Vacaciones de terror 2 (1990)

... aka: Pesadilla sangrienta (Bloody Nightmare)

... aka: Terror Vacations 2: Diabolical Birthday

... aka: Vacaciones de terror II: cumpleaños diábolico (Vacations of Terror II: Diabolical Birthday)

... aka: Vacation of Terror II

... aka: Vacations of Terror 2

Directed by:

Pedro Galindo III

Hard to believe anyone was eagerly anticipating a sequel to the very mediocre haunted house / cursed doll flick VACATION OF TERROR (1989), but they made it anyway. This one, which does not involve any kind of vacation despite the title, is directed by the first film's co-producer and brings back star Pedro Fernández in the role of Julio Aragón. From what little I remember of the previous film, Julio had accompanied his girlfriend's family to a remote old house for a summer vacation when the ghost of a witch started trying to kill everyone off. Now Julio has moved on with his life, runs an antique / curio shop and his mullet appears to have doubled in size. He's also not dating the same chick and also never even discusses the events of the first film. His love interest this time is played by real-life Latin pop star Tatiana, who really gets to stretch her acting muscles here playing a Latin pop star. OK, to be fair, she's cute, appealing enough and her acting isn't bad, and this is somewhat better than her next movie, FATAL NIGHTMARE (1990), where she was terrorized by a psycho armed with a Freddy-like clawed glove.

Tatiana's character, Mayra Mondragón, is a rising celebrity who's just recently been getting hounded by the press. Somehow (must be the power of the mullet), Julio manages to swindle a date out of her when she stops by his shop. As soon as Mayra leaves, a crazed man (Alfredo Gutiérrez 'El Turco') starts trashing the place and screaming about "the doll from hell!" He promptly runs outside and is hit by a car. Before he dies, he gives Julio some talismans to help ward off evil and recommends our hero consult something called "The Book of Tormented Souls." So off to the library Julio goes. He finds the book, rips out a few pages, sticks them in his pocket and leaves. Guess he forgot his library card.

Joaquín Cordero (DR. SATAN, PANICO), who's too good an actor for something like this but fine nonetheless, plays Tatiana's wealthy movie producer father, Roberto. He's planning an elaborate, Halloween-themed nighttime party for his daughter Tania's (Renata De Los Ríos) 7th birthday at his closed down film studio. To make things extra special, he's put his fx guy, Ramón (Ernesto Carregha), in charge of making it scary for all of the guests. His idea of "scary;" black streamers, strings of plastic pumpkin lights, balloons and cardboard cartoon replicas of Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster and skeletons, plus a bouncy synth-pop performance of "Chicos, Chicos" from Tatiana, doesn't quite get the job done. Thankfully, Tania is in possession of a cursed dolly, which goes through some strange metamorphosis and eventually transforms into a clawed mini-creature. Well, that's not really scary either, but it at least proves to be a little more entertaining.

The little creature slashes up Ramón underneath the birthday cake table, which causes blood to spurt out of a fountain, which causes the party to clear out quicker than expected. Later that night, Mayra and Tania very stupidly go back to the studio because Tania forgot some silver coins her father had given her. When they get there, Julio, who's revealed to be some kind of demon slayer, is still lurking around trying to find the creature, which has since grown into a big, ugly, slimy, monstrous "bruja" (witch) with claws, fangs and a tail. Tania ends up getting sucked into some kind of otherworldly void, which means Julio and her sister have to find a way to defeat the witch before morning.

As far as the witch's motivations are concerned, the book lays it all out in pretty simple terms. She's from hell and cannot accept the fact she's dead, so this is really all about jealousy and lashing out by capturing the purest souls they can and using them as instruments of evil. The only way to defeat her is by embedding a silver seal in her flesh.

Since there's barely any plot to speak of, this usually comes off less like a movie and more like a collection of cheap spook show effects, with Julio and Mayra (later joined by the father) endlessly running around the foggy, closed-down studio encountering one horror after another. There are souls trapped inside of screaming coins, plastic pumpkins turning into fireballs, a phone shooting out slime, a toothy jack-o-lantern coming to life, a girl turned into a little Play-Doh doll, a room doing 360 degree spins, a room rapidly filling with water from the ceiling down, a melting gun, an earthquake, the ground cracking open and swallowing someone whole, a stabbing via doll tongue (!) and the witch impersonating the little girl to attack someone in a moving vehicle. These scenes range from extremely silly to fun and imaginative.

In many respects, this seems more geared toward children and young teens than adults. Though there's some blood and slime, there's no explicit gore, no nudity, no sex, barely any profanity and a low body count, with almost all of the deaths taking place entirely off-screen. You could snip brief shots here and there and probably end up with a PG or PG-13 rating. The production itself is fairly solid for a budget movie, with great shooting locations, some nice atmosphere, acceptable acting and a witch that's both well designed and well performed (by Luis Camarena). This is also slightly more enjoyable than the original film.

The director, part of a Mexican filmmaking dynasty that goes back to the early days of cinema (similar to the Cardona clan), also made THE DEATH OF THE JACKAL (1984), its sequel Massacre in Rio Grande (which is listed some places as having been released in 1984 and others 1988), HELL'S TRAP (1989), Panic on the Mountain (1989) and Theater of Horror (1991). Though I'm not sure the relation (brothers or cousins perhaps?), the co-writers and co-producers were Eduardo Galindo and Santiago Galindo, who had also worked on the first film.

The earliest sign of a home video release I could find was a tape from 1995 that looks like it was issued from a subsidiary of Video Treasures out of Troy, Michigan (Platino Video and Mex-American Home Video are both credited). They re-titled it Pesadilla sangrienta / "Bloody Nightmare" and the write-up on the back of the box includes both English and Spanish language plot descriptions.

This is now very easy to find all over the place. For us English speakers, it made its English-subbed debut in 2008 as part of BCI Eclipse's 8 film set "Crypt of Terror: Horror from South of the Border, Vol. 1," which also included the first Vacation, Trap, CEMETERY OF TERROR (1985), both English and Spanish language versions of DON'T PANIC (1988), GRAVE ROBBERS (1989) and The Demon Rat (1992). In 2023, Vinegar Syndrome released a Blu-ray and paired with the first film. All of the new interviews on the VS release cover just the original film, not this sequel.

★★

Museo del horror (1964)

... aka: Museum of Horror

Directed by:

Rafael Baledón

A young woman walking home alone late at night is stalked and then ambushed by a caped, behatted, skull-faced fiend. After she passes out, he carries her into a cemetery and opens the lid on an above ground sarcophagus. Inside is a secret passageway. He takes her down below, carries her through a hallway with mummy-filled caskets lining the walls and then into a room that's hidden behind one of those caskets. There, he lies her down on a table, pulls a boiling cauldron over and then dumps molten wax all over the screaming woman's face. This extremely atmospheric opening credits sequence proves that there are few greater combinations in the horror world than high contrast black-and-white photography, proper night lighting and a little bit of swirling fog. Gorgeous. This latest victim turns out to be the third of such disappearances in the area in the past few months. The police are baffled as there are no witnesses and no clues thus far. However, there is something of a pattern: Each disappearance has been of an attractive young lady in her early 20s and each girl disappeared at around the same time of the evening near the same location.

We next meet numerous characters staying at a boarding house run by the gossipy Doña Leonor (Emma Roldán). There's Luis (Joaquín Cordero), who was once a promising actor until a crippling injury put an end to that career. He now manages a theater and gives tours at a wax museum. Reading about the disappearances in the paper, Luis comments that the missing girls, being young and all, probably either ran off with a guy or split town to go on a little adventure. Not interested at all in the conversation is the grouchy and misogynistic Professor Abramov (Carlos López Moctezuma), who goes on an angry rant about how he despises the "chronic chatter of women" and how "God made a mistake putting tongues in women's mouths!" And then there's Raúl (Julio Alemán), a nice, upstanding young doctor (or so that's what everybody thinks), and Leonor's daughter, Marta (Patricia Conde), a nice young nurse. Raúl, who's known Marta since childhood, is interested in pursuing a relationship with her but she's not quite sold on him.

All three male boarding house residents are set up as the prime suspects. Luis is hoping to secure a grant with his new exhibit on the heroines of art and theater. He has painstakingly molded each of the lifelike wax figures and his museum only features female characters because, in his own words, he holds women in such high esteem. Or does her? Raúl is up to some sketchy things himself. In a Burke and Hare-influenced twist, he pays a pair of drunk lowlifes (José Dupeyrón and Vicente Lara) to rob graves and bring him fresh "specimens" to conduct his secret experiments on. He also has a collection of human heads he keeps in vats of liquid hidden in the hospital morgue. As for the professor, who is seldom seen without a scowl on his face, we've already established what he thinks about women, but he also has a thing for taxidermy and is developing "a new technique for embalming" on top of that.

After getting dropped off at a nightclub (where all of the principle characters happen to be in attendance) by her "papi," prostitute Sonia (Sonia Infante) becomes victim #4 during her late night stroll. Only in this instance, there's a witness: One of Raúl's patients. When he goes to the boarding house to tell the doctor what he's just seen, someone shoots him in the back with a poison dart. That finally brings the police, headed by David Reynoso as the Commissioner, to the home. It's discovered that the poison used to kill the witness was curare and the only person to have a bottle of it on hand is the good professor. Still, that's not enough to pin blame on him. Despite the murder, bosomy blonde nightclub chanteuse Norma Ramos (Olivia Michel), who's sick of the cheap hotel she's been staying in, decides to rent a room there.

In an interesting twist, Marta rejects a marriage proposal from straight-laced Raúl and instead finds herself falling for Luis. While he's older, crippled, less financially secure and more emotionally complicated, there's just something about him she's drawn to. Of course, this infuriates Raúl, who accuses Marta of mistaking pity for him and his disability with love. He also informs her that everything he's done in life thus far he's done to set up a good life for the two of them as a couple (awfully presumptuous, ain't he?) and he's not going to give her up without a fight. However, both Raúl and the professor seem to be fighting off their desires for the attractive singer who's just moved in.

A seldom-viewed film, this was an unexpected surprise. It boasts good performances and a competently-structured (though ultimately predictable) mystery with well-drawn characters courtesy of writer José María Fernández Unsáin, who pinches ideas from a number of other films, namely The Lodger, The Body Snatcher and House of Wax. However, where this really shines is in the atmosphere and visuals, with Raúl Martínez Solares' great cinematography aiding the mood immensely.

While obviously a low budget production, director Baledón also adds just the right amount of visual embellishments. One standout sequence features one of the proposed victims losing it after venturing out into the underground catacombs as a flurry of images of decaying corpses flash on the screen. There's also a very interesting bit where the grave robbers hit a patrolman over the head with a shovel and then bury him alive, which then segues into a nightmare scene of cobweb-covered zombies rising from their tombs. The shots used for the latter are extremely creepy and look like they come from another film (or films), which makes me wonder just what film exactly. One source claims stock footage from Bava's HERCULES IN THE HAUNTED WORLD (1961) was used.

To my knowledge, this has never been officially released in America. 5th Dimension Films, Creature Feature Videos and DVD Party are just three of the websites that carry this with English subtitles, though I don't believe any of these releases has been sanctioned.

★★★