Your Daily Dracula – Carlos Lucena as Dr Vilaseca, La Momia Nacional (1981)
The Spanish director José Ramón Larraz is best known to horror fans for a run of moody, sexy, strange films made in the UK in the 1970s – The House That Screamed, Symptoms, Vampyres, etc. Those who’ve delved deeper into his filmography are aware of his Spanish erotic films, which also have macabre elements – The Coming of Sin, Black Candles. And late in his career, he dashed off faux-Yank slasher/old dark house schlock Rest in Pieces, Edge of the Axe and Deadly Manor. There are lesser-known gems in his filmography – Dark Doors and Stigma are especially strong. But only the most completist-minded will be able to sit through the Larraz films which were his biggest hits in Spain – Polvos Mágicos (Lady Lucifera, 1979) and this follow-up, both entries in the surprisingly extensive sub-genre of Spanish knockabout monster comedy. From Un Vampiro para Dos (1965) onwards, there have been a lot of unexportable Spanish laff-fests involving vampires, werewolves, mad scientists, mummies and the like.
La Momia Nacional notionally focuses on a mummy, but it’s as scattershot – and, it has to be said, hard to like – as any of the Scary Movie films. I guess the pitch is a sexier version of Carry On Screaming, and since I saw an unsubtitled Spanish language print it’s just possible that the dialogue is full of scintillating wordplay which passed me by … but the humour is mostly base, kind of mean-spirited (a Larraz trait), clumsy and (worst of all) not that funny. A few neat ideas pop up amid groaner stuff like the partially unwrapped mummy showing her breasts, but many of the routines are just head-scratchingly puzzling – a sex scene between the hero and a vampire hooker is interrupted by a bloke with stereotype gay mannerisms dressed as cupid descending through the ceiling to prod the guy in the bum with an arrow … a vampire counters a cross by holding up a hammer and sickle sign only to be defeated when a dwarf minion trumps that with a red swastika, and the monster does the rot-to-a-skeleton bit then turns into a big hamhock which the dwarf tucks into (there are a lot of food jokes) … a cackling matriarch (Lili Muráti) is possessed (?) and runs about with a cleaver murdering people, chasing the entire cast on a scooter for the Benny Hill-style sped-up finale before being dynamited by passing bikers (NB: the film has an 1890s-look period setting).
The hook is that diminitive-but-not-a-dwarf Egyptologist Felipe (Quique Camoiras) brings the mummy of an Egyptian Princess to Spain, and has – as in The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals – somehow contracted lycanthropy, which prompts him to go through a Lon Chaney Wolf Man parody transformation (with wagging tail) which makes you wonder why the film doesn’t play to its national audience by poking fun at the slobbering change-o scenes of Paul Naschy’s werewolf films. Hero Saturnino (Francisco Algora) keeps getting distracted by the cleavage of the Professor’s daughter Ana Mari (Azucena Hernández) while the actual-dwarf butler Agapito (José Jaime Espinosa) is more interested in unwrapping the mummy in a fairly queasy routine which includes the sound of a creaking door when Agapito opens the mummy’s legs. The lycanthrope Professor is packed off to an asylum run by Dr Vilaseca (Carlos Lucena), who looks a lot like Klaus Kinski in Nosferatu and has three Dracula brides in coffins in the basement – renting them out as hookers in a local brothel. Besides parodying Werner Herzog and Tod Browning, Larraz takes a swing at Terence Fisher – the horny mummy (I couldn’t identify the actress, who is only seen unmasked in long shot briefly near the end) attacks with stiff arms like Christopher Lee in The Mummy (1959), barging into well-appointed rooms and making grabs for the crotches of any available man. An even deeper cut is the severed-head-under-a-salver table scene, which seems to be a parody of Curse of the Corpse People … or at least of the most-often reproduced still from that little-seen film.
The only cast member who rises above the material is Muráti – possibly because she gets to do violence and cruelty gags rather than smut material.
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