Alucarda (1977)

Alucarda (1977) Directed by Juan Lopez Moctezuma

Juan López Moctezuma’s sacrilegious Alucarda is a very uncanny examination of the female psyche in its pubescent stage as seen through the metaphorical praxis of demonic possession. Tendentious and tritely blasphemous, this English-language Mexican film about the titular character (Tina Romero), a gothic teenage orphan fostered since her unholy birth by a Catholic convent of nuns, tells a heterogeneous yarn of inhibited lust, religious superstition and diabolical phenomenology.

Alucarda and her morbid fascination with death and the supernatural – always appropriately attired in funereal black – lead her to unlock unknown doors and cursed tombs with her beloved friend and eternal love Justine (Susana Kamini), one of the young guests at the convent, with whom she discovers and then embraces the antithesis of Christianity and falls prey to the profanity and debauchery of Satanism. The eerie atmosphere of its cavernous expressionistic décor and its heretical romanticism hints at the otherworldly, even if it does not make explicit its realm of fantasy, hence the superstitious hysteria that deafens the scenario with the typical battle of scientific rationality against religious transcendentalism stands more on an allegorical ground than on a real one. However, it is loaded with absurdities that are intrinsically amateurish. Moctezuma helms this sinister, sapphic Lucifer fable with counterproductive histrionics; the framing is theatrical, and the performances are reduced to shouting and delirium.

The effects are woefully more laughable than caustic – witnessing the entire cast in a perennial show of overacting is not necessarily pleasant, just plain annoying – as we behold a bunch of hysterical women screaming, the unpretentiously pretentious anti-narrative that hijacks the phenomenology of the visuals fails to produce anything more than an inert tableau of clichéd satanic imagery. Along the way the film loses the meaning of its statement by failing to pinpoint what exactly its diatribe is condemning. I’m sure even the performances don’t have a clue, after all they just rant and rave the whole movie. Tina Romero is superb though, as the creepy Alucarda as long as she’s not subjected to the exploitative theatrics of the hokiest ritualistic stagings.

When Alucarda implicitly whispers, gently entices Justine, the film incarnates the essence of a very alluring, oneiric coming-of-age fairy tale. Alas, such cinematic refinements are short-lived. Way too theatrical for my taste, too obvious in its inspirations – the finale is basically The Exorcist meets Carrie – and too contrived to be genuinely thought-provoking.