original production:
Cast: Rosita Arenas (Emily), Rita Macedo (Aunt Thelma/The Crying Woman), Abel Salazar (Herbert), Carlos Lopez Moctezuma (Fred), Domingo Soler (Daniel/Wild Man in Bell Tower), Roy Fletcher, Enrique (Henry) Lucero, Mario Sevilla, Julissa del Llano (Female Stagecoach Passenger)
PLOT SUMMARY:
A young woman discovers she is next in line to join a family of witches.
SYNOPSIS:
A ghost-woman stands in the misty shadows of a dark forest with her giant hounds. Her henchman, Fred, is a creepy slave with the trademark disfigured face so common in Spanish horror folklore. Her dogs and cohort brutally attack and kill three coach riders, as the woman watches, trembling, clearly in the throes of a sexual release.
A cute young woman, Emily, arrives at the strange woman's creepy old castle with her pudgy husband Herbert, to visit. Emily is the niece of the demon-woman, who she knows as Aunt Thelma.
Emily goes to her room and looks in the mirror first thing, where she sees a horrible skull face smiling back at her!
Aunt Thelma returns home from her murders, entering a rat-infested dungeon as a flying, robed skeleton. She turns back into female, and prays to a rotting corpse as it turns into a zombie-woman. We soon discover that Thelma's evil mission is to bring, through the bloody murder of many humans, a vampire demoness back to life, a demon known as Marianne Lane, the Wailing Witch!!!
Herbert snoops around, and is menaced by hairy hands and rubber bats. The hand belongs to a monster in a closet, who causes Herb to fall off the stairs.
Thelma tells Emily of her familial destiny: at midnight, she will become next in a long line of bloodthirsty she-demons. And her initiation will bring back the main witch, who was speared with a lance and paralyzed by Thelma's late husband. She must remove the lance from the witch's heart as the bells of the castle start to ring once more.
Emily rebels, and runs to town to get help for Herb. On the way, she curiously finds herself almost strangling a man to death. The curse has begun!
Back at the witch house, Thelma uses a flaming Voodoo doll to put a spell on Herbert. She tells him the story of the evil preistess (visualized via an incredible montage, told largely in negative). After the occult lecture, Thelma starts to make out with Herbert, but Emily runs in. Emily looks in a mirror, and can no longer see her reflection. She's turning into pure evil!
Herbert and Emily run up into the old bell tower. Herbert falls through a trap door, and the closet monster attacks Emily, stopping long enough to rip up a painting of Thelma's dead husband.
Thelma's hounds attack and kill two policemen.
Midnight strikes. The bell starts ringing. Emily, completely under the spell of evil, grabs a lance and begins to remove it from the main witch.
Herbert pleads with her, and Emily comes to her senses. The bell stops ringing. The walls start to crumble. Fred and Herbert fight. Herbert and Emily escape, but the cave-in crushes Thelma and her demon goddess, along with Fred, Daniel and the hell-hounds.
REVIEW:
This is an outstanding Mexican horror movie, moody and atmospheric and creepy as hell, combining the best cliches of gothic horror with a somewhat perverse sense of sexual decadance and repressed lesbianism, reveling in the dark side of female empowerment and extended families.
The pre-credits teaser opens with a close-up of the grotesque face of a woman (Rita Macedo) with a distorted grimace and bloated, swollen eyes. The murder of the coach riders) is dynamic and gripping.
Rita Macedo, made-up as the Crying Woman, has a face of pained evil that reminds us of Mr. Sardonicus and Dorian Gray, indicative of both madness and posession.
The photography is great, spooky and grim, featuring lots of fun zoom shots which add dramatic emphasis to already-lurid scenes. The "occult montage " scene is breathtaking in its otherworldy creepiness. There's some incredible shots of Thelma's cheesy model house collapsing, and a powerful score by Gustavo Cesar Carrion.
The f/x are excellent (the dungeon set is great, full of cobwebs and torture devices and occult paraphenalia and big gears for the bell). Even the make-up is fantastic. Ms. Macedo's eyes, when posessed, are so eerie as to be painful.
THE CURSE OF THE CRYING WOMAN is a winner all the way.
COMMENTS:
* (updated 02-14-06) 
Thanks to a terrific new book we just received, "Ghouls, Gimmicks and Gold" by Kevin Heffernan, (2004, Duke University Press), we have been able to update the U.S. television release date for this Murray horror title to 1965. The appendices to this study of the horror film in America, circa 1955-1968, include complete listings of syndication feature film packages from many distributors, including American International Television, who subleased the K. Gordon Murray film catalog under the title THRILLERS FROM ANOTHER WORLD. It seems that 1965 was the watershed year for genre film sold to television, with a veritable flood of titles released by both domestic and foreign distribs.
* (effective 05-01-03) After a very brief window of availability, this long-sought K. Gordon Murray title is once again out of print, due to international copyright issues. Used video tapes of this title may be found on online video dealers and auction sites. Stay tuned for further developments!
* THE CURSE OF THE CRYING WOMAN is one of several "La Llorona" films made in Mexico, based on popular Spanish folklore.
* Released to US TV in 1965, THE CURSE OF THE CRYING WOMAN was re-released in 1969 on a theatrical co-bill with: THE BRAINIAC!
* The teenage cutie in the stagecoach who is brutally run over in the pre-credits teaser is Julissa del Llano (later billed simply as "Julissa"), who co-starred with Boris Karloff several years later in three of his last horror films, SNAKE PEOPLE, SINISTER INVASION and FEAR CHAMBER.
NOTABLE DIALOGUE:
"I've destroyed Virtue!"
