the haunted palace

Tres cines de la CDMX

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I recently enjoyed a weeklong vacation in Mexico City with my family, my first time traveling abroad. It was an indulgent trip that mostly consisted of visiting art museums, shopping for vintage clothes, and eating piles of delicious food. Those may not sound like especially strenuous activities, but they did require long hours strolling in the sunshine, which meant a lot of afternoon downtime for my fellow travelers to recover with a traditional siesta. While everyone else smartly took the opportunity to nap between major-event excursions to the lucha libre show or to Diego Rivera’s studio, I instead ventured out of our apartment on solo adventures to survey the local cinema scene. In total, I visited three of CDMX’s local theaters that week for three unique moviegoing experiences. The films I saw were English-language productions subtitled in Spanish, so the only language barrier was figuring out how to order tickets without totally embarrassing myself; I like to think I failed admirably. Here’s a quick recap of the titles & venues I was able to squeeze into the trip.

Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus (2025) @ Cine Tonalá

The one hip English-language film that screened at every indie CDMX cinema the week I happened to visit was the portrait-of-an-artist documentary Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus. Like most audiences, I was previously only aware of its titular one-hit-wonder through her association with Jonathan Demme soundtracks. It turns out that was for a very obvious reason: racism. After running through about a dozen or so Q Lazzarus in the usual style of more famous artists’ docs, a title card in this new career recap reveals that she’s never had an official record release besides her contributions to movie soundtracks, because contemporary producers decided she was too “difficult to market.” It dropped my jaw. As a rise-to-near-fame story, Goodbye Horses gets intensely friendly & intimate with Q herself as she gets to know documentarian Eva Aridjis on a personal level. The most incredible part of her story, really, is the happenstance of meeting the two directors who’ve popularized her music through cinema—Aridjis & Demme—by picking them up as a cabbie working the streets of NYC, decades apart. For his part, Demme made an all-time classic out of “Goodbye Horses” by placing it in two separate films (Married to the Mob and, more infamously, Silence of the Lambs). Aridjis’s contribution is no less significant, though, since her new documentary includes a 21-track collection of Q Lazzarus songs that have been previously left unpublished.

Just as I knew little of Q Lazzarus’s personal or professional life before watching this new documentary, I also had no idea the documentary itself existed until I traveled to Mexico City, where it was playing relatively wide (partially because it’s director Eva Aridjis’s home town). That widespread distribution gave me plenty of options for cinemas to visit, and I settled on Cine Tonalá in the La Roma neighborhood. The single-screen theater is attached to a proudly laidback cocktail bar & performance venue, functioning as a multi-purpose arts space rather than a popcorn-shoveling corporate multiplex. Its closest local equivalent in New Orleans would be The Broad Theater, except with steeper incline seating and more lounging-around space in the lobby. It’s the kind of cozy spot with thoughtful programming that I would visit every week if I lived in the neighborhood (speaking from experience with The Broad).

The Haunted Palace (1963) @ Cineteca Nacional

The Cineteca Nacional museum in the Coyoacán neighborhood is anything but laidback. Built in the 1970s as a temple to celebrate & preserve the artform, it’s an impressively large & lively venue that was swarmed with visitors on the Saturday evening when I dropped by to see 1963’s The Haunted Palace. The 12-screen cinema was showing an eclectic mix of both repertory titles (including selections from Hayao Miyazaki & Agnieszka Holland) and new releases (including Goodbye Horses), but its public cinema is only one facet of the sprawling facility. The massive complex had a college campus feel, complete with museum exhibitions, appointment-only archives, multiple cafés & vendors, an outdoor market, and a quad area where young cineastes were chilling & chatting. I arrived at least a half-hour early, which allowed me enough time to go DVD shopping, picking up a copy of the Mexican horror staple El Vampiro. If I ever return, I’ll make sure to arrive a half-day early instead, since there was plenty more to explore elsewhere on-site.

