Such is my dedication to the horror genre that I watched a really poor quality copy of El Baúl Macabro in Spanish with automatically generated English subtitles, most of which were pure gobbledegook. Thankfully, there were just about enough that made sense to get the gist of what was going on.
The film is a precursor to '60s surgical horrors such as Georges Franju's Les Yeux Sans Visage (1960) and Jess Franco's Gritos En La Noche (1962), except that those films were good and El Baúl Macabro isn't. Directed by Miguel Zacarías, it sees a doctor abducting young women to use in operations, the aim to keep his terminally ill wife alive. He is aided in his nefarious work by an assistant who isn't quite a hunchback... he just has very bad posture.
There are long stretches where nothing of interest happens, and for most of the time staying focused proves a challenge. However, there are two moments that prevent the film from being a total loss: a one-eyed vagrant discovers the dismembered remains of one of the doctor's victims and picks up a severed arm; and Esther Fernández, who plays Alicia, daughter of hospital superintendant Dr. Monroy, provides a glimpse of stockings and thigh. For this unexpected spot of gore and brief moment of cheap titillation, I'll give El Baúl Macabro one more star than it probably deserves. 2/10.
The film is a precursor to '60s surgical horrors such as Georges Franju's Les Yeux Sans Visage (1960) and Jess Franco's Gritos En La Noche (1962), except that those films were good and El Baúl Macabro isn't. Directed by Miguel Zacarías, it sees a doctor abducting young women to use in operations, the aim to keep his terminally ill wife alive. He is aided in his nefarious work by an assistant who isn't quite a hunchback... he just has very bad posture.
There are long stretches where nothing of interest happens, and for most of the time staying focused proves a challenge. However, there are two moments that prevent the film from being a total loss: a one-eyed vagrant discovers the dismembered remains of one of the doctor's victims and picks up a severed arm; and Esther Fernández, who plays Alicia, daughter of hospital superintendant Dr. Monroy, provides a glimpse of stockings and thigh. For this unexpected spot of gore and brief moment of cheap titillation, I'll give El Baúl Macabro one more star than it probably deserves. 2/10.
