La noche de los brujos

The Night of the Sorcerers (1974)

** (out of 4)

Mildly amusing film from director Amando de Ossorio takes place in Africa where various voodoo ceremonies are taking place. As the film opens we see a woman captured and have her head cut off. From here we're introduced to a new group of people who have come to do some research and before long they are taken one by one to the voodoo grounds.

THE NIGHT OF THE SORCERERS has a lot of the right ingredients for a good movie but sadly it falls well sort of putting everything together and turning it into something memorable. I say this because the story is an interesting one, there's plenty of gore to be found, the cast is attractive and there's even a kinky sex scenes. All of this should have led to a much better movie but we've got a lot of flaws that keep it from being better.

I think one of the biggest flaws in the movie is the use of slow-motion. If you're familiar with the director's Blind Dead series then you know that he's a fan of using the slow-motion but it just doesn't work here and in fact it looks pretty bad. Just check out the scenes where the woman are chasing someone and the way the slow-motion has them bouncing (slowly) is just comical at times. It certainly kills any chance of suspense or tension.

Another problem with the film is that the story itself is rather spotty as it basically just sets up the next victim without too much detail or anything else. A character shows up, gets captured and then killed. As I said, the film has some good qualities including the setting, which was nice and I'd also argue that the cast was a lot of fun. The film is mildly entertaining but there's no question that it should have been better.

No Horror fan can doubt that Spanish director Amando De Ossorio deserves great praise for his absolutely awesome "Blind Dead" series, which he began in 1970 with "La Noche Del Terror Ciego" ("Tombs of the Blind Dead"). These four films enjoy an enormous (and well-deserved) cult status and the eponymous undead Blind Templars range among the creepiest creatures ever to appear on screen. "La Noche De Los Brujos" aka. "Night of the Sorcerers" (1973) is sadly a weaker film in Ossorio's repertoire, as this little trash offering makes no sense at all and furthermore tends to get quite boring.

In 1910, a tribe of savages in an African country behead a hot woman, who then turns out to be a female vampire... Decades later, two scientists (Simón Andreu and Jack Taylor) and three hot babes travel the country in order to take photos of endangered animals and happen to come to the exact same spot...

In spite of a better cast (frequent Giallo leading man Simón Andreu, Exploitation regular Jack Taylor and sexy Spanish cult-siren Bárbara Rey, who also was in "Ghost Ships of the Bind Dead") "La Noche De Los Brujos" reaches neither the creepy atmosphere nor the suspense or entertainment level of any of the 'Blind Dead' films. This is not to say that "La Noche De Los Brujos" is completely without qualities, however. It is, to a certain extent, fun to watch. The female cast members are entirely hot (especially Bárbara Rey and the maroon-haired Kali Hansa), and all take their clothes off at some point. Also, in typical Ossorio manner, the gore-effects are very well-made. That's about it though, as the film is sometimes unintentionally funny and the storyline is flawed and full of holes. A Horror film doesn't necessarily have to be 'realistic', but it should have a certain inner logic, and the story-parts should connect, which isn't really the case here. "La Noche De Los Brujos" isn't a complete disaster, but its definitely not very good, and there are far better films by Amando De Ossorio to check out. 4.5/10

Amando de Ossorio's La Noche de los Brujos has one of the most entertainingly trashy pre-credits sequences ever...

Bumbasa, 1910: natives perform a ceremony in the jungle, tying a beautiful woman to a tree and flogging her until her blouse falls open. She is lashed some more until her underwear falls off (these guys have got some serious whip skills!). The natives dance while the chief rapes the poor woman, after which she is placed on a sacrificial altar and beheaded with a machete. As the tribe smears themselves in her blood, a squad of soldiers arrives and shoots the lot of them. Suddenly, the woman's decapitated head springs to life, baring a mean pair of fangs - she's a vampire!!!

All of this was so insanely over-the-top that I decided to watch the whole film despite discovering that my copy was in Spanish with no subtitles.

