Blue Demon y Zovek en La invasión de los muertos (1973)

Directed by René Cardona [Other horror films: El espectro de la novia (1943), La mujer sin cabeza (1944), The Living Idol (1957), La Llorona (1960), Las luchadoras contra el médico asesino (1963), Las luchadoras contra la momia (1964), Santo vs el estrangulador (1965), Espectro del estrangulador (1966), Las mujeres panteras (1967), La mujer murcielago (1968), Las luchadoras vs el robot asesino (1969), La horripilante bestia humana (1969), Santo en El tesoro de Drácula (1969), Santo contra los jinetes del terror (1970), Santo en la venganza de la momia (1971), Capulina contra los vampiros (1971), El increíble profesor Zovek (1972)]

Known in the USA as The Invasion of the Dead, Blue Demon y Zovek en La invasión de los muertos is a movie that is utterly unlike most things I’ve watched. That alone doesn’t make it bad, but even so, this isn’t that good.

Now, I’ve seen it once before, but like two other Mexican horror films in the same vein I’ve seen (Santo contra la magia negra and Santo el enmascarado de plata y Blue Demon contra los monstruos), I saw this without subtitles, which, as you can guess, makes it rather hard to tell what’s really going on. This time around, I understood more. Well, sort of – whatever the Hell Zovek was rambling on about most of the time, I didn’t quite get – but otherwise, I certainly got more clarity.

If you don’t know either Blue Demon or Zovek, I couldn’t say I blame you. This is a luchador film – a film that stars Mexican wrestlers of the Lucha Libre variety. Blue Demon, or Alejandro Moreno, wears a mask throughout, and Zovek has a headband he rarely removes. As far as I can tell, at least from this film, Zovek is both a mentalist and an escape artist, along with being talented in hand-to-hand combat, while Blue Demon is a historian/scientist who runs some information agency, and also knows hand-to-hand combat.

Oh, it’s also worth mentioning that, as the film is known here as The Invasion of the Dead, this is a zombie movie. Sorry – when a film has random things like wrestlers going on, some of the more important pieces get pushed to the side of my mind.

The basic idea of the film is that an object is sent from alien beings to Earth, and this object (a sphere) brings the dead back to life. Apparently Professor Zovek (his full title) believes this to be due to an old calendar that predicts calamities. Oh, he also, toward the end, was attempting to contact the master who trained him telepathically, but his master couldn’t be reached, which would have been a good sequel hook, had Zovek not died in 1972 (at 31 years old) from a helicopter crash.

Actually, it’s on that note that I should also mention that, unlike what you might expect from the title, Zovek and Blue Demon get virtually no on-screen time together. This is perhaps because of Zovek’s untimely death, and Blue Demon being pulled in to finish up the movie. To be fair, the movie doesn’t feel too disjointed due to that unfortunate incident, but it does go a long way to explain that Blue Demon doesn’t have any action sequences until the final 15 minutes of the movie.

When it comes to the zombies, well, I had to admit I wasn’t impressed. For the most part, the only way one could tell they were zombies was due to either their blank stare or rigid way of walking. No make-up went to making any of them look particularly zombie-esque. Hell, even Sugar Hill threw cobwebs on their faces, but no luck here. Related, there’s about zero special effects, unless you want to count the occasional fire. That’s not that surprising, given this was a Mexican film, but even so, a zombie movie without any blood always struck me as sad.

As far as the performances go, it’s really hard to judge. I suspect that, for the most part, Blue Devil (or, again, Alejandro Moreno) and Professor Zovek just played themselves. Zovek got much more screen-time than did Blue Devil, which I’d say was a good thing, as Blue Devil had a subordinate who was used exclusively for ‘comedic effect’ (played by Polo Ortín), and he got old pretty quick. Speaking of pretty, Christa Linder (Night of 1000 Cats, The Incredible Invasion, and The Drifter in the Rain) didn’t have a lot to do, but she did wear some tight jeans and a tight shirt, so I had little to complain about.

Horror-wise, it’s rather hard to recommend the film. Sure, some of the sequences in the second half were fun, such as Zovek fighting off a zombie attack in a cave (twice, if not three times, he picks up a zombies and throws them back to the group), or Blue Demon fighting two random werewolf-type guys (don’t ask me where they came from – I honestly have no idea, they just popped up one scene), but those scenes struck me as more fun than horror. There was a cool scene of zombies slowly walking through a graveyard, but otherwise, this movie never felt all that spooky at all, which, while not necessarily surprising, was disappointing.

As it was, I was happy to see The Invasion of the Dead again, especially as I had subtitles this time around. I imagine some of you know how tedious it can be to watch a film in a different language with no subtitles, but if you don’t, I can personally attest to it rarely being a fun time. In this case, even with subtitles, the movie was hella slow, and I didn’t have that much fun with it, save a scene here or there.

If you’re interested in seeing Mexican horror films, or early post-Night of the Living Dead zombie films, this might be worth checking out, but otherwise, I wouldn’t really urge people to do so.

4.5/10