Psychotic Cinema

Genre: Mexican Horror

In this Mexican horror movie we start with Dr. Satan who is deep down in the caverns of Hell being told by Lucifer that he has one more chance to return to the living and to find the black magician and vampire Yei Lin.

Yei Lin has discovered the “Sorensen Formula” which can transform base metals into gold using a device like a ray gun. He must kill Yei Lin and bring back the formula (you would think the Devil would be powerful enough already to turn base metals into gold). If Dr Satan fails, he will never have eternal peace.

With that unpleasant prospect in mind, Dr Satan returns to the world of the living and is back in his office interviewing young girls. When he finds a suitable one, he injects her with a syringe and turns her into a zombie.

With two girls as zombies, he returns to his laboratory where the girls sleep in open coffins. At night he sends them out to search for Yei Lin.

In the meantime, the police are trying to track down Yei Lin, who is planning to fly to Hong Kong. These policeman don’t seem too bright because Yei Lin continues to experiment with his device in his laboratory while his pretty assistant, Medussa, sit’s on the reception desk.

When one nosey security guard enters she murders him by fireing some guns built into the reception desk.

Soon Dr. Satan’s female zombies discover the whereabouts of Yei Lin and the rest of the movie is a tit-for-tat between these two forces of evil.

With Yei Lin's supernatural powers, he is able to transform himself into a very fake looking bat which can then suck the blood from its victims. Because he can turn into a vampire, he can also be killed with a stake through the heart. Yei Lin also has some henchmen to assist in his evil crimes.

Dr Satan must use his suppeirior cunning and while Dr Satan and Yei Lin battle for the formula, the police are getting ever nearer.

Directed by Rogelio A. González, who has made some pretty strange films in his time including the 1960 sci-fi movie Ship of Monsters (1960), which contains some of the strangest aliens ever put to celluloid

Like many Mexican horror movies, Dr. Satan versus Black Magic can be a bit slow at times. It’s also difficult to root for any of the characters as the two leads are both as evil as each other. The police are secondary and hardly come into the story.

That’s the down side to this movie, but don’t let that deter you because this movie is bizarre. What stood out for me were the sound effects, especially in Dr Satan’s Laboratory and Yei Lin’s ray gun device. These sounds are a psychedelic smorgasboard of freakin' weirdness

Luis Hernández Bretón produced the soundtrack which reuses the avant-garde music he wrote for two earlier vampire movies, El Vampiro Sangriento (The Bloody Vampire) (1962) and La Invasión de los Vampiros (The Invasion of the Vampires) (1963).

Another thing which stands out with this movie is the surrealistic color schemes. This is all thanks to the work of the great cinematographer José Ortíz Ramos.

Joaquín Cordero, who usually played heroic characters rather than villains is Dr. Satan. His rival, Yei Ling, is played by Noé Murayama, a Mexican actor of Japanese descent who spent most of his career in dramas and westerns, although he did appear in another movie concerning Satan, El Látigo contra Satanás (The Whip versus Satan) (1979).


The two buxom zombie girls are great and look more like zombie go-go dancers.

This could only be a product of the 1960’s and is recommended to any fans of Mexican horror movies.

Dr. Satán y la Magia Negra (Dr. Satan versus Black Magic) (1968)