The rest of the film takes place in Bumbasa in the present day. A group of people - two men and three sexy ladies (a brunette and two blondes) - set up camp by a river; before long, the women are strutting around in varying degrees of undress, which is nice. The brunette has some sexy time with her one of the men in the river, while one of the blondes spies from the bushes and takes photographs (without using the flash, which means that the pictures would be rubbish). Meanwhile, deep in the jungle, the natives that were killed in the opening scene rise from their graves as zombies (or ghosts, or zombie ghosts)

The next day, the blonde with the camera (who looks muy tasty in a denim mini-skirt) wanders off into the jungle, where she encounters the zombies and the vampire woman, who grab her and tie her up. The vampire whips her, and blondie's top comes open. The vamp pulls the woman's skirt off, bites her on the neck, places her on the tribe's chopping block, and hacks her head off with a machete. Again, the severed noggin comes back to life with fangs. The whole whipping/decapitation/vampire thing was great the first time around, but the same routine repeated is less impressive. So when it happens for a third time, with the second blonde, I was not happy.

The film ends with the brunette almost getting the whip and machete routine, but being rescued by her lover in the nick of time, the man destroying most of the zombies and vampires by throwing his bullet belt into their fire.

Given the amazing opening, the rest of the film, with its repetitiveness, has to be deemed a bit of a disappointment.

5/10. I nearly docked a point when the roll of film in the blonde woman's camera is developed, and all the pictures come out fine, but a gratuitous naked washing scene easily made up for that.

Amando de Ossorio will always be best remembered for his Blind Dead series of films, and that's a very good thing as the films he made outside of that trilogy aren't nearly as good - this one is a prime example. The subject of voodoo is an interesting one, but it never seems to cross over very well to movies, as just about every film I've seen on this topic has been disappointing and unfortunately, this one is no different. It's a real shame too as a film with these elements really could have been a lot better, but Amando de Ossorio isn't able to create an interesting plot around the central idea and unfortunately it falls flat. The film starts with a sequence that sees a woman have her head cut off during a voodoo ceremony. From there we focus on a team of researchers who head out into Africa in an attempt to find out why elephants are disappearing from the area. They soon discover that the locals are afraid of a legend about some voodoo witches in the area, and naturally this turns out to be true and some of the researchers get killed...etc etc.

I'm not sure if it was just a problem with the copy I saw (apparently, there's a remastered DVD out now), but this film is very dark and it's often difficult to make what - if anything - is going on. The cinematography is nothing special either and that's a shame because any film set in Africa has the potential for plenty of interesting shots but that isn't capitalised on. Amando de Ossorio does manage to pack some gore and nudity into the film, though it's scant consolation for the rest of the film. The sorcerers themselves also don't manage much in the way of intrigue as they don't appear all that often and when they do, not a lot happens. The plot surrounding the team of researchers is completely worthless and didn't generate anything that I cared for, which gives the film a rather flimsy backbone. Simón Andreu is the only name on the cast list that I recognised and he doesn't do enough to stand out. To the film's credit, the women featured are invariably very nice looking. Overall, this is not a great film and I can't recommend it; see Ossorio's Blind Dead series or The Loreley's Grasp instead!

OK, this is not a good film. But I think it is somewhat underrated, while the director Amando Ossorio's more famous "blind dead" series is somewhat overrated (especially the last two). Instead of undead Teutonic knights, in this film we have a tribe of living voodoo-practicing Africans. Of course, voodoo sacrifices have been practiced historically in places on the "dark continent", but this bunch are little more than cartoon stereotypes (all they need is a big pot to cook people in). I suppose it doesn't help that the tribe exclusively captures white women, whips all their clothes off, rapes them (at least in one case), and then decapitates them--which somehow causes them to become undead "panther women", prowling half-naked through the jungle in slow motion (and WITH their heads). But is this the only film of the 1970's to portray black Africans as "primitive", or to play on the illicit thrills of interracial sexuality? Hardly. All those who call this racist and/or sexist really need to see more European exploitation films of that era. This is actually pretty weak tea.

It's also a very typical low-budget Spanish horror film--short on a logic, long on atmosphere, extremely confusing but with a generous helpings of nudity and violence (at least in export prints). It's certainly more incompetent than Ossorio's best films, but I'd put it on the level of a mediocre Paul Naschy flick, and it has the same scruffy charm as a lot of those. There's also a couple of recognizable actors among the European characters who come to a bad end at the hands of the African voodoo cultists and "panther women", including Jess Franco regular Jack Taylor, as the expedition leader, and the slinky and sexy cubana Kali Hansa as the "half-breed". It's out on DVD now and is worth a rental, if maybe not a purchase, for fans of Spanish horror.