The Curse of Nostradamus (1961) User Reviews (6)

The Society For The Abolishment Of Superstition?Giggle

[evilskip · 5/10 · 11 March 2001]

Back in 1959 a 12 part serial was filmed for Mexican movie goers under the title of The Curse Of Nostradamus.It ran in 12 twentyfive minute installments.K Gordon Murray spent a few pesos for it and cut it into 4 movies for release to some theatres and American tv.The titles were Curse Of Nostradamus, The Monster Demolisher, The Genie Of Darkness and Blood Of Nostradamus.German Robles played the vampire Nostradamus.

Nostradamus is either the son or the grandson of the famous Nostradamus.He refers to himself as both the son of and son of the son.He feels that Nostradamus was slighted and wants to reestablish a cult following.To do this he seeks the aid of noted Professor Dolan, the head of some sort of society to abolish superstition.(Sounds like Government tax dollars at work to old evilskip).

Nostradmaus appears at Dolan's house and informs him of his demands.Dolan politely tells him to blow it out his nose.The vampire then declares he will kill 13 prominent citizens until Dolan agrees.He will start by burying a man alive.Dolan, being a fool, doesn't humor the vampire until he can drive a stake in his arse because 1) he doesn't believe him 2) we would have no movie.

The vampire indeed does have a seemingly dead man buried alive in a creepy little scene.He also kills two more citizens while Dolan the dolt blindly refuses to give in.

The movie ends very abruptly, especially if you don't know the history of it and the fact that there are 3 more movies to follow.

This isn't the best of the series but it does lay some important groundwork.Not a bad time waster.With more and more of the Mexican horror movies being released on dvd we can hope this series will end up released this way.

A little tale of the prophetic murderous vampiring son of Nostradamus

[darkwebonlinedotcom · 4/10 · 6 November 2012]

A Mexican serial, 'La maldición de Nostradamus', was shown in cinemas in 12 25-minute episodes during 1959-60. Never one to miss an opportunity in exporting cheap, badly-dubbed Mexican fare to US shores, producer K. Gordon Murray - he of 'Santa Claus' (1959) fame – edited the series into four separate movies in order to fleece four separate audiences.

The films became 'Curse of Nostradamus', 'Monsters Demolisher' (sic), 'Genii of Darkness' and 'Blood of Nostradamus'. As so much of the first film is plot establishment, it's difficult watching the sequels without seeing this first entry.

The son of Nostradamus (Germán Robles) is a vampire who wants to clear the reputation of his esteem father. In case you're unaware, one thing that history tells us about Nostradamus is that he was a hated villain. Well, according to this film anyway.

In order to clear daddy's rep, junior attempts to get the head of The Society to Abolish Superstitions (!!!), Prof. Duran (Domingo Soler) to publicly restore Nostradamus' good-standing, and while he's at it, to admit that vampires do exist.

Naturally, this doesn't go now with a man who spends his days trying to discredit fear of the unproven, so he refuses. Nostradamus Jr. then promises to commit various murders and crimes until the Professor yields. The Prof instead sets out, with good friend Julio Alemán to bring the vampire and his hunchback servant down.

Not only is Junior a bloodsucker, he has also inherited his father's gift, meaning his vengeful prophecies often include elements that haven't happen yet. An amusing example of this is the predicted death of a police office, before he becomes a police officer. I say amusing, because one day the guy is unemployed, the next, he is a police officer on a covert operation! Yessss.

There is a great idea here – a killer with the ability to predict events before they happen. However, making the killer a vampire seems a little redundant, and comes across as an attempt to cash in on the Mexican hits like 'The Vampire' (1957) and 'The Vampire's Coffin' (1958).

Of course, any promising material that isn't ruined by director Federico Curiel is left for Murray to wreck, with bad dubbing and editing. Obviously it's best to see the original Mexican serial, but good luck with finding that. It's as rare as prophetic vampire bat droppings.

If you do opt for the films, make sure you watch them in the right order. They do follow on directly from each other. The correct order is as listed in the second paragraph of this review.

