Aaaah, it's so nice that the amazing old Méxican horror movies
we all love now, finally, are being released on DVD after being
restored properly and earlier only being available in blurry american
public domain editions. So, a big and heartfelt THANKS
to the great Panik House Casa Negra.
However when re-writing this very short text in early December 2020
these companies sadly all kicked the bucket 10-15 years
ago. There will probably never be any Blu-ray releases of these old
black & white méxican horror classics, maybe in latin editions
without english subtitles ? But, maybe, as US Vinegar Syndrome autumn
2020 has released a couple of méxican 1980's Slashers
by Ruben Galindo Jr. on Blu-ray, so maybe ....
Above: Collector card
"El Espejo de la Bruja" is a both visually
great looking and .... yeah, you guessed it .... atmospheric wild and
Gothic crazy doctor
horror directed by veteran Chano Urueta. After an intro scene about
witchcraft the housemaid Sara (Isabel Corona) sees her
beloved goddaughter Elena
Ramos (Dina de Marco) being murdered by her husband, the crazed doctor
Eduardo Ramos (Armando
Calva). Sara is a bruja, a witch, and she can conjure visions in a mirror,
and she promises to revenge her goddaughters death.
She prays to dark demons to punish Eduardo and his new wife Deborah
(Rosita Arenas, the méxican genre icon).
Rosita Arenas can besides this film also be seen in genre classics as
all the 3 Aztec Mummy 1957 movies and the 1961 La Maldición
de la Llorona, and others.
When Deborah have had her face destroyed by fire Eduardo decides to
steal dead female bodies from the Morgue to experiment
on for trying to transplant skin grafts to his wife. Yes, Urueta clearly
has been inspired by Georges Franju's 1959 "Les Yeux Sans
Visage" the Mother of all crazy skin transplant Doctor movies,
a film that very much inspired spaniard Jesús Franco to make
his
1961 or 1962 "Gritos en la Noche" or "The Awful Dr. Orloff".
There are some very early 1960 Gore in El Espejo de la Bruja.
The film are presented in 4:3 fullscreen original ratio,
in black & white, with a spanish audio with english subtitles or
an english dub,
region 1. Audio commentary by Frank Coleman, biographies, a text about
director Chano Urueta and a collector card
