In her magic mirror, Sara (Isabela Corona) sees her goddaughter Elena
(Dina De Marco) killed by her husband Eduardo (Armando Calvo) because
Eduardo wants her out of the way to marry Deborah (Rosa Arenas). But even
though she tries to intervene, Elena's fate is final and she is eventually
killed just in the way Sara has seen it in her mirror.
Still, Sara stays in Eduardo's household as a maid, and soon enough he
has married Deborah, who knows he was married before but doesn't have the
slightest idea that he actually killed his first wife.
At first, Deborah shows understanding for her husband getting nervous
about things concerning his first wife, as she thinks he is still
griefing, but eventually Elena's presence gets too brooding and Deborah
wants to change things ... which is when Elena starts to haunt the house
for real. Finally, she and Eduardo find out that the haunting emanates
from the magic mirror, and Eduardo smashes it with a burning oil lamp ...
but since it's a magic mirror, upon being smashed with the lamp, it causes
Deborah to catch fire ...
Deborah doesn't die from the fire, but she is horribly disfigured, and
now Eduardo becomes obsessed with restoring her former beauty, and to that
end he doesn't even resort from graverobbing, and eventually, when he
needs perfect hands for his wife, he even takes them from a live donor
... which is when his assistant Gustavo (Carlos Nieto) totally freaks out
and Sara sends him straight to the police.
But Sara isn't done with her revenge yet, she now summons Elena back
from the grave and exchanges the hands Eduardo got from the poor girl for
Elena's hands.
Soon, Deborah is as beutiful as ever, and she couldn't be any happier,
it's only that her hands, Elena's hands, seem to have a few ideas of their
own, and they definitely don't like Eduardo ...
Eventually, the Gustavo and the police are at the door, just when
Deborahcant keep her/Elena's hands from stabbing Eduardo to death. Then
the hands fall off, as does the skin tissue on her face, and she becomes
horribly mutilated Deborah once again.
Elena's hands meanwhile, no longer attached to any body, crawl around a
bit and then strangle Gustavo for having helped Eduardo ...
Now that's one original blend: Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940)
meets Georges Franju's Eyes without a Face (1959), and the whole
thing is told as a ghost story and done in the style of a gothic shocker -
and surprisingly enough, the whole thing works like a charm, it's a
creepy, delibertately slow-moving piece of horror cinema that tells an
unusual, original story in images brooding with atmosphere.
Recommended.
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