From a narrated prologue that relates how a Renaissance alchemist fled to Vera Cruz during the Spanish Inquisition, how he tinkered away on a secret invention, and how he met his fate in a cave-in in 1937(!), the action proceeds with cautious pace and meticulous circumstantiation into what amounts to a thorough revitalization of the vampire myth. A revamping, if you will. Unlike the gluttonous Coppola, the Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro limits himself to one facet of the myth, the immortality one. The outcome is a work of uncommon discipline and restraint for a twenty-nine-year-old neophyte. And it meets the strictest definition of a connoisseur's horror film, concerned as it is with ideas rather than special effects, and disturbing images rather than rude shocks. The ideas, to do mainly with age and decay, don't really develop or deepen; they are simply set in front of us for quiet contemplation. But the disturbing images are sufficient -- in number as well as in level of disturbance -- to prevent any drowsing off: the cucarachas crawling out of the poked-out eye of an antique angel; the exhibit of glass jars containing body parts surgically removed from the Howard Hughesian recluse (Claudio Brook) who wants to get his hands on the alchemist's long-lost invention; the budding vampire (Federico Luppi) licking up a dribble of blood from the floor of a public restroom: he actually has got his hands on the invention, or vice versa, but he doesn't understand the correct use of it; and the invention itself, a mechanical egg with retractile, prehensile legs and a living, blooksucking insect inside it. There is, needless to say, a vein of dark humor in much of this, and a lighter vein of it in the character of a hired American thug (Ron Perlman) less interested in his boss's mortality than in his own imminent nose job. But the only place where the humor bubbles up to disrupt the deadpan surface of the movie is in the wasted "creative" efforts of the virtuoso mortician: no one told him the body was scheduled for cremation. (1993) — Duncan Shepherd