At The Movies: Horrors abound in fright shows El Conde and The Queen Mary

El Conde (R21)

110 minutes, available on Netflix
3 stars

The story: In an alternate history, Chile’s General Augusto Pinochet (Jaime Vadell) faked his death in 2006 and is a 250-year-old vampire hiding in a crumbling mansion at the southern tip of the South American continent.

El Conde premieres on Netflix at an opportune moment, immediately after its Venice Film Festival best screenplay triumph and on the 50th anniversary of the coup d’etat, which ushered in Pinochet’s 17-year reign of terror. Some 40,000 disappeared, and were tortured and executed under his regime.

Chilean auteur Pablo Larrain gained recent Academy Awards attention for his Hollywood biopics Spencer (2021), on Britain’s Princess Diana; and Jackie (2016), about the United States’ former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy.

The writer-director is back home, and he has reimagined his country’s reviled dictator as a literal monster in his continuing studies of 20th-century historical figures.

With his flapping military cape for wings, Pinochet takes flight over the city of Santiago on a hunt for fresh human blood. He is decrepit but still depraved, still sucking his populace dry.

This darkly comic art-house horror shot in crepuscular black and white is a metaphor in search of a story, strangely muted even during scenes of frozen hearts being greedily consumed.

The narrative is thin. Holed up with Pinochet on his remote estate are his wife (Gloria Munchmeyer) and butler (Alfredo Castro). They are visited by his five adult children, who circle him like vultures for their inheritance, then by an accountant-exorcist-nun (Paula Luchsinger) of frustratingly vague intention.

The third act is nevertheless a mordant masterstroke. It introduces a certain British premier, and sets about exposing the Western autocrats for spawning Pinochet.

If only the satire were as chilling as the reality of these fascist powers returning from the grave today.

Hot take: South America’s traumatic past is resurrected in a macabre parody that warns about the undead nature of evil.

The Queen Mary (M18)

125 minutes, opens on Thursday
2 stars

The story: The violent unravellings of two families – one in the present day, the other on Halloween night in 1938 – mysteriously intertwine on board the RMS Queen Mary, the fabled luxury transatlantic liner that is today a ghoulish tourist attraction docked at Long Beach, California. Time Magazine calls it “one of the world’s most haunted places”.

Estranged photographers Erin (Alice Eve) and Patrick (Joel Fry) are on a day tour of the eponymous super-liner, and The Queen Mary is unsettling even before their young son (Lenny Rush) has a mishap in the disused pool that awakens the vessel’s trapped spirits.

Irish director Gary Shore is an impressive stylist. His gothic love letter to the ghost ship, which he filmed on location, is a nautical horror gorgeously spooky from the start, with grainy archival newsreels calling forth the cursed mythology.

In a suite here nearly a century earlier, a third-class passenger (David Ratch) had gone on a psychotic rampage, massacring his wife (Nell Hudson) and daughter (Florrie Wilkinson) in what is known as the Jack Nicholson cabin fever syndrome of The Shining (1980).

The grisliness is now relived by Erin and Patrick as they search for their child along the blood-soaked corridors and in muggy boiler rooms. There are axe-to-skulls, stabbings and disfigurements with the audio-visuals playing every kind of trick.

It soon becomes obvious that arresting shocks are all the movie has because the story is a muddle, both confused and confusing.

The parallel timelines are disjointed throughout the twisty terrors.

The couple’s troubled relationship is unexplained, and is the creepy Captain Bittner (Dorian Lough) character really the captain or, indeed, human?

Hot take: This supernatural voyage, although atmospheric and frequently frightful, runs aground narratively.