By Silvia Moreno-Garcia

This week, in Hidden Histories, we are talking about the secret and obscures places surrounding us. To an outsider, Mexico does not seem very secret or obscure. If you’ve never been there, you’ve at least seen the photos of people tanning on the beach under a palm tree, sipping Margaritas. The casual tourist does not generally pause to consider the many layers of history hidden in Mexico, from Prehispanic cultures to the bloody struggles that have dotted the country, especially the Mexican Revolution, an armed conflict that lasted from 1910 until 1920.

There are few speculative films that look at Mexico, even fewer that deal with horror and intersect with history. I’m discussing two of them this week: The Ruins and From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman’s Daughter

From Dusk Till Dawn 3 plays like a Western for the better part of its length, switching to horror in the last bit. It begins with a Mexican outlaw who is about to be hanged, but is rescued and rides away with the hangman’s daughter. They decide to spend the night in a creepy bordello full of vampires, where they run into a preacher and Ambrose Bierce, as well as the very angry hangman who wants his daughter back.

By the way, don’t believe the reviewers who say this flick is set in Mexico in 1870. Any cursory glance of a textbook will prove to you the Mexican Revolution was most definitely not taking place in that time period. This movie is firmly planted in the 1910-1920 period. I should know: my great-grandmother lived through it

There are so many little things to love about this movie, even if it collapses into a failure by the time the credits roll. Stuff like the period-accurate uniforms worn by the Federales who accompany the hangman and the appearance of Ambrose Bierce, who really did journey to Mexico in hopes of covering the unfolding Mexican Revolution, made me smile. For a moment, it looked like this movie might be summarized as “Pancho Villa versus the Vampires” and that nugget of an idea – which never crystallizes, because Ambrose Bierce ends up at the bordello, not in Villa’s company – is brilliant. Unfortunately, instead of having revolutionaries, outlaws, Federal troops, vampires and famous Mexican characters such as Villa clashing in northern Mexico, we end up at the bordello.

The bordello, for all its vampire prostitutes, is a drag. We’ve seen the bordello in the first movie and there’s nothing fresh in stock in it. After all, a vampire bar brawl is pretty much a vampire bar brawl. The second half of the movie is guilty of loosing steam and the movie, as a whole, does not allow us to get to know the characters well enough to care who is getting out of the bordello alive (the fact that you pretty much know that answer since the beginning of the film does not help).

There’s some mumbo-jumbo about Aztec ceremonies, a gross-ancient vampire and lots of blood, but it’s not very fun because the most interesting parts of the movie, which are so easily discarded by the writer, are the intersection of real and fictional characters in a horror universe. I suppose it had to with money. The bordello, after all, was a cheap and easy set to film in. Anything else, and you’d need to add more extras, costumes and effects. Plus, “Mexican vampire prostitutes eat people” is an easier concept to stitch together than a more complex storyline.

This is the kind of movie which is best watched because it inspires thoughts of what might have been, instead of what is being projected on the screen.

You can purchase From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman’s Daughter through Amazon.com

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