GRAVE ROBBERS

  1989/88m

A.k.a. Ladrones de Tumbas

Director/Writer: Ruben Galindo Jr. / Writer: Carlos Valdemar / Cast: Fernando Almada, Edna Bolkan, Erika Buenfil, Ernesto Laguardia, German Bernal, Maria Rebeca, Andrea Lagarreta, Andres Bonfiglio, Tony Bravo.

Body Count: 12

Ruben Galindo strikes again! After the amazing Cemetery of Terror, the not-so amazing Don’t Panic, and Trampa Infernal directed by another member of the fam, here comes Grave Robbers. Dig that everything-tastic VHS cover!

For all intents and purposes, Grave Robbers is just Cemetery of Terror all over again. In 1879, a Satanist is axed in the chest before he can complete a ritual to birth the antichrist through a kidnapped girl. Before he expires, he swears vengeance of the bloodline of his captors.

110 years later, teen Tomb Profaners unknowingly stumble in the crypt, hidden beneath a grave they expected to find gold in (thanks to psychic gold-sensing (!?) Rebeca who explains the rich are buried with gold to buy their way into the afterlife). While the girls compare jewellery finds and talk about all the clothes they’re going to buy, their boyfriends open up the sealed tomb and take a sacred chain and the sacred axe, the removal of which allows the fiend to reanimate as a sort of sub-New Blood Jason critter.

Unaware of this development, the teens flee to the surface with their booty but are stranded when their truck gets stuck in the mud. Evil creature comes along, retrieves the axe, and begins killing everyone in sight, starting with two poor locals who offered to help move the truck.

Local sheriff Captain Lopez rocks up and finds the teens standing over bodies and arrests them all then goes looking for his daughter, who has gone camping with three gal-pals nearby. And they are ancestors of the cursed bloodline. Of course. The cloaked fiend kills the other girls but cannot be put down by bullet, then tracks down the grave robbers in jail to start getting rid of them until he can find the captain’s daughter for his ritual back in the tomb.

While it functions on a high-cheese level, there are some pretty gnarly kills in this one, with heavy bloodletting as we see axe blade pulled through the neck, a hand coming out of a guy’s stomach to retrieve the talisman thingy that can hurt it, and a creepy concrete-arm that slowly forms out of a wall.

Not quite up to the bonkers fun level of Cemetery of Terror but it’s virtually a Xerox of that script with a few tweaks, so is still very much worth your while.

Blurbs-of-interest: The three main female cast players – Bolkan, Buenfil, and Rebeca – were all in Cemetery of Terror.