Epic mullet intact, Pedro Fernández is the lone cast member of René Cardona III’s Vacation of Terror to return for the wonderfully titled sequel, Vacation of Terror 2: Diabolical Birthday, again as Julio. Alternately (and unimaginatively) known as Pesadilla Sangrienta (Bloody Nightmare), this second helping may be an improvement over the original, but let the record show that no one takes a vacation.

Now under the guiding hand of another director with Roman numerals in his name, Pedro Galindo III, the Mexico-made monstrosity puts Julio in the antiques biz. What to his rapey eyes should appear in his store one day but teen tart Mayra (unimonikered singer Tatiana). He gives her a free plant worth 60,000 pesos in hopes of getting into her pantalones; instead, he gets an invitation to hear her sing that night at the birthday party for her 7-year-old sister, Tania (Renata del Río).

The shindig is horror-themed — because if there’s one thing all little girls love, it’s monsters — and being thrown at the movie studio owned by their father, producer Roberto Mondragón (Joaquín Cordero, Wrestling Women vs. the Murderous Robot). Mayra takes the stage to belt a tune whose pure pop pep belies such grim, gibberish lyrics as “Boys, boys, boys / Clumsy and aggressive / Poor boys / Neurotics, all lost / Boys, boys, boys / Super guys / Surprised by Sunday crisis.”

Then Papa Mondragón wheels out a grande-sized strawberry cake, underneath which hides the creepy doll from the first film. Consuming a swiped handful of the cake causes the doll to lose its hair and shed its skin, thus revealing its true self: a goopy demon with horns, tail and all. (Don’t question it.) Tania vanishes within a wall and Julio swoops into he-man mode, strutting around the grounds in a trench coat, as if he were Van Helsing … but played by comedian Paul Rodriguez.

Making cameos in this frivolous spectacle of special effects — “special” as in “special education” — are Tom Cruise and Heather Thomas, albeit via posters: respectively, the Cocktail one-sheet and the smashed-pancake/white-bikini shot that got me all hot and bothered at the onset of puberty. You know, when I was neurotic, all lost, surprised by Sunday crisis. —Rod Lott

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Fernando (Julio Alemán) is an architect who has it all: a loving wife, three kids, another on the way, a teenage niece living under their roof and an appreciation for life’s finer things, i.e. cow-eye tacos. And now he has even more, inheriting a vacation home from his aunt. So what if it “looks like a haunted house,” as his daughter, Gaby (Gianella Hassel Kus), says? It’s his, and it calls for a celebration!

It also calls for, naturally, a vacation — to be precise, a Vacation of Terror! The old place turns out to be a real fixer-upper; it’s all dust and cobwebs and — ay-yi-yi! — the kitchen has no stove! Even worse, the place houses mice, snakes, spiders, bleeding works of art, flying kitchenware and upturned furniture on strings, all because it was built on the site where a witch was burned at the stake, Joan of Arc-style, one century prior.

Besides a pile of ashes, the Beelzebub-worshipping woman left behind a doll, which Gaby promptly finds and clutches. Looking like a bloated, latter-day Elizabeth Taylor, the doll has a porcelain complexion, pursed lips and the ability to do magic things. All of these aforementioned acts are accompanied by a close-up of its eyes shifting back and forth while the soundtrack plays the same sound effect: someone quickly dragging his fingernails across a piano’s wires. Third-generation director René Cardona III employs the aural sting so often, it eventually gains a Pavlovian effect.

If Vacation of Terror weren’t a Mexican-language production, it may not be worth a watch. Seeing American horror tropes filtered through the culture and perspective of our republic neighbors to the south is what makes this cheap flick fun, from the niece’s boyfriend (Pedro Fernández) stepping up as a hero in acid-washed jeans to his oddly phrased declaration that “I, for one, will make myself a sandwich.” His total ingredients are lettuce, tomato and carrots, in case you wish to emulate his snack for optimum viewing; in all honesty, a El Charrito frozen dinner — the more calories, the better — would be more apt. —Rod Lott

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Night of the Bloody Apes earns its reputation as a classic of Mexploitation cinema — and then some. Director René Cardona plundered his own film, 1963’s Doctor of Doom, to build a better monster, adding el grande tres: color, guts, nudity.

Dr. Krallman (José Elías Moreno, who played the title role in Cardona’s Santa Claus) has a problem: His son’s leukemia has progressed to where the young man’s days are numbered. Dr. Krallman also has a two-pronged solution: First, kidnap a gorilla from the zoo. Then, transplant the gorilla’s heart into his son, Julio (Agustín Martínez Solares, Santo & Blue Demon vs. Dracula & the Wolfman). For this second step, Cardona splices in lunch-losing footage of an actual open-heart surgery.

It works! And yet it also doesn’t, because Julio’s head transforms into that of an ape. He doesn’t look simian so much as his face has been dipped in chocolate pudding, which since has dried. Primate Julio runs around town, wanting to rape women, but he cannot figure out how to remove his infernal, high-waisted pajama pants.

