The Phantom of the Convent (1934), by Fernando de Fuentes

I'm going to tell you all something depressing: I have almost exhausted my supply of horror movies from the '30s and '40s. It's not depressing because I'm going to be running out of these kinds of movies, it's depressing because I've watched so many of them. The ones that have appeared recently on the site are only the tip of the iceberg...remember, I tend to review stuff on this site that I like. Well, fortunately, I've not quite done mining out these decades, as it turns out I've been blinded by American-centrism, and forgotten that other countries made low-budget horror films in the '30s and '40s. I've tried to get into some of the British scare films from this time, particularly those featuring camp legend Tod Slaughter, but this is one time where British sensibilities are too overwhelmingly mild for me. I need something that has teeth in its mouth and meat on its bones. Well, as it happens, there was a short string of horror movies made in Mexico in the 1930s that erupted in seeming response to the likes of Dracula and Frankenstein. (After all, Spanish-speaking Mexicans would have had access to a Dracula all their own, due to Universal's shot-by-night alternate Spanish version of Dracula.) Recently I've worked through as many of these '30s Mexican fright films as I can get my hands on, which is tough given that, surprise, many of them have been lost. Unfortunately, for me at least, fewer still among them have ever been given English subtitles. I've been able to decipher some of them thanks to some of the English and French cognates I can pick up now and again, but otherwise I'm reliant on physical presentation and online plot synopses. One of the ones that has gotten an English translation, however, is 1934's The Phantom of the Convent. Even if this movie wasn't available with subs, it would still stand out among its brethren, but I am infinitely grateful for whoever subbed this film. Phantom of the Convent is a fascinating, eerie, legitimately good horror movie with some complicated psychology, which I'm perpetually stunned has not left grander scars on the face of cinema.

Alfonso, Eduardo, and Cristina are a trio traveling in the mountains somewhere. The wimpy Eduardo is married to Cristina and is uncomfortably aware of the attraction she shares with Alfonso, who is his best friend. This sort of tangled red string is not the sort of thing you want to have when you end up stranded on the mountain in the middle of the night, nor when a mysterious stranger and his spooky dog show up to offer you shelter at the monastery that's supposed to be abandoned. This is the very fate that befalls the three, and it turns out that that reports of the abandonment of the ominously-named Monastery of Silence are indeed exaggerated. However--as if the imposing black-clad stranger or the too-huge eyes peering through the door weren't enough tip-off--it becomes clear that something is amiss in the Silent Convent. The three find a cabinet that is partially tipped over; they fix it, but as they leave the room Eduardo glances back and sees it's been restored to its initial position. They also come across a monk who is flagellating himself, which we only see in shadow. Eeriest of all is the monk's cell which is blocked off with an enormous cross, which is either covered in scratches or what seem to be strips of flesh...that we can't tell makes it worse. Above the cell is an enigmatic Latin message about the damnation of those who succumb to carnal sin, and before our heroes are properly prepared, they begin hearing agonized moans from within...

It is here that the monks properly welcome the three with an enormous banquet, wherein they all but reveal they are the living dead. Strangely, the three don't seem to care, as they are all beginning to undergo certain changes...Eduardo is becoming more cowardly, while Alfonso and Cristina grow even bolder about their extramarital lust. Still, what questions they do have for the monks are met only with standoffishness, at least until a wind begins to blow through the Monastery. The monks then go on about having to stop "him" and embark on a complex prayer ritual. Now they are willing to explain what has happened to their monastery. Long ago, there was a brother among them named Fray Rodrigo. Rodrigo coveted his best friend's wife, and despite knowing the evils of such, he made a pact with Satan to kill his friend and make his wife fall in love with him. For this, he was haunted by guilt, and eventually the Dark One came for him. The monks tried to bury his body, but every time they did, it would return to its cell, to the place its owner had been killed in.

The monks then received a curse from God, that they must pray until Rodrigo's soul was cleansed, no matter how long it took. During this time "the Evil" would raid the monastery at night and make the weird psychological hell it is today. Despite all of this knowledge, however, it becomes clear that Alfonso cannot escape the archetypical mold left for him by the wife-loving Rodrigo. And that brings him to a desperate, terrifying encounter with the awful things that lurk in Rodrigo's locked-up cell...

