aka Ladrones de Tumbas

• Directed by Ruben Galindo Jr.
• Written by Ruben Galindo Jr. and Carlos Valdemar
• Starring
  • Fernando Almada
  • Edna Bolkan
  • Erika Buenfil
  • Ernesto Laguardia
  • Maria Rebeca
• Produced by Raul Galindo

It might be instructive for you to review the first few paragraphs of my review of Cementerio del Terror, aka Cemetery of Terror (1985). Not only do my general comments there about the nature of foreign-made but American-influenced horror cinema apply just as much here as they do there, but this movie was co-written and directed by the same person who wrote and directed Cemetery of Terror, giving you a general feel for the flavor of what’s to come. I think Grave Robbers is clearly the superior movie, though that doesn’t mean much; it’s a by-the-numbers supernatural revenge flick, which boasts mostly baseline competence to recommend it. But given how rare such competence is as a supposed baseline in both domestic and foreign horror flicks, that’s probably more of a recommendation than it would be in a sane universe.

So, what do you need for a supernatural revenge story? Why, something that needs to be revenged, of course! Our opening scenes are in set sometime in the past when the Inquisition is still operative. In some underground cavern lit by a bazillion candles, a Satanist (Agustin Bernal, credited as “El Verdugo” — that’s “The Executioner” to us anglophones) has chained a nubile young thing to a pentagram on the floor; after he scores her belly with a pointy Satanic amulet, he plans (as he announces) to impregnate her with the Antichrist. His plans are interrupted by a bunch of cowled monks, who rescue the poor girl and put El Verdugo on the rack. Yes! Finally, a movie in which the Inquisition does what it does to someone who deserves to have it done to him!

The head Inquisitor (Fernando Almada) sternly tells El Verdugo to confess, which, under extreme duress, he does — though it’s less of a confession than a “My lord Satan steals your puny God’s lunch money!” declaration. That’s good enough for the Inquisitor, though, who immediately grabs a headman’s axe and plunges it into El Verdugo’s chest. Before he expires, though, and despite having a chopped-up lung, El Verdugo prophesies rather specifically that someday someone will pull the axe out, and the El Verdugo will seek out a descendant of the head Inquisitor on which to sire the antichrist. (And here I thought that the Inquisitor was a celebate priest. You learn something every day.)

“Missed!”

Fast-forward then to the presentish day, in which we meet Captain Lopez of the small-town police department (also played by Fernando Almada). In quick order we learn a few facts about him; for instance, his police department has only one machine gun, which has just been repaired by Raul (Tony Bravo), who is also engaged to the Captain’s twenty-something daughter Olivia (Edna Bolkan, also of Cemetery of Terror). See where we’re going with this? Olivia’s heading for an all-girls’ campout with three friends from Mexico City. Don’t bother to learn their names.

Meanwhile, four youths in a pickup make their way in the middle of the night to the cemetery outside of town (it used to be six youths, but two got tired of having to ride in the cold of the back of the pickup). They’re professional grave robbers, although they really aren’t doing well with their bottom line, but one of them, Rebeca (Erika Buenfil), has a charm or seerstone or something by which she’s assured that they’re really gonna hit gold in this one, honest. She leads them to a particular headstone, where the two males of the party, Manolo and Armando (Ernesto Laguardia and German Bernal), do all of the gruntwork of digging out the grave while Rebeca and Diana (Maria Rebeca) sit on the edge and look eighties.

The get to the casket and, whaddaya know, no gold. (A neat little detail: When they crack the coffin, the boys immediately light a match and ignite all of the gases that escape. I’d never seen that in any other movie.) Rebeca gets down in the excavated grave to see for herself and immediately falls through what the thought was the bottom of the grave into a larger chamber. The others follow her down into what we recognize as the torture chamber in which El Vertugo met his end. (I have to surmise, though no one mentions it, that this is the basement of the citadel in which the Inquisitor operated, and when the above-ground building was eventually razed, the cellar was simply closed off and covered over.) Not only are there dessicated corpses still on the racks and stuff, but there’s gold and jewelry all around, literally strewn over the dried husks of heretical corpses like something out of a really bad D&D campaign.

“I bet there’s 10d12 gold pieces in here!”