Among the few repertory titles being offered that week, I of course went for the one directed by Roger Corman and starring Vincent Price, since that’s squarely in my comfort zone. The Haunted Palace is an odd outlier in the Corman-Poe cycle that actor-director duo is best known for, since it only recites a few lines from an Edgar Allan Poe poem and mostly pulls its inspiration from Lovecraft instead. It’s also out of step with the typical payoffs of a classic Roger Corman creature feature, since its central monster doesn’t move an inch and Lon Chaney Jr. gets all of the best jump scares in a supporting role just by . . . hanging around. It’s only a pleasure for audiences who enjoy lounging in spooky castles and fog-machined graveyards while flipping through pages of the Necronomicon (or listening to its Vincent Price audiobook version), not in a rush to get anywhere. That is to say that I very much enjoyed seeing it screened big & loud with an enthusiastic crowd, even if there are far better titles in the Corman-Poe cycle that would’ve been a better use of the time & space (primarily, The Masque of the Red Death). In local terms, the experience was comparable to The Prytania’s recent afternoon screening of The Fall of the House of Usher, except the venue was a half-century newer and the audience was much fuller.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025) @ Cinemex

If Cine Tonalá is the Mexico City equivalent of The Broad and Cineteca Nacional is the Mexico City equivalent of The Prytania, then Cinemex is the local equivalent of an AMC palace. I must’ve passed by a half-dozen locations of the corporate franchise while exploring different parts of the city, so it was hilarious that the one located closest to our apartment was called Casa de Arte, as if it were an independent arthouse. It’s the same way that AMC arbitrarily labels some of its offerings as “Artisan Films” even though they’re wide-release, major-studio productions with massive budgets (no offense meant to the artistry behind AMC Artisan titles like Sinners & The Phoenician Scheme). Cinemex does not offer a one-of-a-kind arthouse experience. It offers the same-as-it-is-everywhere multiplex experience, which is a different flavor that sometimes tastes just as good. It’s about as artisan as a cup of Coca-Cola.

It was in that downtown multiplex that I caught the latest (and possibly last) installment in the Misión: Imposible franchise, The Final Reckoning. Perhaps due to the lack of enthusiasm with the previous entry in that franchise, Dead Reckoning, the three-hour epic does a lot of sweaty scrambling to connect its story to the larger, decades-spanning Mission: Impossible narrative arc before then settling into the tension of two lengthy Tom Cruise stunts: one in which he raids a sinking submarine and one in which he pilots an upside-down airplane with his foot. The resulting picture is one hour of aggressively incomprehensible crosscutting & flashbacks followed by two hours of old-school movie magic. I would say that it’s the kind of classic movie magic that you can only find in Hollywood, except the movie was mostly shot in England and I personally watched in it Mexico. There really isn’t anything especially recommendable about it beyond the excuse it offers to escape the summer sun for a few hours with a lapful of overpriced junk food, which is the only reason anyone would visit an AMC or a Cinemex anyway.

-Brandon Ledet

The Haunted Palace (1963)

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Oooh boy, this one is a bit of a clunker. Although The Haunted Palace is considered the sixth of Roger Corman’s adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s work, it’s not really; it takes its title from a Poe poem that was later incorporated into “The Fall of the House of Usher” but draws its narrative from an H.P. Lovecraft novella, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. If anything, the misspelling of Poe’s middle name as “Allen” in the credits for this one tells you just how far we’re straying afield for these, and although this was followed in production order by The Masque of the Red Death and The Tomb of Ligeia, if you were to tell me that this was the last of these Poe flicks, I would believe it, because it feels like it’s really running on fumes. As always, when it does manage to tread water, it’s being buoyed aloft by the performance of Vincent Price, and he also has Lon Chaney Jr. on site to help (not that they are able to save it). 