Most of the '30s Mexican horror movies I watched before this lacked the sheer distinctiveness that this movie possessed. Much like their northern counterparts, many of them were made to make a buck, and that was all. Of the selection I watched, I only found interest in the sci-fi thriller The Dead Speak, about a "mad" scientist's quest to prove the reality of forensic optography, and The Macabre Trunk, which may be the first horror movie to feature a scientist who harvests "glands" to keep his female relative living/young--it precedes the extremely similar Bela Lugosi flick The Corpse Vanishes by six years. What I think helps The Phantom of the Convent stand out is its uniquely Mexican identity--more properly defined as a Hispanic Catholic identity. One German review I read (one of the few available online of the film) made the same comparison I did, that the sinister monks and the monastery that is their tomb are highly reminiscent of Amando de Ossorio's Blind Dead series. And with that connection in mind, you begin to see a critique of Catholic strictness arise in Phantom that director Fuentes shares with Ossorio's zombie Templars. Fuentes gives us a universe where God curses a large group of his most devout followers for the trespass of one of them, forcing them to beg him for this fallen man's forgiveness long past the point where any of them would have wanted to die. What's more, God then allows his greatest adversary to add to their misery relatively unchecked, held back only by constant prayer. As for the sinner himself, who died guilty for what he did? He is denied eternal rest within the grave, constantly reanimated to return to his place of penance. And that's before the Devil starts latching onto your soul and bringing out your absolute worst attributes!

Regarding those attributes, there is some implicit and unfortunate misogyny in this movie--at least, I see it as such. The person who becomes most obviously affected by the monastery's corrupting influence is Cristina--and specifically, the monastery makes her more lustful. Alfonso lusts for her too, but he also has his own "No, Johnny's my best friend" moments of resistance. Making the film's sole female character a symbol of lust is bad enough; that she is more strongly affected also suggests she has less internal resistance to the supernatural forces. This was sort of a thorn to me, as was the movie's tendency to repeat conversation points unnecessarily. Otherwise, the whole film was tightly scripted, filled with mystery and some spectacularly horrific imagery.

The ending made me realize I'd heard a variant of this story before; and that story, in turn, claimed to be based on a common folk tale. That is one thing I've noticed about these Mexican horror films--even the less-interesting ones have a much more clear-cut tie to folklore than their counterparts from the States. The Dead Speak's story of "the dead man's eyes" is older than Frankenstein and many of its inherent ideas, while two of the more famous entries in this era of Mexican horror include adaptations of the La Llorona story. Such is also the case with Phantom of the Convent's delving into Catholic lore to build its world. American movies surely conformed to the same type of archetypes as the mythos the Mexican filmmakers were drawing from, but it also seems like American movies had several extra layers of bullshit. The Macabre Trunk, with its parallels to the pretty-darn-batshit Corpse Vanishes, is one of the crazier ones, as is, seemingly, The Mystery of the Ghastly Face, which I found incomprehensible due to a lack of subtitles and plot synopses. (It may be the Mexican Face of Marble, but don't quote me on that.) It seems that Mexican filmmakers particularly enjoyed tapping into their roots in the Spanish-speaking world, probably because that's what their audiences wanted, whereas our American films can't be linked to one culture in particular.

Catholic unease aside, Phantom of the Convent has enough raw atmosphere and psychosis to make it a worthy equal to any of the great horror films that modern audiences love. Actually, this may be one of my new favorite horror films of all time in a way that almost makes me feel guilty reviewing it on a site dedicated to garbage. But the A-List is also about celebrating the obscure, and Phantom is a film that is undeserving of the obscurity it has today. I say that often, but it takes a movie like this to remind me of when it really counts.

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Face of the Screaming Werewolf (1964), by Gilberto Solares, Rafael Portillo, and Jerry Warren

I must be at the absolute end of my rope if I'm starting to actually enjoy Jerry Warren movies. There are Ed Wood fans, of course, and Jess Franco fans...even James Bryan and Jean Rollin fans. But in all my years I've met few people who have told me they appreciated the films of Jerry Warren. Warren's fame these days comes from the many films he "made" from films originally shot in Mexico, to which he added his own scenes and dubbing. He and K. Gordon Murray were the kings of this Mexican import racket, though Warren also made films of his own, including the legitimately atrocious Wild World of Batwoman. Despite my completely rational hatred for Batwoman, I found that Teenage Zombies, of all things, was not a horrible experience, and I intend to check out Frankenstein Island at some point. But my introduction last year to today's film, an example of Warren's Mexican hybridizing called Face of the Screaming Werewolf, was a revelation in trash filmmaking. In fact, I considered it to be the best movie I saw in 2016. Now, to most that's probably just a sign of how utterly trashy 2016 was, but all the same, I think Face of the Screaming Werewolf is a movie that deserves another look, if anything because it was as baffling as the year I saw it in.

