Vinegar Syndrome is off to a strong start with their Mexican horror debut Blu-ray of GRAVE ROBBERS.

In the sixteenth century Mexican town of San Ramon, the Inquistion's hulking executioner (Agustín Bernal, SALVADOR) is tortured and executed with his own axe when he is discovered attempting to father the son of Satan with a village girl. Three hundred odd years later, a band of young grave robbers – psychic Rebeca (Erika Buenfil) and her hothead boyfriend Manolo (Ernesto Laguardia), Diana (María Rebeca) and Armando (Germán Bernal), Jorge (Andrés Bonfiglio) and Andrea (Andrea Legarreta) – discover the entrance to the Inquisition's catacombs beneath the grave of its archbishop. While she has no problem robbing the dead of their gold offerings, Rebeca draws the line at the men opening up a sealed tomb sending off bad vibes. They discover the corpse of the executioner and Manolo removes the axe from his mummified corpse. When a sudden storm sweeps through the valley, the attempts of the grave robbers to hightail it back to Mexico City are cut short when their truck gets stuck in the mud. When two villagers become the first victims of the resurrected killer, the young grave robbers are arrested by local sheriff Captain Lopez (Fernando Almada). Lopez locks up the youths but subsequent brutal killings among the locals have him worrying about the safety of his daughter Olivia (Edna Bolkan, LICENSE TO KILL) who has gone camping with her girlfriends and seems to be the executioner's ideal virgin womb for his second attempt at bringing the Antichrist to Earth.

Far from the Universal Pictures-aping Mexican horrors of the fifties and sixties or the genre mashup SANTO and luchadora efforts of the sixties and seventies, GRAVE ROBBERS does ape the slasher trends north of the border but within a gothic horror shell. Opening with an extended credits on black with some creepy Gregorian chanting, the opening Inquisition flashback is dripping with Eurohorror atmosphere despite a lack of nudity, and director Rubén Galindo Jr. – son of prolific Rubén Galindo (NARCO TERROR) – goes all out with the gory kills in the second half of the film with torn throats, faces split by axes, crushed skulls, lopped off limbs, ripped out guts, and some impressive low-budget prosthetics that have the mummified executioner looking like one of the GHOSTS OF MARS. The fiery climax is suitably entertaining and the surviving characters earn their likability despite being rather unsympathetic and annoying in the first half of the film.

Never dubbed in English, GRAVE ROBBERS made stateside appearances theatrically and on home video for the Latin market (and possibly on Spanish-speaking TV stations in cut form). The first English-friendly edition came from BCI in a double-feature DVD with Galindo's CEMETERY OF TERROR. That edition utilized an existing video master that was rather hazy and murky. Vinegar Syndrome's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen Blu-ray comes from a 4K scan of the original 35mm camera negative, greatly enhancing one's appreciation of Galindo's realization of the gothic horror look with candlelit sets and now brighter-looking night scenes. Some of the prosthetics look more rubbery but a decapitation hold up well, as do the dungeon/catacomb sets, looking overall quite impressive compared to some of the more flatly-lit and shot Mexican genre efforts of the period. The DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0 mono track sports clear dialogue and some effective sound design while the synth scoring feels more supportive on rewatching than it did upon first viewing. The optional English subtitles have been newly-translated.

Extras start off with an audio commentary by The Hysteria Continues, some of whom first encountered this film as a bootleg VHS and seem unaware of the previous DVD edition. They discuss the film in the context of Mexico's waves of horror cinema from the thirties onwards but also reveal that director Galindo may have come from a filmmaking family but that his studying in Canada in the late seventies and early eighties may have influenced his slasher-oriented approach to horror, citing his other two horror efforts of this period CEMETERY OF TERROR and DON'T PANIC (a Satanic slasher from the eighties that was shot in English but did not make it over here stateside since the VHS cover with that title from Mogul turned out to be a retitling of the Spanish occult sex film SATAN'S BLOOD). The curiosity they express to one another about other horror-sounding titles in the filmographies of Galindo senior and junior and some of their contemporaries suggests that there is far more Mexican eighties horror to be discovered than the sampling we got stateside as part of BCI's HORROR FROM SOUTH OF THE BORDER volumes.