I just saw Guillermo del Toro’s latest, El Laberinto del Fauno (aka. Pan’s Labyrinth), and I’m pretty impressed. This is one of the best original works of speculative fiction in film in recent years, I think. Like most of del Toro’s movies, it teeters on the edge of being amazingly good, but then fails because of some hard to believe plot twist or dialogue. Guillermo del Toro is obviously an idea guy, and he has great ideas (all of his movies have the kind of stories that probably look amazing as treatments), but he’s not a great screenwriter. Still, this is probably his best movie to date, even better than Hellboy, which in itself was quite good.

This isn’t that easily identifiable as either horror or fantasy, but it has aspects of both, set against the in itself quite horrible reality of early Fascist Spain. A young girl, Ofelia, travels with her pregnant mother to rural northern Spain to meet her mother’s new husband, an army captain whose two principal interests are brutally defeating the remaining leftist guerrillas hiding in the mountains, and the impending birth of his son by Ofelia’s mother. He’s not particularly interested in Ofelia or her mother, which leaves Ofelia to wander about and soon find an ancient labyrinth whose central chamber is occupied by the titular faun, who tells her she might just be the lost princess of an underground kingdom.

That fantasy story, however, mostly takes the back seat to the fight between the captain and the guerrillas, punctuated by a couple of sequences of extremely brutal violence that made me flinch. The first one is very unexpected, and reminded me perhaps most of the murder in the first sequence in Irréversible, not at all as long-lasting, but much more jarring because of the surprise onset. During the movie, the captain is painted as so much of an asshole (but quite a believable one) that when he finally gets his dues, you wish he could suffer more.

In the meantime, Ofelia has to pass three tests given to her by the faun, to prove that’s she’s really the lost princess. In the first, she must confront a giant toad living under a dead tree, a challenge that, apart from the visceral special effects, is quite in keeping with the fairy-tale roots of the movie. The second, however, is when things veer deeply into horror territory. Simply drawing a doorway on her bedroom wall with a piece of chalk, Ofelia enters the gallery of The Pale Man, a monstrous humanoid thing with no eyes in its head, but with apparently removable eyes in the palms of its hands. The creepy alien weirdness of it reminds me of Lovecraft, which is obviously a general inspiration for del Toro (see Hellboy, and also del Toro is apparently doing an adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness). Now that I think about it, there’s also a visual parallel with Y’golonac, an extended Lovecraft mythos monster with mouths, not eyes, in the palms of its hands.

Sadly, it’s in this very creepy scene that the movie also offers its biggest letdown in terms of character motivation. Despite having been warned explicitly and urgently by the faun not to partake of the Pale Man’s buffet of delicious food (he sits motionless at the head of a large table filled to the brim with it), and despite the faeries who guide her trying to stop her, Ofelia decides to stop at the table and taste a couple of grapes. This piece of plain, unadulterated, and unmotivated idiocy wakes the Pale Man, from whom Ofelia barely escapes, and also causes the faun to declare her unable to pass the tests. It’s a plot contrivance to be able to wake the Pale Man, but it could easily have been handled in a myriad other ways that would not have caused the audience to view the main character as either terminally stupid or suffering from acute short-term memory loss.

Later on, the movie improves again, and the end is heart-wrenching and appropriately fairy-tale style tragic, although the “was she imagining it all, or was it real” touches of the ending, despite seeming to finally come down on the side of her experiences being real, weaken things a bit, and if one were to come to the conclusion that it was all fantasy, the moral would be that childhood fantasy is a dangerous thing which leads children to putting themselves and others in mortal peril for no good reason. I don’t think that’s the moral del Toro wants to promote, and that’s without even getting into the theme of someone being a lost princess whose very soul has qualities that makes her fit to rule, in a movie that’s otherwise doing a fine job of being anti-fascist.

But, quibbles aside, this is a very good movie in many ways. It’s a shame that del Toro, a Mexican, seems to be unable to make his movies in Mexico (only his first, Cronos, that of the interesting idea but fatally flawed and clichéd execution, was made in Mexico, subsequent ones have been made in Spain or the US), but even though his production is uneven, he always seems to dedicate himself 100% to the story of his movies, with little concern for anything else. That’s got to be worth something, and he seems to be getting better all the time.

For those of you who read Spanish, I can highly recommend Revista Cinefagia, a website (it’s called Cinephagia Magazine, but I don’t think they actually publish on paper) reviewing all sorts of movies, but mostly Spanish-language ones. I found them when looking for reviews of crappy Mexploitation horror movies (they review both Vacaciones de terror and another crappy 80s Mexican horror movie, Cementerio del terror), but they actually do a lot of different stuff, from international cult and horror cinema to mainstream Latin American movies, and they do it really well. The reviews that I’ve read are all smart, clever, and generally get the point.

Like many reviewers, they’re at their most entertaining when they really hate something (their review of Batalla en el Cielo is funny, for instance), but there’s plenty to read in their impressively long list of movie reviews. Oh, and they also review porn, including Eon McKai movies, something few critics are willing to do, but more should.

I’m tempted to send them a complimentary copy of Comando Zorras, now.

Wonderfully cheesy Mexican movie channel De Pelicula is running a Halloween horror movie marathon. All Mexican horror movies, all the time, this whole weekend. It’s not as bad as you think… it’s much, much worse.

