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Review

It's difficult to convey the strange power of the 1978 Mexican horror film Alucarda any more succinctly than "Psychotronic Video Guide" author Michael Weldon's comment that the film "has more blood, loud screaming, and nudity (male and female) than just about any horror movie I can think of," but director Moctezuma's shocking and surreal fable has a distinctively hyperbolic flavor that is also rarely glimpsed in other horror films of the era.

The type of compact, 74-minute sustained cinematic paroxysm that plays virtually every scene as if it were the film's operatic fever dream denouement, Alucarda is a genuine oddity, a surreal tableaux of gore and religious iconography with a highly theatrical mise-en-scene and an eponymous performance from Tina Romero that occasionally makes Isabelle Adjani's work in Possession seem like a model of restraint.

There is a minimum of plotting and exposition in the film, which finds Justine (very DeSade in more ways than just the moniker) arriving in a convent filled with fanatical nuns who garb themselves in mummified wraps when they're not self-flagellating their naked bodies. Justine befriends the strange Alucarda, and their union soon results in crucifixion and torture, demonic possession, blood drinking, and innumerable other anti-social acts. As the church persecutes the two young women, the town doctor (Claudio Brook, a veteran of everything from Bunuel to Cronos) attempts to shield the girls from what he perceives as superstition, but he too comes to realize that there is genuine evil at work.

If a brief summary of Alucarda - encompassing both narrative and stylistic elements – makes Moctezuma's film sound like standard 1970s post-Exorcist, post-The Devils sacrilegious horror fodder, that's partially because it's tricky to communicate the dizzying hothouse feel of the film's colorful imagery and exaggerated performances, qualities that elevate the film beyond typical genre works of the period.

Moctezuma had a fascinatingly varied career (nicely conveyed on this DVD's supplementary features) – from television presenter of silent cinema, to jazz radio DJ in Mexico City, from theater associate of Alejandro Jodorowsky and Fernando Arrabal, to co-producer of Jodorowsky's early classics El Topo and Fando and Lis - but in America, he remains best known for directing a trio of strange horror films in the 1970s: Alucarda was preceded by the unique Poe adaptation Dr. Tarr's Torture Dungeon (1972) and the more conventional thriller Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary (an American-Mexican co-production from 1974).

Part baroque primal scream psychedelia, part gothic vampire opus, Alucarda remains Moctezuma's most accomplished work in the genre.

 -- Travis Crawford