Census Bloodbath: Canta Y Llores

Note: The only available copy of this Mexican slasher was in unsubtitled Spanish. While I do speak some Spanish, take my review with a huge grain of salt.

Year:
1980
Director:
Mario Hernández
Cast:
Antonio Aguilar, Flor Silvestre, José Gálvez
Run Time:
1 hour 31 minutes

Plot: Taste of Blood (originally Sabor a Sangre), which is set in the early 20th century, follows Mauricio Rosales (Antonio Aguilar), a noble cowboy who nobly happens upon the corpses of six dead caballeros while traveling the country performing noble deeds with his companion. 

When they bring the dead men and their horses back to town, they learn that the group was on an excursion to catch the serial killer El Tigre, who has been terrorizing the area and seems to be targeting Rodrigo Arteaga (Bruno Rey, who later appeared in the Mexican slashers Yo te amo Catalina and El violador infernal). They did not succeed, but perhaps Mauricio can...

Analysis: In addition to somehow being the second slasher period piece we've covered in a row (after Taiwan's Keep Out of Danger), Taste of Blood has two other elements that had me intrigued right off the bat. The first is the fact that it's technically part of a franchise. Actually, you could even call it a very early example of a legacy sequel.

You see, Antonio Aguilar played Mauricio Rosales (one of those classic "drifter who changes people's lives, then breezes out of town" types who informed characters as far afield as Jack Reacher and Mad Max) in a series of nine matinee Westerns from 1955's El rayo justiciero through 1958's Los muertos no hablan. Sabor a sangre saw him returning to the role for the first time in more than a decade and the last time overall.

The second is the fact that, due to the nature of its franchise, it blends slasher elements with the tropes of both Western movies and mariachi musicals. How could you not at least quirk an eyebrow at that?

Unfortunately, it doesn't evoke any of those three genres particularly well. As a musical, it's pretty drab. The severe tonal shifts that are required to transition the characters from being menaced by a serial killer to singing mariachi tunes are entirely outside of director Mario Hernández's grasp. Taken on their own, the musical numbers themselves aren't much good, anyway.

Even though the singers are pretty good, the numbers are staged incredibly poorly, either involving characters standing still and staring at one another or showing dancing/horseriding people in prolonged, extreme wide shots that render the sequences static and tedious.

It's even worse at being a Western. It's tedious as all get out. When it's not delivering three scenes in a row of pairs of people yelling at each other, it's luxuriating in excruciating moments like Mauricio slooowly reaching for his gun over the course of what feels like the better part of an hour.

Typically, these genre mashups are worst at being slashers, but Taste of Blood does have some decent slasher elements. While it's really not a body count picture as such (there are too many shooting deaths, and the more slashery deaths aren't lingered upon), some of the murder scenes are reasonably shocking and they're liberally slathered in "killer POV" shots. By far the worst thing about the slasher component of the film is its droning synth score, which sounds like an electric razor, only less musical. 

Unfortunately, at the end of the day, Taste of Blood is unremarkable in a way that really shouldn't be possible.

Killer: El Tigre

Final Girl: Mauricio Rosales (Antonio Aguilar)

Best Kill: In a scene so out-of-nowhere that it can only elicit either a scream or a guffaw, a pregnant girl delivers a tearful monologue and is then abruptly shoved off a cliff.

Sign of the Times: The fact that a 1950s Western franchise returned in the 1980s as a slasher franchise tells you all you need to know about how the tides of genre changed in the intervening years.

Scariest Moment: The killer slowly approaches a terrified old woman after murdering her husband.

Weirdest Moment: Mauricio Rosales is introduced on horseback, making his horse do cute little prancey dressage moves. But the horse keeps doing that over the next couple scenes, so I think maybe Antonio Aguilar just couldn't get it to stop.

Champion Dialogue: N/A

Body Count: 25; though the movie is singularly unconcerned with presenting kills in a legible way, so the number could very well be more than what I'm counting. Also, while even the number that I have would put Jason Voorhees to shame, the number of deaths that feel in any way slashery is only 6.

1. Carriage Driver is shot.
2. Caballero #1 is shot.
3. Caballero #2 is shot.
4. Caballero #3 is shot.
5. Old Caballero is killed offscreen.
6. Caballero #4 is killed offscreen.
7. Caballero #5 is killed offscreen.
8. Woman is hanged offscreen.
9. Woman's Husband dies of wounds sustained offscreen.
10. Caballero #6 is shot.
11. Caballero #7 is shot.
12. Niña Arteaga is stillborn thanks to her mother being trampled by horses.
13. Viejo has a knife thrown into his gut.
14. Vieja is killed offscreen.
15. Flashback Man has his eyes poked out with a stick.
16. Flashback Man #2 is shot.
17. Abuelo is shot.
18. Muchacha,
19. Muchacho,
20. and Madre are burned to death in a hut.
21. Swimmer is shot.
22. Caballero #8 is shot.
23. Pregnant Girl is pushed off a cliff.
24. Captain Eyepatch is shot.
25. El Tigre is shot.

TL;DR: Taste of Blood is an intriguing combination of the Western, slasher, and musical genres, but fails to pay that off in any way.

Rating: 4/10

Census Bloodbath: Hellenovela

Note: The only version of this Mexican slasher movie that I was able to get access to was in unsubtitled Spanish. While my AP test scores allow me to claim that I am bilingual, it has been a long time since high school. So take my review with a grain of salt, considering the fact that I was understanding at most 50% of the dialogue in any given scene.

