The Living Coffin Review

The film opens in a crumbling, once-grand hacienda. The old mistress of the house, Clotilde, died a year previous, having descended into madness following the death of her children, leaving the family without a strong leader at the helm. Worse, Clotilde's body has gone missing and rumor is that she wanders the nearby swamp where her children perished, wailing out her pain and wreaking bloody vengeance on anyone unfortunate enough to wander in range of her grasp. At the family home Clotilde's surviving sister has descended into an obsessive mania of her own: believing that the undead Clotilde will one day return to kill her she indulges all sorts of superstitious practices to ward off evil and has gone so far as to install an elctrical warning bell in her own coffin to prevent anyone trying to steal or tamper with her corpse upon her death.

Into this home wanders our hero, a roaming traveller known only as The Cowboy looking for information on a strange statue carved some years before by Clotilde before her death. Accompanying The Cowboy are his hyper-intelligent horse and his sidekick Crazy Coyote - significantly less intelligent than the horse and concerned only with finding a comfortable bed where he can get a good night's sleep. As The Cowboy gets drawn into the mystery of the hacienda and the bodies begin to pile up we learn that he is, in fact, a wandering law man and that he is determined to crack the case. By the time we get to the end we'll have witnessed multiple murders, a hidden gold mine, a bar room brawl, secret passage ways throughout and under the old house, various masked villains, and the horse weilding a firearm.

The Living Coffin succeeds because it knows exactly what kind of film it is: this is pure b-film pulp. The star was the son of a prominent politician, cast both for his father's name and for his own fame as a prominent bull fighter, who claimed to consider his film work - he starred in eleven features in all - a distraction from his true love - bullfighting - to the point that he never even bothered to watch his own films after they were complete. A man in love with his craft and prone to take himself seriously this isn't. Director Mendez has obvious technical skills but also shows here that he has a great love for the cheap serialized westerns of earlier decades and he pulls out every trick from that era he can as often as he can. The film is less a coherent story than it is a pastiche of set pieces and crisis moments but it moves quickly from point to point and if you're willing to go where it wants to take you it is a good bit of fun.

Though time has not been as kind to the source elements of The Living Coffin as it was to The Black Pit the DVD release once again shows CasaNegra's commitment to quality. Audio and video have both been remastered from restored vault elements. The clean up on this film is not flawless, there is still some damage evident, but on the whole it is in remarkably good shape for a low budget offering from this time period. Both the original Spanish and subsequent English dub are included as audio options along with a poster and still gallery, very extensive cast biographies, and an excellent photo essay on the history of the horror-western in Mexico. The Living Coffin is certainly not the best film in CasaNegra's impressive catlaogue, nor has it received the most robust release, but it once again showcases CasaNegra as a quality label devoted to digging up notable and otherwise forgotten genre classics from Mexico's extensive film history and giving them the sort of quality releases they deserve.