So the doc performs another organ swap, this time giving Julio the ticker of a woman who suffered a skull fracture. It works! And yet it also doesn’t, because Julio continues ripping clothes off the ladies and, to their boyfriends, squeezing out marshmallow-like eyeballs, tearing off flesh and other acts that earn the title its penultimate word.

It says a lot about the movie that I haven’t even mentioned the good-guy cop (Armando Silvestre, The Scalphunters) and his girlfriend (Norma Lazareno, Cardona’s Survive!), who wrestles professionally in a red-leather catwoman mask. Cardona’s story is so weird on its own, it doesn’t even need them, yet the two are major players.

Cardona works in a palette of unbelievably bright colors for a story so willfully embroiled in the sleazy side of things; the juxtaposition works to Night of the Bloody Apes‘ advantage, lending a downright quaint and wholesome vibe to its gleeful presentation of gore and gazongas. Plus, it’s easy to love a film rife with such absurd dialogue played straight-faced: “It’s too early to declare a victory. We have to wait and trust in God. Come, help me drag the cadaver of the gorilla over to the incinerator.” —Rod Lott

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Part two of the Philippines-lensed Blood Island franchise begins with a gimmicky prologue exhorting audience members to take the oath to join the Order of the Green Blood. William Castle would be mighty proud of this tacked-on bit, but he would detest the reliance on bare breasts that follows. That’s okay; Mad Doctor of Blood Island was made for us, not for him, and we find it delightful in its good-time depravity.

Government pathologist Bill Foster (John Ashley, Beach Blanket Bingo) heads for the titular site via boat, which also carries the buxom Sheila (Angelique Pettyjohn, Takin’ It Off), who hasn’t seen her isle-bound father since she was 12, and Carlos (veteran Filipino actor Ronaldo Valdez), who’s come to remove his mother from “this wretched island.” What makes the slice o’ paradise so wretched? Dr. Lorca (Ronald Remy, Blood Is the Color of Night), the limping scientist whose experiments toward eternal youth yield green-skinned men with crusty faces, like a progenitor to Swamp Thing.

Whenever director Eddie Romero (The Twilight People) aims his camera at these homicidal freaks of nature, the lens quickly zooms and in and out — not for a few seconds, but for the entire scene, in such a frenzy as to literally induce nausea. Gore is present via butcher-shop scraps placed atop cast members’ torsos. The entire affair is full of screaming mimis and hula dancers and sacrificed goats.

Oh, and bad acting, particularly with its ostensible hero. As wooden as Pettyjohn is pillowy, Ashley puts as much as pizzazz into a dramatic line like, “And these people you’ve caged and mutilated?” as he does a throwaway one such as, “I think your father could use some soup, Sheila.” The only time he seems to be fully charged and in the present moment is in his long-awaited fireside love scene, in which he goes Method to slowly grab a big, honking handful of leading lady. —Rod Lott

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Ever since she was a 10-year-old blonde, the brunette Cathy has seen visions throughout New York City. In the day, it could be a granola-looking woman wrapped in thrift-store duds or a little girl who looks like she came in fourth place in the Heather O’Rourke look-alike contest. In the night, however, Cathy sees Lurkers: superimposed faces and bodies of “horrible old people” surrounding her bed.

Nonetheless, Cathy (Christine Moore, Prime Evil) survives such hauntings — not to mention abuse from and nearly getting stabbed by her shrew of a mother — and becomes a professional cello player who enjoys sexual congress with her fiancé, Bob (Gary Warner, also from Prime Evil), a photographer who looks like Lou Reed. Although she thinks he’s the bee’s knees because he “protects” her while she sleeps, Bob is really a cad who’ll stain the sheets of anything with fallopian tubes. And you think the elderly are horrible, Cathy?

As becomes increasingly obvious to everyone but our big-haired heroine, Bob is involved in some deeply sordid dealings. Such acts come to light approximately at the point of Lurkers when, out of nowhere, a beefy man with a sledgehammer (Tom Billett, Bad Girls Dormitory) appears and flattens the melon of a random screaming woman in the streets. Cathy witnesses this, then immediately attends a party where no one believes her likely story.

That’s when director Roberta Findlay (of, yep, Prime Evil) seems to have tired of the course her film heretofore has taken for a good hour or so and switches gears. This could be because across her decades of work, Findlay is not known for having much use for story, which Lurkers actually possesses — okay, so it’s in piecemeal, but a start is a start. Her touch is all over this one: rough setups, questionable angles and unbalanced performances.

For what it is, Lurkers looks pretty good, benefitting from the decade’s love of bright colors; therefore, I suspect it’s visually sturdier than Findlay’s porn work, although one can sense this movie could become an X-rated pomp at any moment. After all, on display are pink sheets, overgrown ferns, crucified homosexuals in bondage gear and, above all else, lingerie models talking junk bonds and index futures while undressing. —Rod Lott

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