Try and imagine how STRANGE this looked on t.v. (spoilers)

[newportbosco · 6/10 · 19 August 2006]

This one nearly has it all.. (1.) Some of the best/worst dubbing in the whole K. Gordon Murray line up, with line after line of just INSANE babbling. (2.) German Robles as a vampire sticking his eyes out whenever he is bugged by anything. (3.) Prof. Dolan, who looks like he would get hacked off with anybody for any reason whatsoever.. (4.) Neat new anti vampire weapons like PLATINUM bullets (think about how much THEY would cost to stop a vampire)..and you don't need JUST a cross, it has to be THE CROSS OF ANTIOCH (who says you don't learn anything from these things?)

The rating is internal, in relation to the others in the series..a fine start.

Dolan refuses to establish a cult for Nostradamus, so in vengeance the vampire starts to kill 13 people in a row. The last one is to be Dolan. Nostradamus ALWAYS tells the professor who his victim will be ahead of time.The fun is waiting for how Nostradamus is going to outwit Dolan despite the warning..

The first murder, with the victim put into a trance and buried alive, is very effective.

I saw this one in the 60's and couldn't make heads or tales of it...eventually you have to take it on it's own loopy merits..

This is the first three episodes of a 12 part serial edited together, and it's budget limits often work for it...the torches Nostradamus lights at the beginning fall apart in places...just like real torches sometimes do...and you get a great sense of dirt and grime at the end when Dolan's right hand man is chasing the vampire through the tunnels. No doubt because they used real dirt and grime. This series is begging to be restored, by the way, with the prints I've seen often fuzzy and dark..but there is a worthwhile flick underneath all that murk.

The Curse of K. Gordon Murray.

[BA_Harrison · 2/10 · 18 June 2023]

The Curse of Nostradamus was the first of four films to be compiled from episodes of a Mexican serial by American producer K. Gordon Murray; I watched it because I am a horror movie completist, but I'm secretly hoping that I can't find the other three films - because this one is that bad!

Germán Robles plays vampire Ericson, the son of Nostradamus (or the son of the son of Nostradamus - it's not very clear which), who wants Professor Durán (Domingo Soler), esteemed debunker of superstitions, to help vindicate the name of his infamous ancestor. When Durán refuses, Ericson attempts to change the professor's mind by threatening to kill thirteen people; he could probably bore them to death by talking to them, but opts for more elaborate methods.

The film is slow, overly-talky, and shoddily edited, with terrible dubbing. Robles hams it up as the vampire, occasionally turning into a rubber bat on a string when confronted by a cross (or The Cross of Antioch, to be more precise); his loyal sidekick is that horror cliché, the drooling hunchback. In a slight deviation from the norm, the best way to kill the vampire is to shoot it with platinum bullets, which sounds expensive, especially the way that trigger-happy hero Tony (Julio Alemán) fires wildly at the bloodsucker.

Part one

[BandSAboutMovies · 4/10 · 6 July 2020]

Nostradamus is not the fortune-telling mystic that scared you so badly in 1981's The Man Who Saw Tomorrow. No, he's an aristocratic vampire played by German Robles, who also played Count Karol de Lavud in the two El Vampiro films.

This was originally a 12 part serial that has been broken down into 4 films by American producer K. Gordon Murray: this one, known as Curse Of Nostradamus in English, plus The Monster Demolisher, The Genie Of Darkness and Blood Of Nostradamus.

Murray's nickname was Kagey and he led a pretty amazing life. The son of an Irish-American funeral home director, he grew up in Bloomington, Illinois, which is right next to the town of Normal. That's where many of the carnie folk spent the off-season and Murray grew up around them. Instead of going into the family business, the teenager started a "corn game", which is sort of what we'd call bingo today, in one of his father's cemetery tents. Imagine - people were so starved for entertainment that they'd go play games of chance surrounded by the dead.

Regardless, that game got him on the road with the World Wonder Shows Carnival. After becoming the manager, Murray used his circus and carnie contacts to help cast the Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz. While he was doing that, he was also getting rich from a series of not-so-legal slot machines all over the Midwest.

