on the small side. It’s more of an issue that director Alazraki makes no effort to create any atmosphere from these shadowy interiors beyond inserting stock footage of lightning bolts to make the characters jump occasionally. Of course, conjuring chills isn’t a priority in this type of project, but it might have helped ground the story and sell the humour. The monster makeups also suffer from a noticeable lack of resources. Seldom has Dr Frankenstein birthed a more underwhelming creature, and although it could be argued that Jack Pierce’s iconic makeup was under a jealously guarded copyright at this point, the producers of the film certainly didn’t seem to be over-worried about upsetting Universal Studios. Bulnes’ Vampire gets the usual cape, dinner jacket and silly teeth combo, but it’s Rivera’s lycanthrope that really gets the short end of the stick: a rubber mask with tufts of fur stuck to it, some fangs and a bad wig. It’s hideously cheap.
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Special mention must also go to actor Joaquín García Vargas, playing private detective Hercules Borolas, who Rivera initially hires to search for the stolen crates. It’s almost as if he looked at how Valdés and Jasso were overacting and decided it was a contest to see who could go the furthest over the top. In fact, you have to wonder whether the three of them needed medical assistance with their facial muscles after the shoot was over.
Perhaps the only point worth discussing here is the Mexican horror film industry’s curious aversion to using the name ‘Dracula’. After all, ‘Frankenstein’ was regularly bandied about without due care and attention, but the name of Bram Stoker’s undead Count was apparently off-limits. From ‘El Vampiro’ (1957) onwards, any bloodsucking nobleman who appeared got another aristocratic title despite clearly being based on the familiar Lugosi template. Could it be that producers were still mindful of the legal reach of the Stoker Estate 40 years after his widow brought a successful action against F W Murnau’s silent classic ‘Nosferatu/Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens’ (1922)? Given that this film is such a flagrant copy of a well-known product from a major studio powerhouse like Universal, it’s a little hard to credit such a concern, but it seems likely that some kind of legal reason was involved.
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Rivera began his film career shortly after the end of World War Two, mainly appearing in uncredited roles for almost ten years. Occasional billing included a small role as a henchman in Rene Cardona’s first attempt to bring legendary wrestler Santo to the big screen in ‘El Enmascarado de Plata/The Silver-Masked Man’ (1954), which, famously, did not feature the great man himself. More important supporting assignments followed, including roles in ‘El secreto de Pancho Villa’ (1957), one of the trio of films featuring masked crimefighter La Sombra Vengadora, and ‘Invisible Man in Mexico/El hombre que logró ser invisible’ (1958). He first worked with Alazraki and Valdés in comedy-western ‘Las hermanas Karambazo’ (1960). The director promoted him to a far more significant role in ‘Pistolas invencibles’ (1960), after which the two were frequent collaborators. He also worked regularly for Cardona, appearing as Dr Kur in ‘Santo and Dracula’s Treasure/Santo en El tesoro de Drácula’ (1969). He worked as an occasional scriptwriter throughout his career and switched to directing in 1973. By the time he passed in 2016, he was long retired but had amassed more than 80 credits during over 40 years in the industry.
If you’re burning to see a Mexican rip-off of ‘Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein’ (1948), then I guess this one’s for you.