Original title: La cabeza viviente

Double billed in the States with the altogether better El espejo de la bruja/The Witch’s Mirror (1962), also produced by actor/producer Abel Salazar and directed by Chano Urueta, The Living Head pales by comparison. It’s essentially a mummy film, albeit featuring an “unwrapped” mummy, one of several made in Mexico around the same time, but it’s really not any better than the dreary Aztec Mummy series.

After a lengthy expository scene set in the distant past featuring an outbreak of stock footage and the sacrifice of a young warrior by the high priest Xiho (Guillermo Cramer) for killing and beheading the warrior Acatl (Mauricio Garcés), we’re introduced to a team of archaeologists led by Professor Herman Meuller (German Robles). They explore the Aztec ruins, discovering the mummies of Xiho and the high priestess Xochiquetzal (Ana Luisa Peluffo). They recover Acatl’s severed head, a large ring and the perfectly preserved body of Xiho. The rest you can probably guess – the head of Acatl is still alive and directs the hulking Xiho to take his revenge on all those who defiled his final resting place.

The film was allegedly shot just a week after work on The Brainiac (1962) had been completed, which might explain why it lacks the lunatic charm of that film or the atmospheric creepiness of The Witch’s Mirror – it feels rushed and half-hearted, as if everyone was just a bit exhausted by it all. The Living Head feels lethargic by comparison, a leaden trudge that even a good cast of Mexican horror regulars can do nothing to save. It feels like Urueta’s heart just wasn’t in it and given how dull Federico Curiel and Adolfo López Portillo’s script is, one can hardly blame him. There are technically worse films among the nine horror produced by Salazar between 1953 and 1963 but few that are a pedestrian as The Living Head.

One of the most fascinating aspects of these Mexican horror films is the use of non-European folklore, though here Urueta manages to make even the most exotic sounding (to none-Mexican ears) characters and legends seem dry and dull. Everyone talks six to the doze – the villains certainly like the sound of their own voices – and it takes an awful long tome for anything to happen. Gustavo Cesar Carrion’s urgent, insistent score seems to be urging the lethargic characters on but to no avail.

The K. Gordon Murray supervised English language dub is predictably even sillier though the original Spanish version fares little better. It’s a feeble effort compared to the rest of Salazar’s films, even the least of which is generally more interesting than this. It reeks of poverty, recycling musical cues from The Brainiac, the sets looking threadbare and spartan and the effects generally very poor (though the disintegration of Xochiquetzal’s mummy is unexpectedly rather good).

The Living Head is one of those films that’s certainly not very good but nor is it bad enough to be even accidentally entertaining. It’s just there, a swiftly conceived and poorly executed waste of everyone’s time. There are hints here and there of the sort of atmosphere that we knew Urueta was capable of conjuring but it’s never enough and what little there is just makes the film all the more disappointing.