Original title: El hombre y el monstruo

Like its US double bill mate, The Bloody Vampire (1962), The Man and the Monster has an impressive opening sequence – a young woman (Mari Carmen Vela) crashes her car and ends up badly mauled when she tries to find help at a nearby hacienda. What follows is a strange mish-mash of Faust, The Hands or Orlac, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Wolf Man (1941) that never wanders from its original inspiration, the Universal monster films of the 1930s and 40s.

Music agent Ricardo (Abel Salazar, who also produced the film), arrives in a small Mexican village in search of the legendary pianist Samuel Magno (Enrique Rambal), to discuss with him plans for a comeback performance after many years as a recluse. The composer lives in the house that the woman was attacked at and when Ricardo calls on him, he’s told that Magno can no longer play and that he’s been training Laura (Martha Roth) to make her debut during his forthcoming performance. But Laura later reveals that Magno does still play, but only at night and always the same piece. Ricardo discovers the corpse of a former pupil, Alejandra (Roth again) sealed up in a shrine that also contains a piece of sheet music for the music that Magno keeps playing. It seems that Magno sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for prowess on the keyboard but now he’s compelled to play the mysterious tune which causes him to transform into a werewolf like creature who hates anyone better at the piano than he is.

It’s all wild and crazy stuff – it doesn’t make a lot of sense, stretches credulity to breaking point and is more likely to generate laughs than shudders but it has some lovely black and white photography from Raúl Martínez Solares (50s and 60s Mexican horror films are often better looking than one might expect), decent performances and sprightly direction from Rafael Baledón.

But the monster is a major let down, a second rate riff on Universal’s Wolf Man make-up and the sight of the fully transformed Magno pounding away at the piano is unintentionally hilarious. He does, though, get a great scene later in the film where he goes on the rampage in a hotel where he’s quite the monstrous brute,throwing bellboys to the ground, crashing through doors and pursuing women around the building.

All that said, The Man and the Monster is still a lot of fun, and is arguably one of the very best of the Mexican horror films of the period. It rattles along at a fair old clip, barely leaving time to ponder its many idiocies for too long and even though the special effects are seriously lacking, the ranting, egotistical monster has a lot of wayward charm.

Abel Salazar, who plays Souto, was a prolific actor, producer and director in Mexican cinema of the 1940s, 50s and beyond who later appeared in some more widely seen genre films, among them La maldición de la Llorona/The Curse of the Crying Woman (1961) (also directed by Baledón) and El baron del terror/The Brainiac (1962). He was largely responsible for starting the craze for Mexican Gothics in the late 1950s when he starred in and produced El vampire/The Vampire (1957) and its sequel El ataúd del Vampiro/The Vampire’s Coffin (1958). He and Enrique Rambal as Magno are the most recognisable faces in a cast that does remarkably well with the ludicrous material they’re given.