After a move to Hollywood, Cecil B. DeMille hired him to help promote The Greatest Show on Earth. This led to a career in film, which of course brought him into the orbit of Kroger Babb, where he learned to take movies and make them more emotional. He did that with redubs of Mexican films, as well as becoming the King of the Kiddie Matinee.

We've discussed at length how Murray brought the brain-melting opus that is Rene Cardonna's Santa Claus to America, a movie that seasonally played in theaters for thirty years. In all, he'd release sixty movies in fifteen years. The only thing that stopped him was the IRS, who seized his beloved films to get some back taxes, and the heart attack that the stress of the court battles caused.

Notable Murray imports include The Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy, The Brainiac (El Baron del Terror), The Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Mummy (Las Luchadoras contra la Momia Azteca), Shanty Tramp (which he also wrote), The Swamp Of The Lost Monsters (El Pantano de las Animas) and Curse of the Doll People (Munecos Infernales), The Living Coffin (El Grito de la Muerte) and a series of Little Red Riding Hood movies where he played Stinky the Skunk (even dressing as the character when the films played live). He would also bring El Santo to America, re-releasing Santo Contra Las Mujeres Vampiros as Samson vs. the Vampire Women and Santo en el Museo de Cera as Samson In the Wax Museum.

Anyways, let's get to this movie, which starts with a professor who has been re-elected to lead a society dedicated to the destruction of superstition, all so he can prove that werewolves and vampires aren't real. However, he's soon visited by a 400-year-old vampire, the son of Nostradamus the Alchemist.

He wants to begin his father's cult again and to do so, he's killing thirteen of his greatest enemies. Like some Medico Phibes, he's writing to each of them - who says the art of letter writing and politeness is dead? - starting with burying a man alive. The professor replies to this by shooting Nostradamus Jr. six times center mass and the vampire laughs and flies away as a bat.

Still, the professor refuses to let the world know that vampires are real,, other than telling Antonio, his daughter's fiancee. Nostradamus, besides having a wonderful top hat and reminding me of Coffin Joe, has a hunchback assistant, which is how you know you've made it in the supermonster business.

Nostradamus Jr., the sadist vampire, does not want to suck your blood!

[Coventry · 7/10 · 18 July 2019]

"The Curse of Nostradamus" is an unjustly and sadly forgotten Mexican curio from the early 60s, and actually a lot more intelligent and atmospheric than you would automatically assume, judging by its cheap look & feel and its status of obscurity. The first thing that attracted my interest was, obviously, the unusual name in the title. Did these silly Mexicans seriously intend to portray the famous historical doctor/clairvoyant Nostradamus as a horror monster, or did they simply want to lure unwary viewers with a familiar-sounding name (like the Italians did around the same time with "The Horrible Dr. Hitchcock")? Fact remains that the plot does revolve around the one and only Nostradamus! Well, actually, the plot revolves around his son; - a purely evil vampire who wants to wreak havoc against a literate scientist and his entourage for continuously denying the existence of supernatural forces (or something).

Nostradamus Jr. appears to be your average and prototypical cinematic vampire. He's almost half a century old, wears a cloak, has a hunchbacked servant, transforms into a bat, fears the cross and doesn't have a reflection in the mirror. There's one peculiarity, however, that makes him one of the most uncommon vampires ever. Junior kills for fun and to make a statement, but he seemingly doesn't need to drain the blood from his victims' necks to survive. Instead, his methods for murder are inventively playful and extremely sadist, which is exactly what makes "The Curse of Nostradamus" worth discovering. Via hypnotism, he causes for someone to be buried alive (still the most horrifying way to die, if you ask me) and for another person to become a guilt-ridden murderer himself. These sequences, including the extended and uncanny build-up, are genuinely powerful and excellent examples of spooky Gothic horror. I was enjoying this film immensely, but then unfortunately came the downright clumsy and abrupt ending, and it ruined a lot. Apparently there exist three more "Nostradamus" films, but I have little hope of ever finding those. The picture quality and the English dubbing of my copy (and old "Something Weird Video" bootleg) is extremely poor, but I'm not complaining too much about that, since it's already exceptional for a cheap 60-year-old Mexican horror film to be available anyways.