Terror and
    Black Lace

Slasher Trash with Panache?

Review:JA Kerswell

A thoroughly entertaining slice of telenovela—or rather, would be terrornovela. A sex maniac with a fetish for chopping off ladies' hair lives below the Mexican Jan Brady and her swinging locks. It can only spell trouble. Whilst the first two-thirds of the movie features melodrama so overblown it would make Pedro Almodóvar blush, it concludes with an epic battle-axe-wielding Brian Clemens-style cat-and-mouse chase that features both terror and, yes, skimpy black lace.
 
Beautiful young bride Isabel (Maribel Guardia) lives in the penthouse with her controlling husband Martinínez (Gonzalo Vega), a machismo-fueled travel agent who can inexplicably afford such luxurious surroundings. She feels trapped and wants the freedom to go shopping and buy a negligee—of the black lacey kind. After a hyperventilating fight where Isabel tells her Martinínez to shoot her through her lingerie-clad heart with his pistol or let her go to the mall, he relents—only for her to almost immediately fall under the spell of Rubén (Jaime Moreno), a smooth playboy with a cleft chin the shape of pert buttocks.
 
Meanwhile, her downstairs neighbour Cèsar (Claudio Obregón) is outwardly a respectable university music historian but hides a dark secret. At night, he goes out in his Volkswagen Beetle and violently chops off ladies’ ponytails—which he keeps in an ornate wardrobe and sometimes takes to bed with him. In a variation on Abel Ferrara’s DRILLER KILLER (1979), César’s mental health continues to decline because of his female neighbours downstairs—a trio of excitable, flirtatious travel agents and their too-loud stereo system and constant disco music.
 
Although Cèsar makes it a rule not to be a hairdo hacker at his apartment complex, he looses control and murders the building's maid Coquis (Claudia Guzmán), when she makes him sniff her freshly washed and conditioned hair. Trying to dispose of the body via the lift, he is surprised by Isabel and decides he must kill the only witness to his latest crime …  

TERROR AND BLACK LACE is a curious mix of Latino soap opera and psycho-sexual shenanigans—with a decidedly slasher movie happy finish. However, those expecting a more conventional subgenre picture, be warned, as the majority of the movie is given over to Isabel’s desires and temper tantrums—as well as frog-marching around her apartment with freshly painted toenails. The first two-thirds is pure telenovela—the wonderfully lurid type of South American melodrama with its over-emoting and outrageous plot twists. Your mileage may vary on this. Personally, I found it entertaining, especially wrapped up in its gaudy mid-‘80s fashions and sensibilities. 
 
However, Cèsar makes for a curious villain with his beatnik beard, brown polo neck and beige polyester slacks. He looks like he should be enjoying smooth jazz rather than chasing Isabel around her apartment complex with a battle axe. The film makes sure that her skimpy black lace negligee is shown off to full effect when she takes off her dress and throws it off the roof in a failed attempt to attract the attention of the police below. The cat and mouse and up and down in the apartment’s lift—accompanied by the pounding music from the neighbours’ party—is very reminiscent of Brian Clemens’ super fun made-for-TV proto-slasher I’M THE GIRL HE WANTS TO KILL (1974) (and it is possible this was an inspiration). However, the film is much less structured like a typical slasher movie than the films of Mexican director Rubén Galindo Jr., such as DON’T PANIC (1987)—although it similarly features the seemingly de rigueur romance-in-the-park montage.
 
Spanish director Luis Alcoriza—who was a friend and collaborated with Luis Buñuel—seems to have been something of a dilettante. He moved from comedy and melodrama but doesn’t appear to have any other horror credits. However, the well-constructed chase sequences suggest he had a flair for thriller material that otherwise went unexplored. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Costa Rican actress Maribel Guardia went on to become something of a Queen of the telenovela in Mexico. 
 
As I said, your mileage may vary. However, if you enjoy some campy melodrama with a slasher twist (as I do), TERROR AND BLACK LACE is a fun watch, to be sure—and its frothy ​exuberance gains it an extra half point. 

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