‘The incidents that we have just seen could have been true…or false.’
A middle-aged woman becomes interested in spiritualism after a séance. When her family gets into severe financial trouble, she attempts to invoke the spirits to help with dark and unfortunate consequences…
Serious-minded but plodding Mexican horror from director Benito Alazraki. Nora Veryán and José Luis Jiménez star, with support from René Cardona Jr.
After dinner, entertainment at an evening house party takes an odd turn when host Doña Elvira (Diana Ochoa) breaks out the ouija board. She’s recently widowed and has found solace in the messages received through the ether from her dead husband. Old school friends María (Veryán) and Carmen (Alicia Caro) find it hard to take this seriously, an opinion shared by their sceptical husbands, Luis (Jiménez) and Guillermo (Jorge Mondragón). However, Ochoa’s daughter, Aurora (María Eugenia San Martín), takes down the evening’s message and reveals it’s bad news. Her upcoming marriage to Veryán and Jiménez’s son, Rodolfo (Cardona Jr.), will never happen, and it will be Veryán’s fault, events stemming from something that occurs on her upcoming wedding anniversary.
The couple dismiss the warning as pure nonsense and go ahead with the party they have already planned. Jiménez’s gift to Veryán turns out to be the deeds to their house, which is finally mortgage-free after more than two decades. However, when the guests have departed, Cardona Jr. explains that he needs a substantial sum to get his new crop dusting business off the ground. Veryán persuades a reluctant Jiménez to take out a new mortgage on the house and fund the venture. Unfortunately, the parents soon face financial ruin when their son’s plans start falling apart. Praying at the local church, Veryán sees friend Caro, only to find out later on in the evening that she’s had a heart attack hundreds of miles away and has died. Converted to a sudden belief in the supernatural, Veryán begins praying for financial assistance to a very different kind of god.
Although Mexican horror of the mid-20th Century is likely to be remembered for vampires, wrestlers, and various bizarre oddities, a more straightforward, conventional project occasionally surfaced. This was one such instance, with Alazraki’s film being an uncredited riff on W.W. Jacobs’ famous 1902 short story ‘The Monkey’s Paw’. The tale has been adapted for the screen many times, although usually as a short subject. The first was a silent version in 1915, with a new short movie in 2024. Alazraki sets his version amongst the aspirant middle class, Jiménez’s hard-working stiff slaving for more than twenty years to try and satisfy the demands of the upwardly mobile Veryán. Sadly, their focus on money has rubbed off on their son, whose ambitions and impatience run ahead of his common sense.
Using spiritualism as a backdrop to the story is a new wrinkle, with Ochoa’s initial session with the Ouija board balanced on her knees eventually leading Veryán to an organised group led by Manuel Dondé, who wear fancy robes more akin to a devil cult. It’s also interesting that the screenplay by Guillermo Calderón and Rafael García Travesi has this communing with the dead business established as a definite fact. There’s no hidden strings or trickery here; the spirit manifestations, blurry as they may be, are undoubtedly genuine. Given that iconic wrestler, Santo also tangled with spiritualists (albeit fake ones) at the box office in ‘Santo vs the Villains of the Ring/Santo el enmascarado de plata vs los Villanos del ring’ (1962), perhaps indicates a certain popularity with these practices in Mexico at the time.
Sadly, all these shenanigans are woefully underdeveloped, and the pace is almost unbearably slow. Alazraki throws in a couple of séances to try and liven things up, and these scenes benefit from a committed performance by Beatriz Aguirre as a medium named Estercita. However, there simply isn’t enough going on to keep the audience on board. The ‘Monkey’s Paw’ element only surfaces with less than fifteen minutes remaining, and the ‘twist’ ending barely qualifies for the name, given that ‘be careful what you wish for’ was already a tired cinematic trope by this point. Save for the occasional imaginative camera move, there is also zero atmosphere or suspense. The main characters are also pretty unlikeable, so the audience has no one to identify with and little emotional connection to the story.
It must be acknowledged, however, that the only print accessible to view is the U.S. release. This version was supervised by the legendary producer K. Gordon Murray. Rather than make his own films, Murray made his reputation importing foreign films, many from Mexico, giving them a quick wash and brush up before unleashing them on the American market. This process usually involved an English dub from Sound Lab Inc. in Florida, and some of the final results could be a little underwhelming. In this case, the dub isn’t horrible, save for a brief but dreadful turn from VoiceOver Man, who speaks at the beginning and end of the picture. Rather appropriately, he sounds like celebrity psychic, the Amazing Criswell, of ‘Plan 9 from Outer Space’ (1957) infamy. There’s no evidence that it was him, but the tone and delivery are similar, and one of the lines, quoted at the beginning of this review, sounds a lot like something he might say!
Perhaps the only point of interest for aficionados of Mexican horror is to see Cardona Jr. in one of his rare acting roles. The son of famous director René Cardona, he went on to find success as a director himself, delivering many cult items such as ‘S.O.S. Conspiracion Bikini/S.O.S. The Bikini Conspiracy’ (1967) and working with his father on films like ‘Blue Demon and Zovek in The Invasion of the Dead/Blue Demon y Zovek En La Vasion De Las Meurtos’ (1973). His acting career began as a child in some of his father’s movies before he stuck out on his own in Alfredo B. Crevenna’s ‘Teresa’ (1961). The following year saw him rack up a dozen acting credits, including this film, which amount to more than half his appearances in front of the camera. One of these was the highly obscure ‘Los desvergonzados’ (1962), which also marked his debut both as a writer and a director, and he was to concentrate on those roles in the future.
A real heavy-handed slog, with very little to recommend it.