- Directed by Gilberto Martínez Solares, Rafael Portillo, Jerry Warren
- Written by Juan Garcia, Gilberto Martinez Solares, Alfredo Salazar
- Stars Lon Chaney Jr, Verya Beirute, George Mitchell Andre
- Run Time: 1 Hour
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdNT3RaQ7v8
Spoiler-Free Judgement Zone
A spliced-up mess made from two Spanish-language films involving a mummy and a werewolf and two groups of mad scientists. It’s tremendously awful and hard to follow.
Synopsis
Three scientists, Redding, and his men, experiment on Ann Taylor. As they hypnotize her, a boy sneaks into the room to watch. The dramatic music ramps up to be excessively dramatic as we watch the spinning disc get closer and closer. Finally, she goes to sleep. She talks about seeing “The ancient land” and a city of stone. She’s experiencing a past life under hypnosis.
There’s a chieftain who tells the woman of the past not to go into the pyramid. She goes in anyway, unable to resist. She wakes up.
The newsman tells us that Dr. Redding has gone to the Yucatan to explore the pyramid.
Redding, Ann Taylor, and the staff arrive at the pyramid. She recognizes the place from her visions. We get a flashback to the old-time natives performing some kind of ritual in there. A woman sings while others beat the drums. The Aztec priest then sacrifices the woman.
Back in the present, the gang walks into the pyramid. They find two mummies, one of whom roars at them. One was an old-time aztec, and the other was a more modern man.
We cut back to Redding’s return to civilization, where he presents his find. The lights go out, a gun fires, Redding is killed, and the mummy is gone!
The other scientists, led by Professor Canning, have stolen the mummy’s body and put it in an experimental reanimation chamber. The machines cache science-fiction sounds, but there’s just not enough voltage.
A criminal gets a phone call; Dr. Janning wants him to steal the other mummy. Lightning strikes, and the mummy, who is now sleeping in a wax museum behind a secret door, wakes up. The man looks out the window and sees the full moon. He looks terrified and then turns into a werewolf. The werewolf hides in the lab as the scientists return. He kills one of them, but then grabs his throat and passes out.
The criminal from earlier goes to steal the mummy, but it’s up and walking around now too. It goes inside the house and wanders around, looking at people sleeping. It picks up Ann and carries her outside.
A man in a car runs them over, killing them both. OK then, back to the werewolf, who wakes up in the lab again and finally kills that other scientist. Janning locks him in a cage.
The police interview Dr. Munson about Janning and his people. The werewolf turns human in the day, but back into a wolfman that night. He’s strong enough now to break open his cell and escape. He runs through the park terrorizing people. He grabs a woman and climbs a building, King-Kong-style. A scientist climbs up after them, and the werewolf pushes him off the roof. The werewolf takes the stairs back down and finds another woman to stalk.
The werewolf brings his next woman back to the lab and chases Janning around some more before killing him. Eventually, the werewolf grabs his throat and keels over again. The assistant burns the body just as the police come in, who don’t see anything out of the ordinary.
Commentary
This is really something! It’s a lesson in how not to make a horror movie.
For a 60-minute film supposedly about a werewolf, they spend an awfully long time on native dancing and rituals. This makes sense, as much of the film is reused footage from two other films, La Momia Azteca (1957) and La Casa Del Terror (1960). It’s an editing nightmare, with chopped-up footage all over the place and a story that barely makes any sense. If you look closely, other than a couple of scenes, you don’t see anyone’s mouth moving— it’s all overdubbed footage from the other films.
Oh— the sound effects for Jannings’s lab sequences are all taken from Forbidden Planet (1956).
On the bright side, the werewolf’s transformation is well done. Still. None of the characters matter, as you only see them for a minute or two of screen time before we move onto something else. The mummy scenes were OK, but then he just became roadkill, though we never actually see that.
Not only that, but it’s all very misleading— at no point did the werewolf ever scream.