I just watched Vacaciones de terror, a movie considered something of a classic by people I know (who never call it just by the name, but always say “Las vacaciones de terror, con Pedrito Fernández“). It’s directed by René Cardona III, grandson of legendary Cuban-born Mexploitation director René Cardona, who directed almost 150 movies, including several Santo movies, the Luchadora movies, and La horripilante bestia humana (aka. Night of the Bloody Apes), as well as acting in El Barón del Terror (aka. The Brainiac), amongst others. René Cardona Jr., father of the director of today’s movie, worked on more straight up trash cinema, including the entire series of La risa en vacaciones, one of the most successful lowbrow comedy series in the history of Mexican cinema. So René Cardona III is the last in a long line of schlockmeisters, as well as having some sort of family obligation to deal with vacations in his movies.

The story of the movie is fairly straightforward. A family gets a cheap fixer-upper summer house in the Mexican countryside, but all is not what it seems, as the youngest daughter finds a diabolical doll who takes control of her and supernaturally attempts to kill the rest of the family. The doll accomplishes this mostly by moving its eyes, which is always accompanied by a “scary” synth chord, and mostly makes furniture topple over slowly, or in some cases, cutlery fly about. The aunt falls mysteriously ill and has to go to the hospital, accompanied by the uncle, leaving the now demon-possessed kids in the hands of their niece and her eighties-haired boyfriend. The boyfriend has come upon the one thing that can stop the diabolical doll, namely a shiny medallion. Being Mexican, he’s done the obvious with the medallion: Hanging it from the rear view mirror of his crappy truck. This turns out to be fortuitous, since the doll remote controls his truck and tries to kill him with it, but the medallion stops it (after he stupidly tries to outrun the truck for a while). He then gets back into the truck and drives it through the wall of the house, which does no good at all, since he’s soon impaled by several pieces of levitating cutlery, and then sucked into a smoking mirror (well, he’s pressed against the mirror for a while, then disappears).

The girlfriend hangs around for a while screaming, the uncle tries to return from the hospital, but has diabolical car trouble, and then the idiot girlfriend remembers that the boyfriend said something about the medallion being their only hope, so she gets it and presses it against the doll, then throws the whole thing in the fireplace. This makes the house catch fire, and then explode several times, while everyone barely escapes alive. The final scene shows the house for sale, now in its original dilapidated but not burned down and blown up condition, and the diabolical doll reveals itself to another little girl.

This movie was incredibly horrible, like some sort of retarded, slow-moving version of The Evil Dead, without anyone being raped by trees. Lucky for me, there’s a sequel, which I might get to see some time, called Vacaciones de terror 2: Noche de brujas, and as a bonus, that one features children’s artist Tatiana. I can’t wait.

I just took this through my bathroom window, with my cellphone camera. And they say pollution is a bad thing. Hah! Nature never knew colors like that!

(Bonus points if you know what movie that’s from.)

Over at ADDTF, Sean Collins has found a Bollywood ripoff of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video. Words cannot describe it.

Mexploitation Cinema (with the long subtitle) isn’t associated with this blog in any way except for similarities in subject matter. While I call the sort of movies I’ve participated in here “Mexploitation”, Doyle Greene uses the term more strictly, applying it to horror/monster/wrestler movies produced in Mexico from 1957 to 1977. I think that limit is somewhat arbitrary and unnecessary, but it’s chosen to correspond to Greene’s central thesis, that these movies reflect values and preoccupations common in Mexican society during this period.

And what do you know, that thesis works pretty well. Although Greene uses quite a bit of scholarly critical jargon, he makes a clear and quite convincing case for linking the themes and monsters in the movies to issues of Mexican national identity, xenophobia, politics, and oppression. The main arc of the narrative is that from forging a modern, urban Mexican national identity in the 1950-60s, to the political oppression and violence of the late 60s and 70s.

The tone is dry and academic, but that can be quite entertaining, when applied to movies that are as blatantly ridiculous as many of Santo’s efforts. Greene dissects and analyzes the action and symbolism of several such movies in detail, but can’t seem to avoid bemusement at the puerile plots and stilted dialogue.

All in all, this book isn’t for everyone, but given that it’s pretty much the only serious analysis of a locally important subgenre, it’s definitely worth reading for those interested in Mexican low budget movies.

The IMDB entry for Comando Zorras has been updated (not sure if it’s my update or not, since IMDB kind of sucks that way, but I’m guessing it’s not, since I added Leo’s credit too). That gets me another “official” credit, in the sense that if it’s not on the internet, it doesn’t exist. Yay. I just hope Bolas Chinas won’t take as long.

Back to the horror stuff with a quick review of this Japanese horror movie that’s been remade in the US. The remake, Pulse looks really bad, and has gotten horrible reviews, but people keep telling me the original is quite good.

Kairo isn’t really much of a horror movie, though. It tries to be a philosophical look at loneliness and alienation in modern Tokyo, with computers and the internet as an important ingredient. And then there are ghosts, and a zombie-type apocalypse. The mood and tone it tries to strike is of one of fevered nightmare, unease and decay.

And yeah, it’s dream-like, but it’s one of those annoying, slow-moving, frustrating and repetitive dreams where you get nowhere and can’t get anything done. The pace is excruciating, and when it finally does move, it makes little to no sense. Like many J-horror movies, concepts are demonstrated and insights revealed through endless expository dialogue. What insights there are feel trite and banal, like pretentious student film by students oblivious to their own limitations, and the script makes little sense, don’t come together, flows badly or not at all, and the setups and payoffs are so trivially obvious and by the book that they had me rolling my eyes and scoffing.

It’s not all bad, though. Some of the actual horror sequences (of which there are few) are creepy, but not hard to watch scary and tense like some other, more successful Japanese horror movies. Visually, it’s nice, although the “we don’t have a big budget, let’s just break out 3D Studio and After Effects” look of all the special effects gets annoying after a while.

All in all, this might be worth watching for mood. It might be better on opiates, I don’t know, and I’m not going to be bothered to watch it again to find out.