We open in media res with a bunch of scientists hypnotizing a lady. This hypnosis scene goes on for way, way too long, like most scenes in Face's 59-minute runtime. But we learn that in a past life, this lady was an Aztec priestess of some kind who may be connected to a mummy who I guess these scientists are looking for. They go to this pyramid and find not one but two mummies. One of them is a legitimate Aztec mummy (composed of stock footage of one of this movie's halves, 1957's La Momia Azteca), the other is apparently a much more recent addition to the pyramid. According to a news report, this other mummy--played by Lon Chaney, Jr.--was given "an exchange of fluids" from the mummy to "achieve an apparent sense of death." Note that this intriguing plot thread is never followed up on; but it was probably added in to explain why the Chaney!mummy later appears wearing Larry Talbot's plaid shirt and slacks. This mummy is freed of his wrappings by a rival gang of scientists who steal the mummy from an exhibition and attempt to bring it back to life in their laboratory/wax museum for reasons that are never explained. With me yet? Well, get ready for the shock of your life, when the Talbot!mummy does come back to life, only for the revivificated Chaney to transform into a werewolf under the full moon! This movie ain't called Face of the Screaming Mummy, after all. The Chaney scenes come from La Casa del terror, which from what I know originally played the Chaney role for laughs, a parody of his Universal work. So now there is a killer mummy running around but also a werewolf. Will our heroes prevail? Are there heroes? Will any of these plot threads come to a head in some way?

I've learned I simultaneously enjoy and despise writing reviews about movies which I consider to be the favorites of my favorites. Usually, they're movies where the synopsis should be able to stand for itself, but every time I review one of them I feel like I've done an inadequate job. C'est la vie pour une ecrivaine...but I still want to make people watch these things. I like to imagine, however, that my summary of Face of the Screaming Werewolf is probably sufficient to convey the flavor of this film to you. It is a mess, possibly one of the messiest films I've ever seen. Its continuity is like confetti; it's like Harry Stephen Keeler's web philosophy given Frankensteinian life, with a million tangents that exist solely because life is nothing but millions of tangents. Never mind the fact that few among us (read: me) actually enjoy consuming media that applies that weird maximalist slice-of-life madness to genre fiction like mysteries or horror. Face is not born of deliberate action, instead being a product of the strange energies that arise from the Burroughsian cutup method. Warren has taken two serviceable movies and made a nonsense film so artless that it's become artsy again.

I love movies that make you constantly ask "why?" and "what?" This is a feature of great good movies as well as great trash movies. When you watch The Wicker Man, for instance, you constantly ask, "Why is everyone is this village acting so strangely?" and "What happened to Rowan?" But in Face of the Screaming Werewolf, you will just keep asking "why...?" and "what...?" with no continuation past that initial word. Constantly. Why do the scientists need to use the girl's past life memories to guide their way to an above-ground tomb? Why would someone "exchange fluids" with a mummy or force someone through the process--when a mummy should be desiccated and therefore have no fluids to speak of? Why do the other scientists steal the mummy? Why do they try to bring it back to life, and where did they learn the methods of doing so? Why do filmmakers keep thinking the Aztecs had the same assignations to their mummies and pyramids as did the Egyptians?

What sort of body would provide funding for a research team interested in bringing back the dead, especially the very old, very organ-deprived dead? What sort of equipment requires hooking up cables to a stone sarcophagus and filling it with dry ice fog while annoying sirens go off? What sort of scientists run a horror wax museum on the side? What are the other two tubes on the three-chambered person-sized centrifuge they put Lon Chaney into for? What kind of werewolf can be killed by being clubbed in the head with a torch?! I could go on.

If you want to go into how the two movies clash, you need look no further than tone. Really, we're looking at three different movies here. There are the Jerry Warren scenes in the minority, which have drastically different film quality, which largely consist of various characters providing stapling exposition. Then there are the Lon Chaney scenes, which are pretty spot-on imitations of the Universal Wolf Man movies--pretty standard fare. But we also have the scenes clipped from La Momia Azteca, which are impressively chilling, making stunning use of shadow and lighting to make their admittedly disturbing mummy makeup even spookier. If I thought I could bear the rigors of old Popoca again, I'd actually be willing to give the source material of this film a try. The only thing ruining the creeps are the inserts of Warren's actors mugging into the camera.

Face of the Screaming Werewolf is truly one of the most inept and cheap films of all time, but that makes it special in my mind. I think it will always be one of my absolute favorites, even if I fly solo in that regard. But as always, I encourage people to let the under-an-hour-runtime magic light their way.