A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Saturday, October 11, 2025

Alucarda (Juan López Moctezuma, 1977)

Tina Romero and Susana Kamini in Alucarda

Cast: Tina Romero, Susana Kamini, Claudio Brook, David Silva, Tina French, Brigitta Segerskog, Lili Garza, Adriana Roel, Martin LaSalle. Screenplay: Alexis Arroyo, Juan López Moctezuma, Tita Arroyo, Yolanda López Moctezuma, based on a novella by Sheridan Le Fanu. Cinematography: Xavier Cruz. Art direction: Kleomenes Stamatiades. Film editing: Maximo Sánchez Molina. Music: Anthony Guefen.

Juan López Moctezuma's lurid, loony Alucarda takes place mostly in the environs of an orphanage run by nuns, who seem to belong to no usual order: Instead of black, their habits and wimples are a dingy white -- the better to get soiled and bloodied, as we'll see. The plot, such as it is, centers on Justine (Susana Kamini), a teenager who comes to the orphanage on the death of her parents, and is immediately taken under the wing of another teenage orphan, Alucarda (Tina Romero), who seems not to have given the nuns much trouble until Justine arrives, and then ... well, for once the cliché "all hell breaks loose" seems appropriate. Both girls go nuts, but it's Justine in particular who causes the attending priest, Father Lázaro (David Silva), to intone "we must do [portentous pause] an exorcism!" [Gasp from the assembled nuns.] In this case expelling the demon appears to involve stripping Justine naked, chaining her to a forked cross, and poking holes into her. This goes on until the attending doctor (Claudio Brook, who also doubles as an avatar of Satan) arrives to put a stop to it, whereupon Father Lázaro and the nuns go into a frenzy of penitential flagellation. But the doctor's efforts to use reason don't work either. Alucarda has some of the clunkiest dialogue and most wooden delivery of it that I've encountered in many a month of movie-watching. But it's also compulsively, perversely watchable, and not just in a condescending way because of its campiness or its exploitative nudity and blasphemy. In this tale of God vs. Satan, Satan seems to get the upper hand, despite the efforts of both religion and science to thwart him.  

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