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This is “El fantástico mundo de los hippies“, a 1972 movie that’s the only example I’ve seen of Mexican hippiesploitation. The poster is pure exploitation, the stuff the genre is made of. Check out the breathless descriptions, as well as the priceless addition to the cast in the bottom right corner. Also, I don’t know if it can be seen, but the plot seems to involve some straight-laced detectives or something solving murders amongst the hippies, judging from one of the photos… I’ve added translations for the texts, have a look.

I just watched Vacaciones de terror, a movie considered something of a classic by people I know (who never call it just by the name, but always say “Las vacaciones de terror, con Pedrito Fernández“). It’s directed by René Cardona III, grandson of legendary Cuban-born Mexploitation director René Cardona, who directed almost 150 movies, including several Santo movies, the Luchadora movies, and La horripilante bestia humana (aka. Night of the Bloody Apes), as well as acting in El Barón del Terror (aka. The Brainiac), amongst others. René Cardona Jr., father of the director of today’s movie, worked on more straight up trash cinema, including the entire series of La risa en vacaciones, one of the most successful lowbrow comedy series in the history of Mexican cinema. So René Cardona III is the last in a long line of schlockmeisters, as well as having some sort of family obligation to deal with vacations in his movies.

The story of the movie is fairly straightforward. A family gets a cheap fixer-upper summer house in the Mexican countryside, but all is not what it seems, as the youngest daughter finds a diabolical doll who takes control of her and supernaturally attempts to kill the rest of the family. The doll accomplishes this mostly by moving its eyes, which is always accompanied by a “scary” synth chord, and mostly makes furniture topple over slowly, or in some cases, cutlery fly about. The aunt falls mysteriously ill and has to go to the hospital, accompanied by the uncle, leaving the now demon-possessed kids in the hands of their niece and her eighties-haired boyfriend. The boyfriend has come upon the one thing that can stop the diabolical doll, namely a shiny medallion. Being Mexican, he’s done the obvious with the medallion: Hanging it from the rear view mirror of his crappy truck. This turns out to be fortuitous, since the doll remote controls his truck and tries to kill him with it, but the medallion stops it (after he stupidly tries to outrun the truck for a while). He then gets back into the truck and drives it through the wall of the house, which does no good at all, since he’s soon impaled by several pieces of levitating cutlery, and then sucked into a smoking mirror (well, he’s pressed against the mirror for a while, then disappears).

The girlfriend hangs around for a while screaming, the uncle tries to return from the hospital, but has diabolical car trouble, and then the idiot girlfriend remembers that the boyfriend said something about the medallion being their only hope, so she gets it and presses it against the doll, then throws the whole thing in the fireplace. This makes the house catch fire, and then explode several times, while everyone barely escapes alive. The final scene shows the house for sale, now in its original dilapidated but not burned down and blown up condition, and the diabolical doll reveals itself to another little girl.

This movie was incredibly horrible, like some sort of retarded, slow-moving version of The Evil Dead, without anyone being raped by trees. Lucky for me, there’s a sequel, which I might get to see some time, called Vacaciones de terror 2: Noche de brujas, and as a bonus, that one features children’s artist Tatiana. I can’t wait.