Javier Loya Movies

While vacationing in Haiti, four innocents stumble onto a voodoo ceremony. The presiding witch doctor places a curse upon the unfortunate tourists. This curse is manifested in the form of four outsized voodoo dolls -- which turn out to be a quartet of malevolent midgets. In its native Mexico, The Curse of the Doll People was originally titled Muñecos Infernales. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

The great screen surrealist Luis Buñuel co-wrote and directed this dark, bitterly witty satire. A group of people in formal dress arrives at an elegantly appointed home for a dinner party. However, once dinner is over and the guests retire to the drawing room, they discover that the servants have gone away, and for some reason they cannot leave. There is no explanation why -- there are no locked doors or barred windows preventing them from going home -- but the guests are convinced that they're stranded. Left to their own devices, they slowly but gradually degenerate into genteel savagery, taking an axe to a water pipe for drinking water, killing and eating a sheep that was to be part of the post-dinner entertainment, hiding the bodies of dead guests in the closet, dabbling in witchcraft, and burning the furniture. Buñuel's dry, quixotic wit is abundantly displayed in this film. Leading the cast was Silvia Pinal, the renowned actress who starred in several of Buñuel's Mexican films (she was married to noted producer Gustavo Alatriste, who produced several films with Buñuel). Other than the short subject Simon of the Desert, El Angel Exterminador proved to be Buñuel's last film made in his adopted homeland. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

A comparatively conventional Luis Bunuel effort, the Mexican Woman Without Love is based on a short story by Guy de Maupassant. Rosario Granados plays a young wife, Rosario Montero. Ignored by her wealthy art dealer husband, Don Carlos (Julio Villarreal) -- who is many years her senior -- Rosario enters into an affair with an engineer, Julio Mistral (Tito Junco), by whom she becomes pregnant. Immediately after Rosario conceives, Don Carlos grows seriously ill, and Rosario is thus forced to abandon the affair and take care of him; she passes off her newborn as her husband's child. Two decades pass; Julio dies, leaving his fortune to Don Carlos. This stirs up all kinds of trouble, including suspicions among the now-grown Montero children of their mother's onetime infidelity, and consequent feelings of filial bitterness and hostility. The strains are too great for everyone to bear and the family slowly unravels. The anti-clerical strain in Woman without Love is not as pronounced as the anti-establishment theme, but it's there for those familiar with Bunuel's "code words" and imagery. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi