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