Year:
1988
Director:
Julio Aldama
Cast:
Julio Aldama Jr., Grace Renat, Norma Lazareno

Run Time:
1 hour 22 minutes

Plot: In Terror en los Barrios, Pedro (Julio Aldama Jr. - now how did he get the job?) is a promising young lawyer with a wealthy adopted mother and a gorgeous fiancé, Ángela (Claudia Guzmán). Watching a play about a sex worker's murder triggers a buried memory of his biological mother and her lover being shot by her pimp. This causes him to go mad, dress up in a revolving door of costumes, and murder sex workers and their johns around Mexico City. Frankly, the play was pretty terrible, so maybe I'm misreading the situation and he just decided to go on a killing spree simply to liven up the night.

There's also a bunch of supplemental dramatic material with a pregnant woman - I think her name was Adriana (María Elena Robles, who also wrote the screenplay, making her the rare above-the-line female crew member on a 1980s slasher) - who Pedro hires to be his secretary, and her boyfriend Luis (René Cardona III of Cemetery of Terror, who is the grandson of the director of the exquisite La Llorona). Oh, and a dancer named Rita (Grace Renat), who is trying to support her two kids. Listings allege that there's also a woman named Gabriela (Norma Lazareno of Hasta el viento tiene miedo) kicking around, but I can't for the life of me figure out who that character is supposed to be.

Analysis: It might be time to name a new sub-subgenre here, because Terror en los Barrios is another in a string of what I'd like to call "filler thrillers" that dotted the 1980s. This species of slasher can be spotted by its distinct disinclination to have narrative thrust. Instead of telling a story with forward momentum, these movies lurch to a halt every 15 minutes or so to spend a full scene in the company of time-wasting filler. 

This can take many forms, such as the striptease performances in Stripped to Kill or the aerobics sequences in Killer Workout. Terror en los Barrios is at least more generous than either of those two movies due to the fact that it alternates between two types of filler: weird burlesque dances and mariachi performances.

The mariachi performances are quite good (the burlesque dances considerably less so), but that fact doesn't prevent them from being absolutely fucking useless. Unfortunately, the slasher movie that they're interrupting is pretty bland, so there isn't even much worthwhile to have your attention pulled from.

Terror en los Barrios is fumbles its slasher tropes so much that it even tries to deliver a shocking mid-movie reveal that Pedro is the killer, even though the movie is literally about his mental breakdown. And I'm sorry, but his parade of the frumpiest outfits in the history of drag isn't going to cut it as a disguise.

The kills themselves are also pretty unremarkable. They're not bad, I guess. It's just that the blood budget is essentially nonexistent, so the majority of the murder sequences are awkwardly staged in ways that underscore their artificiality. Thankfully, the story around those kills is where the movie lets loose and gets wet and wild.

Robles' screenplay is clearly influenced by telenovelas, much to its betterment. While the third act of the movie pretty much forgets that it's a slasher (just look at the marked change in the types of deaths that follow #6 in the Body Count), it replaces the insipid mush of the psycho-killer storyline with a string of shocking reveals and melodramatic clashes between the coterie of characters who were previously just sitting around with their thumbs up their asses, taking up space and refusing to die.

At the very least, the way that Terror en los Barrios is a bizarre mishmash between a Los ricos también lloran-era telenovela and a 1980s slasher makes for a fascinating case study. Considering the fact that I'm about to hit my 300th Census Bloodbath title, I'll welcome whatever interesting texture the slasher genre wants to throw at me.

Killer: Pedro (Julio Aldama Jr.)

Final Girl: The woman who I think is Adriana (María Elena Robles)

Best Kill: Pedro slits a woman's throat (with the tip of his knife for some reason) and her gurgling, choking noises really sell the whole thing.

Sign of the Times: The biggest sign that it was shot in 1983 (even though it was released in 1988) is the fact that there's nothing supernatural at all going on here. The influence of 1984's A Nightmare on Elm Street did spread as far South as Mexico, after all, as movies like Cemetery of Terror can attest.

Scariest Moment: After shooting his fiancée while wearing the above mask (The Hulk? Frankenstein? both?), Pedro breathes so heavily that the mask pulses outward.

Weirdest Moment: After his adopted mother dies, Pedro goes to the woods and stares at a river. And stares. And stares. The movie keeps cutting to establishing shots of the river, then back to him contemplating the water from different vantage points.

Champion Dialogue: N/A

Body Count: 12

1. Pedro's Mother is shot by her pimp.
2. Pedro's Mother's Lover is shot by her pimp.
3. John #1 is stabbed in the side.
4. Cheetah Print Dress Lady has her throat slit and is stabbed in the boobs.
5. Sidewalk Lady is strangled (or something) in a bush.
6. John #2 has his head slammed against a footstool.
7. Mamacita dies of old lady disease.
8. Luis dies in a car crash.
9. Ángela is shot.
10. Pimp #1 is shot.
11. Pimp #2 is shot.
12. Pedro jumps from a balcony.

TL;DR: Terror en los Barrios is a serviceable enough telenovela slasher, though it isn't particularly well mounted.

Rating: 5/10

Census Bloodbath: La Forma

Year:
1985
Director:
Rubén Galindo Jr.
Cast:
Hugo Stiglitz, René Cardona III, Eduardo Capetillo
Run Time:
1 hour 28 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Plot: Cemetery of Terror (Cementerio del terror) has a lot of moving parts because the idea of "genre" is a wet bar of soap in its hands. First and foremost, we have a pretty traditional slasher setup. Two friends, Jorge (Servando Manzetti) and Óscar (René Cardona III, who later became a director just like his father and his grandfather, the latter of whom directed the iconic 1960 movie La Llorona), conspire to lie to their girlfriends Olivia (Edna Bolkan of Don't Panic and Grave Robbers) and Mariana (Jacqueline Castro) about going to a high society party in order to get them to an abandoned mansion where they can spend the night and have sex. Their himbo friend Pedro (Andrés García Jr. of Like Water for Chocolate) is also tricked by their lie and invites his girlfriend Lena (Erika Buenfil, also of Grave Robbers and approximately 100,000 telenovela episodes) along. The only character traits differentiating any of these characters are that Olivia is a little vain, Mariana is a little horny, Pedro has a mullet, and Lena is observant and thus reluctant to enter the mansion. While there, they find a mysterious Satanic book and the guys plan the prank of the century: steal a body from the morgue and pretend to resurrect it, in order to scare the girls into having sex with them.

This plan works, in more ways than one. The girls do warm up to the boys (because they kinda did want to have sex with them in the first place). However, unbeknownst to the teens, they do also successfully resurrect the corpse, who just so happens to be the Satanist serial killer Devlon (José Gómez Parcero), who the obsessed Dr. Cardán (Hugo Stiglitz, Mexican character actor par excellence) has been warning Captain Ancira (Raúl Meraz) about all night. The corpse uses his Satanist claws (?) to rip his way through the teens while Cardán chases around after him, until at some point the killer gets his hands on the book and causes a zombie uprising at the nearby cemetery, threatening a group of kids that includes ringleader Tony (Eduardo Capetillo) and Ancira's children Anita (María Rebeca of Grave Robbers) and Raúl (César Adrian Sanchez). Oh, and this all takes place on Halloween night. Was everyone taking notes? This will be on the test.

Analysis: So, I had a lot riding on Cemetery of Terror being good, because the Mexican slasher mashup was the directorial debut of Rubén Galindo Jr., who we will be revisiting multiple times during Census Bloodbath with 1987's Don't Panic and 1989's Grave Robbers. It would be a shame to have to be dreading those titles. Thankfully, I think we've at least avoided "dread," but the strongest feeling I'm able to muster about those titles based on this one is "curiosity."

There certainly is a lot going on here. The bizarre mishmash of genres plays very much like a post-Nightmare on Elm Street supernatural slasher, which it obviously couldn't be because it was shot before the Craven masterpiece was unleashed upon an unsuspecting world in late 1984. That supernatural wave wouldn't truly crest until 1986, so this is ahead of the curve while also being miles behind it by dint of being a rip-off of Halloween a good four years past the sell-by date for something like that. In addition to some Carpenter-esque music and a "go get me a beer" scene that I haven't mentioned, I assume you noticed the Dr. Loomis we have scurrying around here. Cardán's breathless monologues about Devlon being pure evil only avoid being exact copies of Donald Pleasence's because of the liberal sprinkling of Catholic fears of Satanism.

It is halfway decent as a Halloween riff. The teens have good chemistry even though Andrés García Jr. is giving such a questionable performance that he can't even kiss convincingly. And while the kills are pretty samey, largely just involving Devlon using his claws to rip people apart in vaguely defined ways, some of them have their moments, including a pretty gnarly arterial spray. There's also a fun fakeout where Lena is so obviously the final girl thanks to her keen eye for things being awry that it comes as a shock when she is given one of the most violent deaths yet.

And while there are a few aesthetic missteps (Galindo Jr. seems unaware that you don't have to wait until a car, boat, etc. completely exits the frame before you cut to a new scene), in general it's a pretty good-looking movie. There are some excellent compositions that make good use of light and shadow, a beautiful cherry red hospital hallway, and an unforgettable sequence of a woman screaming at the blood on her hands while mist swirls disorientingly around her.

However, the movie's abrupt shift from a Satanic slasher movie to a full-on zombie siege movie is unsustainable. At this point, the entire teen cast has been dispatched, so we're stuck with a bunch of shrieking Goonies running in circles while zombies slowly shamble toward them. The stakes are also lowered right through the floor, because it's quite obvious early on that there is no way that Cemetery of Terror is actually going to kill off a child.

Plus, there are even fewer reliable actors in the child cast than the adult cast. Eduardo Capetillo delivers all of his dialogue in a hoarse scream, including in a domestic moment where he's just hanging out having dinner with his older sister. And one of the other kids performs "tired and afraid" so poorly that I genuinely thought the scene was going to be about him getting possessed. At the end of the day, the slasher stuff is not strong enough that I would have loved the movie anyway, but the entire third act makes such a tedious hash of things that it would have scuppered feelings stronger than the ones the movie had already managed to generate in me.

Killer: Devlon (José Gómez Parcero)

Final Girl: A fuckton of children

Best Kill: Even though it makes no sense that Pedro's death is the only one to involve some sort of ghostly or telekinetic force, the floating axe impaling itself in his forehead is too cool to pass up.

Sign of the Times: One of the assorted children has a caricature of Michael Jackson on the back of his jacket, which he is wearing literally the entire time. MJ might actually have more screentime than Devlon.

Scariest Moment: The kids reach the gate of the cemetery, which rises out of the ground, becoming a huge, insurmountable barrier.

Weirdest Moment: Captain Ancira says he went to the school to talk to the kids' friends in an attempt to find out where they might have gone, but it's the middle of the night. Why are these kids at school?! It's not a boarding school, either. I spent minutes trying to puzzle this all out.

Champion Dialogue: “This is the 20th century. The Devil does not exist."

Body Count: 8; the first of which takes place in a nightmare that is probably a flashback but might not be.

1. Elevator Woman is clawed to death.
2. Mariana is clawed in the neck offscreen.
3. Óscar is clawed in the guts.
4. Jorge is lift-choked and has the back of his head impaled on some sort of spike fixture thing.
5. Mariana is disembowled by claws.
6. Lena is clawed to death.
7. Pedro is axed in the forehead.
8. Devlon combusts due to the book being burned.

TL;DR: Cemetery of Terror is a game attempt at a supernatural slasher, but loses whatever amount of steam it was able to build up in the boring third act.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1302

Census Flashback: South Of The Border

On our Fright Flashback/Census Bloodbath crossover, every week this summer we'll be exploring an 80's slasher film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to the weekend's upcoming blockbuster.

In anticipation of Sicario: Day of the Soldado, the most necessary sequel ever conceived, I'll be reviewing La muerte del chacal, a film that hails from that franchise's domain: the nation of Mexico.

Year: 1984

Director: Pedro Galindo III

Cast: Mario Almada, Fernando Almada, Cristina Molina 

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

I don't know if you're aware of this, but Census Bloodbath is a pretty comprehensive project. In the process of watching every slasher movie the 80's ever churned out, we are gonna cross a lot of borders and oceans. The thing is... If you're watching a bootleg of an obscure foreign film from three and a half decades ago, it turns out that you can't just switch on the subtitles. So yes, I did watch La muerte del chacal (AKA Death of the Jackal) in its original language, and let me tell you - my great grades in AP Spanish don't really carry over into watching a poor VHS rip, so some nuance may have been lost in the process.

Luckily, much like with the previous film I had to watch this way (the 1980 Italian flick Trhauma), the strict adherence to slasher formula makes it pretty damn easy to get the gist of every single scene whether or not you specifically understand the lines being spoken. But I do want you to take this review with a grain of salt, because I certainly didn't watch this under the ideal conditions.

But you know what doesn't need subtitles? Screaming.

So, as far as I can tell, La muerte del chacal tells the story of The Jackal, a serial killer terrorizing the sexy young women of a Mexican town (which, through a bizarre and amusing set of circumstances and tax laws, was shot in Texas). Sheriff Bob (Mario Almada, who also appeared in the film's quasi-sequel Masacre en Rio Grande) is hot on the trail, but before he gets his man a great deal of strippers, horny teens, and various bystanders are felled by the Jackal's awesome sword cane and his two Doberman sidekicks.

Also, like most people you shouldn't trust, he lives in a boat.

Would it shock you if I told you that this film was low budget? It shouldn't, if you've been paying attention. Films made for foreign markets don't land huge sums, and slasher films never do, in any market. But brilliance can thrive in the cheapie environment, and while I wouldn't call La muerte brilliant per se, it definitely has a unique filmmaking quality that can't be denied.

It actually operates in a similar manner to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, utilizing a choppy and erratic editing structure that on the surface seems amateurish but (intentionally or not) drives an eerie chill deep into your bones with its off-kilter glory. Especially in the opening sequences, which depicts the murders of two weirdly middle-aged horny couples in a shipyard, after each kill we get a glimpse of a window closing that doesn't directly correspond to any action in the scene itself, but feels like a grim final note that gets more and more creepy. Also, exactly like Chain Saw, there are random unmotivated shots of the moon that slice through the film at inappropriate times, jamming a shot of adrenaline into otherwise routine proceedings.

Also, there's a boat chase in the middle of the movie, where the watercraft zoom along in wickedly fast motion like they're cars in Mad Max, which is just rad as hell.

I know I'm not making this sound great, but I promise it works. And there are some shots that are just plain great too, so let me make my case with those instead. There's a scene after the killer has escaped from the asylum (about halfway through the killer is caught, and the film suddenly, inexplicably becomes its own sequel), where he's standing in his hospital gown staring up at an apartment building in a beautiful shot that mimics the best of both The Exorcist and Halloween. 

Actually, the killer's appearance in general is some tremendously exciting slasher material. He cuts a striking giallo-esque figure with his black gloves and identity-obscuring Zorro hat, and his weapon of choice is utterly classy and itching to be iconic. Check it out for yourself:

 So spooky!

I can even follow the movie for the ride when it transitions from a giallo into a telenovela in the third act (although I do not know what the killer's true identity turned out to be, because I couldn't keep people's names straight for the life of me, and he was one of many identical old men in the film).

So honestly, I enjoyed a lot of my time with La muerte del chacal. But if I end the review here, you're going to be very confused about the score I gave this film at the bottom of the page. You see, as much good as there is here in terms of outsider filmmaking, there's not a ton of good as a slasher qua slashers. 

For one thing, the kills aren't tremendously impressive. Most are offscreen, and none are bloody. The weapon is neat, but we don't see it in action quite enough for it to be truly memorable. And the fact that the killer uses dogs to hunt his victims is an interesting twist on the format (albeit one used to better effect in 1981's Madhouse), but it's extremely difficult to pull off a convincing mauling in a film at this budget level.

The worst slasher sin La muerte del chacal commits is the fact that it's a police procedural, my least favorite of the sub-subgenres I've come across over the course of this project. Having the protagonist being a policeman chasing the killer prevents you from ever getting to know the victims or caring about their fates. After each murder you just return to the cop, and you only ever get a minute or two with the new victims before they're dead, so it's hard to be scared. Also, there's no denying how regressive the gender politics in the movie are, especially when there is no Final Girl to even out the score.

One last thing is that we don't find out the killer's identity through the Sheriff's ingenuity and hard work. The film just decides to show us the killer's face during a murder sequence at about the place in the plot that you'd need to find out who it was. It's a lazy storytelling technique, and one that's compounded by the fact that I could not remember what character I was looking at. 

So all in all, while I found a lot to like here (and even I can't believe I compared it to that many classics of low budget cinema), it's just not the type of film that really nails me to my seat. I'm glad I've seen it, but it probably won't stick with me for longer than it takes to post this review and have done with it.

Killer: The Jackal

Final Girl: I guess Sheriff Bob's wife? This is a police procedural slasher, which kind of throws a wrench in this section.

Best Kill: A woman in her bathrobe (I have no idea how she relates to the plot, but keeping in mind that this is a slasher movie, she probably doesn't) is stabbed through the neck so forcefully that it pins her to the wall, hanging several inches above the ground.

Sign of the Times: The secretary in the police station has a major side pony that becomes its own separate character in the scene.

Scariest Moment: A woman wanders into a room on the boat that is full of bodies hanging on hooks.

Weirdest Moment: No fewer than three women decide to explore an old rusty boat in their high heels like they're regular Bryce Dallas Howards.

Champion Dialogue: N/A

Body Count: 15; and yes, I'm including the dogs because their deaths are probably the most slasherific of the bunch.

1. Man is mauled by a dog.
2. Woman is killed offscreen.
3. Man is stabbed in the neck with a sword.
4. Woman is impaled with a sword.
5. Woman is pulled into a closet and killed.
6. Stripper is impaled with a sword.
7. Man dies in a boat explosion.
8. Captain dies offscreen.
9. Mistress is stabbed in the neck.
10. Orderly has his neck broken.
11. Security Guard has his head slammed into iron bars.
12. Mama has her throat slashed offscreen.
13. Woman is stabbed through the neck.
14. Doberman #1 is smashed against a wall and thrown overboard.
15. Doberman #2 is shot.

TL;DR: La muerte del chacal is a shabby but visually intriguing shocker with a few tricks up its sleeve.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1482

Popcorn Kernels: Even The Wind Is Afraid

In which we review the final two Mexican horror films screened during month 4 of the Scream 101 podcast: a classic 60’s horror film and its New Millennium remake.

Hasta el Viento Tiene Miedo (1968) (listen to our episode right here)

Year: 1968
Director: Carlos Enrique Taboada
Cast: Marga López, Maricruz Olivier, Alicia Bonet
Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes
MPAA Rating: N/A

The students at an all-girls school are haunted by the ghost of a past student who committed suicide.

Hasta el Viento Teine Miedo faces two hurdles right off the bat. First, it’s a 60’s horror movie. Second, it’s a classical haunted house film. Both of those genres tend to be too stately and antiseptic to provoke blood-curdling chills in today’s audiences. However, the film’s antidote to this is writer-director Carlos Enrique Taboada, who is as close to a Dario Argento as classic Mexican cinema would get.

Although Hasta el Viento still lacks powerful scares, it does boast a sense of creeping dread provoked by an extremely powerful and well-crafted aesthetic. Its use of light and shadow is a perfect stepping stone between German expressionism in the silent era and the stylistic rush of 70’s giallo filmmaking in Italy. The plot might be straightforward and predictable (even at the time), but it lives in a lush, exciting world. This profound grip on style arrives fully fledged in the very first shot, which shows the feet of a hanging body in the top of the frame before revealing its full silhouette on the wall in a flash of lightning. It both skirts the heavy censorship of the period and creates a more dreamlike, provocative image out of a vision that could have merely been crass and blunt.

This delightful handle over the style spreads to every aspect of Hasta el Viento, including the score, which soars up and down in a blustery refrain, and the framing that turns the mundane into an eerie fantasia. It shows a consistency of vision that allows it to transcend from being a horror flick to being an actual bona fide work of cinema art.

Then the characters that occupy that bare bones plot are just delightful. And I’m not just talking about their gravity-defying go-go hairstyles. Each girl has a distinct personality and set of motivations, and their interactions ring with truth, simultaneously sparkling with naturalistic humor. Their dialogue is what makes the movie, buoying the down moments.

I wouldn’t advise going into Hasta el Viento expecting anything other than a stately foreign film, but it delivers its atmosphere with an engaging, surprisingly modern flair. Another Mexican horror film about the terrors of institutional oppression, it’s both a political and stylistic triumph, even if it really isn’t scary anymore.

Rating: 8/10

Hasta el Viento Tiene Miedo (2007) (listen to our episode right here)

Year: 2007
Director: Gustavo Moheno
Cast: Martha Higareda, Verónica Langer, María Aguilera
Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

After a suicide attempt, Claudia is sent to a home for troubled teens that is haunted by the vengeful spirit of a past patient.

It turns out Hollywood isn’t he only place where we can make a hash out of a classic foreign film with a ham-handed remake. Those foreign countries are perfectly capable of doing it to themselves. By updating the classical ghost story of Hasta el Viento Tiene Miedo to the modern age, they drown it in detail and sleaze, stripping away every last element that made it an enduring horror tale.

They’ve given Claudia a gritty origin story, updated the setting to be more grim, and tossed in about half a dozen superfluous lesbian subplots, all in a desperate attempt to jazz it up and appeal to a jaded modern audience: More blood! More boobs! An unnecessary backstory for the tower where the action takes place! It’s an unholy mess, and proof positive that more story detail does not equal a better movie.

I will admit that the story here is more coherent and structured than the original, which had an elemental, almost campfire-esque quality. But the plot will always be simplistic, no matter how much you accessorize it. What made the film click was its inimitable style and engaging characters, two things that the remake entirely lacks. In the habit of most 2000’s remakes, the characters are reduced to interchangeable assholes in the name of “edginess,” and the aesthetic is crude at best, eliminating all mood and shadow with wide blasts of light that make the whole thing look like a forgotten TV movie.

At least this movie attempts to add one element that could be interpreted as intelligent. A major visual and narrative motif is menstruation, as the blood is linked to the characters’ fears of aging, sexuality, and life itself. Naturally, it’s too dumb to do anything particularly exciting with this development, but at least it’s trying. I guess.

However, beyond that, Hasta el Viento 2007 has nothing to offer. Having removed all the best qualities of the original, it’s trapped with that dud story and is left as a miserably tedious slog. I always do my beast to give any remake a shot, but like all too many entries in the genre, this one is just a wailing waste of time.

Rating: 3/10
Word Count: 881

Popcorn Kernels: Mexico Bárbaro

A set of mini-reviews covering Mexican horror films discussed during the first half of month 4 of the Scream 101 podcast.

Satánico Pandemonium (For our Scream 101 review, click here.)

Year: 1975

Director: Gilberto Martínez Solares

Cast: Enrique Rocha, Cecilia Pezet, Delia Magaña

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

A nun is tempted by the Devil to perform perverse and violent acts in her secluded convent.

Exploitation filmmakers do love themselves some nuns. The built-in purity of a woman in a habit provides a quick and dirty entry point into the “corruption of innocence” plot that softcore horror directors like so much. But while the industry has access to a surplus of busty women willing to don a habit, they tend to greatly outnumber the talented directors working in the genre. Now, I won’t say Gilberto Martínez Solares is an untalented director, but I will say he directed 9 movies in 1979 alone, so his attention to detail might be a little lacking.

Now it might surprise you, but the technical quality of a movie isn’t necessarily a dealbreaker for me. As a connoisseur of trash cinema, for me the biggest sin a movie can commit is being boring. And because Satánico Pandemonium commits as many sins as it can get its hands on, why not toss that one onto the pile? In between its many scenes of orgiastic violence and star Cecilia Pezet in various states of undress, there lies an interminable array of nuns walking down stone corridors, across fields, or down staircases in what feels like real time.

Maybe the idea was that the audience should pay penance for the sin of watching this blasphemous film, and that penance is built directly into the film in the form of excruciating tedium. The scenes of sex and violence are decent enough in their own 70’s low budget way (I’ve never seen a more obvious retractable knife in a horror film), noncommittally titillating with softcore sex and vaguely bloody violence. The occasional startling image will crop up and succeed in creating some kind of atmosphere, but for the most part, these scenes are not worth the price you have to pay to reach them.

I will give Satánico Pandemonium this. There is actually a powerful subtext buried deep (very deep) within the film about how it’s not the Devil, but the harsh restrictions of the church itself that drives a person to sin. The repression of the convent, one of the most outwardly pious institutions in the world, has led our heroine to her outbursts, expressing extreme sexual desire and becoming uncontrollably violent when she is denied what she wants. This is the best horror movie link between sex and murder that I’ve seen in a long time, explicitly because it takes place in the milieu of the Catholic church.

I can’t recommend Satánico Pandemonium, but I respect it for its message and its attempts at being a bonkers sadomasochistic horror movie. And the special effects are at least slightly redeemed by some incredible smoking hands midway through. So… great. Maybe still don’t watch it though.

Rating: 4/10

Cronos (For our Scream 101 review, click here.)

Year: 1993

Director: Guillermo del Toro

Cast: Federico Luppi, Ron Perlman, Claudio Brook 

Run Time: 1 hour 34 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

An antique shop owner dissevers a mysterious device that grants him eternal life but curses him with a thirst for blood.

We all gotta start somewhere, and Guillermo del Toro started with a movie about an alchemical vampires with a clockwork scarab licking blood off a bathroom floor. There have certainly been worse debuts, because although Cronos lacks narrative clarity, it reveals the strength of vision he director had even at a young age.

Although del Toro would better achieve almost every element in a later film (Crimson Peak has his best mysterious mansion, Pan’s Labyrinth has a better child element, and so on), Cronos still has an indelible personality that is distinctly itself. Perhaps the most directly Cronenbergian film he ever made, it has a terrific blend of the mechanical and the biological, the sheer wrongness of such juxtaposition fueling its sense of creeping dread.

The special effects and make-up certainly help in this regard. Although they show their low budget seams (del Toro’s ideas are just too big to fit in the realm of microbudget horror), they create sticky grotesqueries that shred your nerves more than any jump scare could.

Unfortunately, these triumphs are housed in a narrative that doesn’t make a lick of sense. His flawless blend of realistic drama and horrific fairy tale hadn’t yet developed, so the dramatic elements that the movie spends most of its time on are severely anemic. You don’t really get a sense of the old man’s personality or home life before his transition, so it’s difficult to connect with how far he has fallen. And honestly, his resistance of the vampiric curse it too complete. He never becomes truly monstrous, and there’s never a sense that he has any particular struggle avoiding his craving for blood.

He’s housed in a meandering plot that just sort of happens around him, though at least that plot contains Ron Perlman (working with del Toro for the first and certainly not last time) hamming it up as a hyperbolically acquisitive villain.

But while the plot and tone of Cronos are iffy, it remains an unassailable triumph of design, from the Cronos device’s clockwork mechanisms to the cruelly antiseptic villain’s lair. If you don’t mind a 90-minute slew of confusion and revulsion (which, really, is a good thing for the genre), check out Cronos. Otherwise, stick with his more established works like Pan’s Labyrinth or The Devil’s Backbone.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 943

Popcorn Kernels: Smashing Pumpkins

In which we explore mini-reviews of movies I watched during the month of October, but weren’t quite important or horror-y enough to break their way into my scary movie-exclusive run of reviews.

Miss Bala

Year: 2011

Director: Gerardo Naranjo

Cast: Stephanie Sigman, Noé Hernández, Irene Azuela

Run Time: 1 hour 53 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A beauty pageant contestant accidentally witnesses a raid on a club and becomes embroiled in a Tijuana drug war.

I was quite excited to see Miss Bala. A Mexican thriller from producers Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal, from the description I was imagining an edgy, female-led action romp that’s part Miss Congeniality and part Sicario. Of course, that’s not how the Mexican drug wars work. Unfortunately in its pursuit of grim, arty authenticity, Miss Bala completely eradicates any reason for it to exist.

If there’s one thing I hate in movies, it’s a protagonist without an ounce of agency in her body, and our beauty queen Laura Guerrero is empty of almost everything else, too. We know nothing about her, save that she has a friend who pushes her to join a beauty contest. We can guess as to why she agrees, but one hypothetical trait does not a lead character make. Laura is an empty plastic bag drifting through this movie, doing what other people tell her and consistently making the single dumbest choice it’s possible to make in any given situation. This is a chick who would order the salmon at a Denny’s if given the opportunity.

I get what they’re doing here. Laura is meant to be an innocent who is randomly swept up in the pure evil of the drug wars just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. She’s not allowed an arc or a happy ending, because that’s the reality of it. Frankly, it’s a Halloween-esque storyline. That pure simplicity could have worked, but we need to understand more about Laura in order to sympathize with her plight. Unfortunately Miss Bala is an arid thriller that doesn’t allow any humanity to leak out.

Also the character motivations (both from the good guys and the bad guys) are incoherent, and the criminal plot is a sloppy mess, so Miss Bala is running on three flat tires. The opening act has a confused, frenzied energy, but as the story plays on and things don’t get any clearer, the film shows its hand: It really doesn’t know what it’s doing, and pretty much everything good is an accident. Then the pointlessly artsy lingering shots suffocate the film even more, as if it needed the help. It’s a damn shame that this movie utterly failed to meet its staggering potential, but they can’t all be winners I suppose.

Rating: 5/10

Death Proof

Year: 2007

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Cast: Kurt Russell, Zoë Bell, Rosario Dawson

Run Time: 1 hour 53 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Two groups of girls are stalked y a psycho stuntman who commits murders with his tricked-out car.

I’ve seen the highlights of the oeuvre of one Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, what have you), but I’ve still seen far too few of his films, by some people’s accounts. I probably shouldn’t have rekindled that viewing with Death Proof, his contribution to the 70’s throwback double feature Grindhouse, which he created with Robert Rodriguez back in 2007. And no, I didn’t watch Planet Terror, but if you have a spare three hours handy, I would gladly borrow them.

Anyway, it turns out there’s a genre of film that Tarantino does not have mastery of, and that’s 70’s-style exploitation, which you think he’d fit into like a glove. But all his usual Tarantino-isms, which he applies liberally to Death Proof, are actively rejected by the genre like a bad transplant. First off, a key element he totally missed about grindhouse movies is that they’re short. The simplistic plot, which at certain points maps onto either the proto-slasher or rape-revenge genres is too elemental to be sustained for two f**king hours, especially when there are five minute swaths of film that so obviously could have been cut if he wasn’t so obscenely overconfident in his writing and his obnoxious cameo performance.

Speaking of writing… Tarantino is well-known for his dialogue, especially his long conversations laced with pop culture ephemera, during which he tosses all pretense of filmmaking to the floor and bathes in his own words for eight to ten minutes. This happens no fewer than four times in Death Proof, inflating the already punishing run time, and proving one thing beyond a shadow of a doubt: Tarantino can’t write for women.

These conversational scenes have worked extremely well in his other films, but the dizzyingly high proportion of women in Death Proof mean that these scenes usually take place within a group of 3 to 5 females. When you’re a person who views that half of the population as giant pairs of feet with assess attached to them, it becomes difficult to craft compelling characters, which he fails to do ten times over, at one point literally forgetting about the existence of a girl who had – until that moment – held a major role.

Some of the dialogue itself is still fun taken on its own (although the single best line is beaten to within an inch of its life with ceaseless repetition), but these scenes drag the film’s already wonky pacing down like an anchor. And it’s not like the sole major male character, Kurt Russell’s Stuntman Mike, fares much better. He’s given way too much to say, babbling like an infant in a way that completely undercuts his eventual menace. Russell does a great job of course, hamming it up to a pitch perfect degree in the gonzo grindhouse finale, but across the board this is probably the worst script Tarantino has ever written.

The feeling I’m left with after Death Proof is frustration, and I wish that wasn’t true. But after being pummeled with yet another of his overwritten black characters, endless conversation essentially using foot massages as a currency, and a scene with a cell phone that pointlessly derails its period authenticity for a subplot that never comes to fruition, who can blame me? There is good here, mainly in the kinetic sequences of violence that close out the film’s two distinct chapters, and a car chase that will have you biting your nails until your cuticles bleed, but just like everything else, they go on for waaaay too long.

Death Proof saps the energy out of itself at every turn, and as dearly as I want to like it, it’s its own fault that I can’t.

Rating: 6/10

Kristy

Year: 2014

Director: Oliver Blackburn

Cast: Haley Bennett, Ashley Greene, Lucas Till 

Run Time: 1 hour 26 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

A college student alone in the dorms over Thanksgiving break is targeted by a bloodthirsty cult.