In 1760s New England—Arkham, Massachusetts, to be precise—several men in the town notice a young, apparently bewitched woman making her way to a mansion on an elevated cliffside that is known as the home of Joseph Curwen (Price), alleged warlock. Ezra Weeden (Leo Gordon) leads a mob of villagers with pitchforks and torches to Curwen’s palatial home, among them Benjamin West (John Dierkes), Gideon Leach (Guy Wilkerson), and Micah Smith (Elisha Cook, whom you may recall as a sympathetic lowlife in The Big Sleep or one of the creepy neighbors in Rosemary’s Baby). The men force Curwen from his home and burn him alive in front of his mistress Hester (Cathie Merchant), but with his dying breath he curses them and their descendants. Precisely 110 years later, Charles Dexter Ward (Price again) appears in Arkham with his wife, Anne (Debra Paget in her final film role, with her penultimate role having been Mrs. Valdemar in Tales of Terror), having inherited the home of Curwen, who was his ancestor. The people of the town (all of whom are played by the same actors as in the prologue) are unfriendly and refuse to help him find it, other than Dr. Willet (Frank Maxwell), who becomes the only friend that the Wards have in town. Once they let themselves into the mansion, they are greeted by the caretaker, Simon (Chaney), who shows them a portrait of Curwen and notes the resemblance between the two men despite the generations that separate them. Although they are prepared to leave, Simon encourages them to stay; the longer that they remain, the more the spirit of Curwen attempts to possess the body of his distant progeny. 

This one clocks in at only 87 minutes, but it feels a lot longer than the others. Part of that is that this one has a repetition problem; in order to demonstrate that they house has a hold over Ward, he has to try and leave several times before, at the last moment, being unable to force himself to go, or delayed by Simon juuuust long enough for Curwen to regain control. The film treads water here, and too much of the film passes without much happening. Although I’ve joked about it in every one of these reviews so far, I found myself missing the mid-film nightmare sequence that every other one of these that I’ve seen has, because that would have broken things up a bit in the middle. For most of the second act, the only scene with any life in it is one in which Ward and Anne go into town and find themselves surrounded by several of Arkham’s mutant residents, stated to be the result of Curwen’s “collaborations” between something housed in the catacombs beneath the house and the poor women of Arkham. 

We do get to see this Cthulhu monster, represented by a not-quite-humanoid green dummy with four arms. I assume it’s a dummy, anyway, since we never see it move. Instead, it’s given the appearance of motion by passing warped glass over the lens. It’s not the worst idea of how to represent the madness of seeing but not comprehending, and it almost works. The make-up effects to represent the maladies of the mutant descendants, which Curwen was breeding in an attempt to allow the Elder Gods entry back into our world, ranges from passable to comical, and one gets the impression that Corman simply got a really good deal on some almost-expired foam latex and wanted to use it quickly. There’s no one to root for, as the descendants of the eighteenth century mob are all mean drunks, and although they have good reason to fear Curwen’s potential rebirth, when we find one of them has his mutated son locked in the attic like Rochester’s first wife in Jane Eyre, our sympathies lie with the prisoner, not his warden/father. Debra Paget is another in a long line of Corman/Poe ladies who’s just kind of there, serving as witness to the proceedings just like Madeline in Usher, Kate in Premature Burial, Francesca in Masque, and Rowena (although she’s a more active participant) in Tomb of Ligeia. There are make-up effects in use on Chaney from the start and intermittently with Price that indicate Simon has long since been completely subsumed by his Curwen-accomplice ancestor and that show when Ward is being possessed by Curwen. The performances between the two are notably distinct, so that this is a necessity to show when Curwen is “active” but pretending to be Ward, and it’s fine enough. 

There’s simply nothing to get too excited about here, and it feels like a half-hearted effort. The deaths of the mob’s descendants in the 19th Century “present” are fine enough as horror moments—Weeden is killed when his monster son is released from the attic and seeks vengeance, Smith is burned alive just as Curwen was—but this one lacks the things from some of the others that make them transcend their American International Pictures roots. The palace is, of course, burned down at the end, and we don’t even get a shot of the fire from the matte painting town like we have in others. Notably, this one also ends on an almost identical surprise ending freeze frame as X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, which premiered only three weeks later, so it might be that Corman was spreading himself a bit thin in the summer of 1963. Since it isn’t even a Poe movie, even the completists amongst the readership can be assured that they can skip over this one without missing anything of note. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond