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.

★★

Witchcraft (1961) [short]

... aka: Witchcraft: The Doll in Brambles

Directed by:

Harold Young

Though no one seems to know the first thing about this particular production, it was a TV pilot (running just short of 26 minutes) for a proposed series to be titled Witchcraft that was never picked up. The only available print (culled from a Sinister Cinema release) seems to have been taken from a VHS source, which suggests this may have been shown on television (or at least re-run) at some point much later than the 1961 production date. This first episode, “The Doll in Brambles,” was going to be one of many adaptations of the works of William Buehler Seabrook, who was apparently better known back then than he is today.

Born in 1884, Seabrook was a war vet, journalist, newspaper editor, advertising executive, novelist and extensive world traveler. He gained fame not only through his books but also through his interest in occultism and his admittance to consuming human flesh (!!), which he described as being "a little stringy" yet "mild, good meat," comparing it to "good, fully-developed veal." Did I mention this guy was also a painfully-insecure alcoholic, a sexual sadist into kinky photography (he commissioned an S&M-themed photo series that would later be dubbed "The Fantasies of Mr. Seabrook" at one point), conducted bondage "experiments" in a barn and spent some time locked away in a mental institution, plus wrote a book about that, too?

It's amazing that hardly anyone, perhaps most especially horror fans, even know who Seabrook is. His 1929 book The Magic Island is usually credited for introducing the Western world to the term "zombie" (back then, a voodoo-entranced 'living corpse,' not the post-Romero ones). It became a best-seller that led to a stage play called Zombie in 1932 and was the inspiration behind the Bela Lugosi film White Zombie from the same year. Seabrook's fascination with the supernatural led him to numerous countries to investigate their spiritual beliefs and customs, which he recapped in his 1940 book Witchcraft: Its Power in the World Today. He ultimately drew the conclusion that there wasn't anything that couldn't be somehow explained through either psychology or science. The fact that a TV series could have existed about this guy's work but never happened feels like a missed opportunity if there ever was one.

There are a couple of names attached to provide some additional interest. Director Young had prior experience in the genre having made a trio of horror films as a contract director for Universal: The Mummy's Tomb (1942) and The Frozen Ghost (1945), both starring Lon Chaney Jr., and The Jungle Captive (1945), the third and final entry in their oft-ignored Ape Woman series. This appears to have been the last thing he ever worked on after leaving the studio system well over a decade prior.

Perhaps an even bigger draw for genre fans is Frank De Felitta, who adapted a portion of the first chapter in Seabrook's Witchcraft book titled "Sawdust Doll in Brambles." De Felitta was a horror / suspense novelist, screenwriter and eventual filmmaker known for his best-selling novels Audrey Rose and The Entity, both of which sold millions of copies and were adapted for the screen as major studio films by the author himself. He also stepped into the director's chair to make the made-for-TV killer dog movie Doberman Patrol aka Trapped (1973), which he also wrote, and the still-popular DARK NIGHT OF THE SCARECROW (1981), which he did not write. He closed out his Hollywood career directing and writing Scissors (1991), which was a flop in theaters but did well on home video because its lead - Sharon Stone - would became a huge star (for two other films) shortly after filming it.

Former Oscar nominee Franchot Tone's (Mutiny on the Bounty) long career was winding down when he accepted the bookmarking gig on this low budget proposed series. Though billed as "Your Host," Tone never introduces himself by name and instead claims he was a friend of the late William Seabrook, who passed away in 1945. The general premise here is that Seabrook's study and many of his findings have been kept sealed until recently as outlined in his will, and are only now going to be revealed to the general public for the first time.

Tone picks up a copy of the Witchcraft book and notes that, through his decades of research, Seabrook came to the conclusion that belief in the supernatural can be chalked up to what he calls "induced autosuggestion," which our host elaborates is "...a recurring thought in the mind placed there by some outside agent through some outside force." He then turns to the camera and assures us that what we're about to see "is not a fantasy," that it "actually happened" and is based on "a true story."

"The Doll in Brambles" takes place near the rocky coasts of Brittany, France. It's a dark and stormy night when visiting American Fred Hunter (Darren McGavin, of Kolchak: The Night Stalker fame) arrives at an inn to visit his French buddy, Louis Bausset (John Baragrey), whom be met and befriending during World War II. The original plan was for Fred to meet his beautiful fiancée, Marie (Annemarie Roussel), and serve as best man in his upcoming wedding, but things have been put on hold for the time being. Not that Louis and Marie aren't in love and don't want to be married, it's just that Marie's evil, abusive step-grandmother, Madame Tirelou (Blanche Yurka), hates Louis and has forbidden the two to see one another. While you may be thinking, "Well, who the hell cares what granny wants?," Mme. Tirelou is rumored to be a witch and has threatened to place a curse upon Louis if he disobeys her orders.

Skeptical Fred laughs off the witchcraft claims and sets out to help, informing his friend, "I just came halfway around the world to see you get married and, by golly I'm not going home until you are!" He visits the cliffside home shared by Marie and her grand-mère, manages to secretly slip Marie a note from Louis and is then kicked out once the hostile Madame finds out who he's friends with. She claims she'd rather be dead than let them marry, vows to outlive Louis one way or another and has made a voodoo doll in his likeness that can be wrapped in thorny branches (the "brambles" of the title) at any time...

I read the story immediately after viewing (found here on Internet Archive) and this is a near pinpoint accurate retelling, laying out the events almost identically to how they're described and even carrying over identical passages of dialogue. The only major changes are the "Fred Hunter" character is actually Seabrook himself, he and Louis weren't war buddies, there's some bat torture and the grandmother gets punished for what she does. Not only pretty faithful to the events of the text, this also honors Seabrook's viewpoint by grounding the supernatural in realty. It neither confirms nor discounts witchcraft per se, though it certainly leans in the latter direction in this case. A doctor shows up at one point claiming a sudden paralysis we're led to believe was brought on by the voodoo doll isn't a physical malady at all, but a mental / psychosomatic one (called "compulsion neurosis" in the story).

What's truly surprising is that this 1961 production also includes a "witch's cradle" that granny uses to restrain her granddaughter so she can be tortured! It's described in the book as "an obscure sadistic-masochistic" piece of equipment with chains and leather straps that's "as perverse a device as twisted human ingenuity ever invented." The granddaughter tries to keep Seabrook from even seeing this contraption, and feels deep shame when does, in the book, which heavily implies it was used for, a-hem, other purposes, though that's obviously downplayed here. Naturally, this is also something that would have greatly appealed to the source author given his sexual proclivities, so him just randomly happening upon an elderly witch living in the remote French countryside with a bondage table in her cellar is quite the coincidence, ain't it?

To be perfectly honest, had I not researched all of this or read the story itself, I probably wouldn't have walked away from this too horribly impressed. It's clearly cheap, set-bound, talky and not exactly scary, action-packed or exciting. The acting is mostly OK (with veteran stage actress Yurka fairing the best and McGavin his usual likable self) and the few scenes actually filmed outdoors do cut down on the staginess a little bit, but it's really the stuff surrounding the production that makes it fascinating. That, and the care taken trying to capture the essence of Seabrook; at least as much as they reasonably could in a mainstream production intended for mass consumption in the early 60s.

★★1/2