Filmed in Mexico in 1986, LOS MONJES SANGRIENTOS languished in obscurity until it surfaced as BLOOD SCREAMS on home video in late 1990.
Karen (Stacey Shaffer), a pretty American girl traveling through Mexico, tarries at a village haunted by an order of 16th-century monks, who mined a fortune in gold and were then murdered for refusing to divulge the treasure's location. At the instigation of an evil witch (longtime Latin sex
symbol Isela Vega in hag get-up) Karen experiences visions of the phantom monks and numerous flashbacks intended to reveal where the gold is hidden--and to pad out the flimsy plot, which feels much, much longer than 75 minutes.
The robed specters make a particularly unimpressive lot. Standing around stiffly with their faces covered by grayish goo, they resemble disgruntled losers of a mudpie fight. A nowhere subplot features Russ Tamblyn, the acrobatic actor-dancer from TOM THUMB and WEST SIDE STORY, who tumbled
headlong into grade Z movies in the late 1960s. Tamblyn's career picked up recently with a memorably oddball role in TV's "Twin Peaks," but he mainly sits out the action in BLOOD SCREAMS as Frank, an obnoxious wandering vaudeville magician (whose sleight-of-hand feats are merely poor trick
photography) who gets dumped by Karen early on and spends the whole film trying to bum a lift from apathetic peasants. How dull is BLOOD SCREAMS? So dull that when Frank reaches the village at the end, the viewer is glad to see him again. (Violence, profanity, sexual situations, nudity.) leave a comment