Kristy is a Netflix horror movie if I’ve ever seen one. And I assure you, I most definitely have. Not quite a slasher, not quire a cultist film, not quite good, it is a film that clings to its own sorry existence by the skin of its teeth. But it’s reasonably entertaining and it’s free, so you might as well watch it.

By far the most interesting thing about Kristy is that it seems to genuinely still believe it’s the 90’s. There’s no winking throwback involved here, just a bunch of crop tops and an addiction to the wonders of modern gadgetry that seems to have missed the last decade or so of Apple press conferences. It’s odd that a movie that includes a crane shot clearly recorded by a drone (an exquisitely beautiful one, I might add, if a bit wobbly) should also insist that people still text like this: “U kil Kristy? ☺”

Its fabulously ill-conceived technobabble doesn’t stop there. Nor does it start there, as the entire opening is an exhausting slog through pixelated Darkweb nonsense that makes the webcam footage in Halloween: Resurrection look like 4K. Alright, after that brief detour to film nerd town, let’s get down to brass tacks. Kristy is a heaping helping of nonsense (apparently, by knowing Kristy’s phone number, the cult can hack 911?) but that has the unintended side effect of making it a pretty fun watch.

Kristy gets the job done in record time, never showing a full scene when a quick montage will do, and not overstaying its welcome by indulging in anything as ostentatious as a “theme” beyond the most superficial level. The crumpled tinfoil masks worn by the killers are pretty creepy, and although the film’s girl power finale is ruthlessly half-baked, it’s enough to have you rooting for her, even though her name isn’t even f**king Kristy.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1469

North Of The Border

Year: 2016

Director: Jonás Cuarón

Cast: Gael García Bernal, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Alondra Hidalgo

Run Time: 1 hour 34 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I was so excited to see Desierto. A thriller from Alfonso Cuarón’s son Jonás about the racial tension at the U.S.-Mexican border reaching a violent extreme, it couldn’t have been a more timely project. I couldn’t wait to see how the immigration debate that has fueled this election cycle would be tackled from the Mexican perspective, lending even more evidence to the idea that genre films are far more political than mainstream Hollywood. Enter 2016. Every time I find myself excited about something this year, it has to at least mildly thwart my expectations.

Wheee…

In the Badlands, aging American cowboy Sam (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is out hunting rabbits when he spots a group of illegal immigrants making their way across the desert. Because the cops won’t do anything, he takes it upon himself to eliminate them with his rifle and his trusty dog, Tracker. Thus begins a long fight for survival through the cactus, boulder, and snake-strewn terrain. There are a good dozen Mexican characters, but the only ones we care about are Adela (Alondra Hidalgo), a  young woman who is crossing with her lecherous caretaker Ramiro (Oscar Flores), Mechas (Diego Cataño), the right-hand-man of the leader of the expedition, and our main character and all-around good guy Moises (Gael García Bernal), who is crossing so he can be united with his wife and son.

And don’t think the hamhanded symbolism of that name has slipped past me, I’m just glad it wasn’t actually spoken aloud in the movie.

Desierto kicks things off well enough. The sun slowly rises from behind a rocky mountain as a faraway truck pootles across a vast expanse of sand, crawling across the empty frame as the title fades in. This indicates that, even as a tight, 90-minute thriller, Desierto has patience and a willingness to let a moment or mood breathe. And then, ten or fifteen minutes in, the action flares up with a sublimely horrifying massacre as Sam mows down a whole crop of immigrants in one fell swoop. It’s a dynamic, visceral moment that emphasizes his menace and the fact that, in the flat, barren desert, there’s nowhere to hide.

It’s horrifying stuff, made even worse by the thought that, in certain states where Desierto plays, audiences might just be cheering Sam on. But what the film does best is to humanize both sides. Sam shows what might even be a flicker of Last House on the Left-style remorse, but he is too warped and vengeful to know what to do with it. And the immigrants are never given much personality, but they have enough to prove a point: some of them are good people and some of them aren’t. But none of them deserve the fate delivered upon them.

This first act promises a smart, breakneck thriller that we only partially get. After the tremendous setup, Desierto just unspools with an endless procession of scenes of people running through the desert, completely failing to escalate the situation to any meaningful degree. A lot of elements it sets up don’t come into play again, which I guess defies the strict conventions of the thriller genre and avoids cliché, but in the process it also avoids having a particularly satisfying arc.

Gravity it ain’t.

Probably my biggest beef with Desierto is that its weakest point is at the exact moment we should be most keyed up: the climax. It’s a one-on-one battle around a giant rocky outcropping that… features two sweaty men inching around a boulder for twenty minutes. It’s exhaustingly tedious and converts a decently engaging thriller into an adrenaline-ectomy. I wanted so much to like Desierto, but it just falls short of being genuinely good

I do like the presentation of the villain here, giving him plenty of all-American cowboy shots that juxtapose against his inhuman evil (which is underlined by the fact that we never seem him take a single drink of water – in 120 degree weather!). But his victims only get two scenes in which to flesh out their personalities, and they squander it on a pile of cliché backstories and fumbled emotional manipulation.

By the third act, even before the tour de boredom that is the final 20 minutes, the cracks begin to show. We get to get up close and personal with some truly silly special effects and a tossed-off moralistic finale that would work if we had any sense of what kind of person Moises actually is. Desierto’s thriller elements don’t present enough of a challenge, drastically minimizing the terror after the opening setpiece an just kind of plateauing until that major nosedive. It’s still a largely enjoyable film, it just lacks the tightness and energy it could very easily have had.

TL;DR: Desierto is a solid thriller for exactly half its run time.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 825