They scoop up riches merrily, then the boys start examining a slab-covered crypt in the corner of the room. More goodies? They start banging on it, ignoring Rebeca’s admonition that they really ought to leave it alone because something feels wrong to her. (Naturally, even though it was her “gold sense” that got them where they are, they’re quick here to dismiss her “superstition.”) they get inside, and discover a withered old corpse with an axe buried in its chest. Shucks, that axe might be worth something, right? They remove it, and suddenly a wind blows through the entire crypt. Spooked, they take off.

But as you well know, something has awakened…

The revived Vertugo grabs some at-hand fabric and drapes it over his head as a cowl, in part to make the revelation of his face at the end that much more startling, and partly because maybe he knows that a full rainstorm has burst above-ground. The truck that holds the four grave robbers can’t get purchase in the muddy road. Two peasants on horseback come along and offer to help pull them free, but one horse goes wild and runs off into the night. The peasant goes looking for it, giving El Vertugo to demonstrate two traits which he clearly shares with his American run-of-the-mill supernatural killer brothers:

“When I said ‘a little off the top,’ that’s NOT what I meant!”

1) El Vertugo is dedicated to killing the least important members of the cast first, especially those who have been brought into the script for no reason but for body count. Heck, he got close enough to the truck in the rain to retrieve the axe from the back of the truck, but then retreats into the rural roads far enough — and in just the right direction — that first one peasant, then the other falls to his blade.

2) El Vertugo can use off-screen teleportation like nobody’s business. Despite walking with a measured gait, he can always be where anyone’s going ahead of them. He also strikes out of literally nowhere. One peasant, standing in the middle of the road, looks away from the camera, then toward the camera… and El Vertugo looms up behind him and cuts his throat. Which means that our satanist zombie must have been crouching right at the foot of the poor peasant!

The sheriff, meanwhile, has been cruising country roads in the general vicinity of Olivia’s camp when he sees one of the peasants’ horses running free. He backtracks and finds the four grave robbers standing over the two corpses in the road; Armando has bloody hands from literally stumbling over the deceased. And where is El Vertugo? Like Bela Lugosi in Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) or that damned singing’n'dancing cartoon frog, he scampers off and lets them take the rap.

Right. Like a vengeful zombie sorcerer is going to stop and light all those namby candles. Uh-huh.

Things from there pretty much go as you’d imagine. Once the sheriff has the grave robbers locked up, a call from a deputy about another couple of fresher bodies — in the vicinity of Olivia’s camp, naturally — makes him doubt that he has the right man. El Vertugo starts killing the camping girls, starting with the one who leaves the campfire to get more water. (In yet another example of his Lying In Wait skillz, he attacks her from underwater at the stream, meaning that he knew someone was going to come for water, and further, exactly where she would go.) But he also wants to get his hands on a small amulet which had been wound around the axe handle, and which is currently around Armando’s neck. Go go off-screen teleportation! And El Vertugo continually busts out new supernatural powers, like the ability to make someone’s guts burst out from inside as if a hand we pressing them out, or to menace a priest with a floating dagger, even though he’s nowhere on the premises. He even manages to reconstruct himself (off-screen, naturally) after a speeding pickup knocks him into scattered smithereens. Now THAT’S power!

Just like his American brothers, El Vertugo could easily accomplish his infernal designs against the feeble opposition of the weak and confused mortals if he would only stick to his priorities — in this case, grabbing Olivia and impregnating her with the antichrist (then, presumably, hiding and confining her for nine months). But he gets too distracted with revenge on those who woke him — I don’t know why, as they were really doing him a favor — and with killing everyone he comes across; eventually, the Captain and the remaining grave robbers can formulate a plan to fight back. (On the other hand, if he and his ilk didn’t have a weakness for killing everyone they came across, they probably would have followed a different life path to begin with.)

Well, maybe the little antichrist will have his mother’s nose.

It’s a dumb movie, yes, but it’s enjoyable nonetheless; at least it keeps things happening, which is more than a lot of cheap slashers can say. Paint-by-numbers can still be moderately entertaining, as long as no one pretends it’s a masterpiece. Running and screaming, violence and gore; mixed in the right proportions, they’re good mindless fun.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 14
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 3
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• spring-loaded cats: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0