Falling over and twisting your ankle during filming in arduous terrain and under extreme conditions: Probably seen as good for the production, self-sacrificing and/or brave.

Falling over and twisting your ankle while drunk at the weekly crew party, not too many meters from your bedroom door: Makes you target of light ridicule and ribbing from fellow crew members.

This is the first day of my production diary for “Rio de oro”. I’ll try to get these posted as often as I can, although internet access is spotty and slow. This is really from March 3rd.

Up dead early, not much sleep, off to the airport for the 6:30 flight to Hermosillo, Sonora. The flight was unevenful, and when I got there, my instructions were to take a taxi to an address in “Cananea”. Not knowing better, I thought this sounded like a 10-15 minute cab ride, but no such luck, Cananea is actually a completely different town, several hours away, so I found a taxi that’s willing to take me, and off I went.

The taxi driver’s named Abundio, and repeatedly asks if I have an iPod or something, because all that’s on the radio is banda and norteña music, which he hates, unlike everyone else in the state. Finally, he fishes out a CD case from the glove box, and we listen to reggaeton and Mexican hip-hop while we drive.

The road is straight and boring, cutting through a slightly hilly desert landscape devoid of anything of particular interest, except for the occasional field of cactus, and some oddly out of place signs. There’s a McDonald’s one, not an ad sign, but the sort of small logo sign you’d expect to see by the entrance to a drive-in McDonald’s. It’s worn and faded, and there’s nothing else around for several kilometers in each direction. The same thing happens again ten minutes later, with a restaurant sign on a high pole, in the middle of nowhere. I consider the possibility of there having been buildings there in the past, but if so, they’re so thoroughly razed that nothing remains, not even a different colored patch on the ground.

That everyone in Northern Mexico drives a pickup truck is something of a cliché, but it would seem it’s also true. I see more pickup trucks, mostly of the moderately large to ridiculously huge variety, on the road than any other kind of vehicle.

I nod off several times, and when we arrive in Cananea after some three and a half hours of driving, it too seems empty and worn out. I go into a supermarket looking for a bathroom, and the shelves are half empty, the produce department sparsely populated only with some dejected looking week-old cabbage. The upper floor of the building holds the office where I’m supposed to meet up with whoever’s taking me to location, and when I get there, the office, that of an accountant, turns out to be the only non-vacant one on that floor, the rest of it empty, just glass doors with old logo stickers on them. I’m later told Cananea is mostly a mining town, and it’s in the middle of a strike that’s lasted more than a year and half now.

I meet up with the driver, and we go off in a truck, first along bits of paved road that gradually becomes more dilapidated, then the asphalt stops, we go along a dirt road that several times dips down to cross dry riverbed. The signs along the road imply that the river flows over the road when it rains, but the landscape shows little sign of that happening lately.

Finally, we arrive at the ranch that’s the production’s home base. It’s actually very nice, something between a hotel and a ranch. I’m told the Reagans stayed here several times, something I chalk up to exaggeration or rumor until, in the living room, I notice a framed photo of Nancy Reagan sitting on the lap of a Mexican cowboy, the ranch in the background. Both are smiling widely. The photo has a cheap plastic label stuck on it, which says, in Spanish, “Sitting in her favorite chair”. I wonder if Ronnie knew.

We leave in the afternoon for a location shoot in the hills, taking off in a couple of pickup trucks and a jeep. The jeep promptly gets a flat tire, runs the tire off the rim, and has to be abandoned. We reorganize people into the remaining trucks and go on.

We’re going to a nature reserve, looking to film some deer. We have some guys out on horses moving them in the right direction, and we’re going to film them as they go by. This turns out to be somewhat more difficult than it sounds, with much moving about and driving trucks up ridges that frankly seem unfit as roads resulting. Finally, just as we’re starting to lose the light, it works, and we get a herd of deer galloping past us at no more than 20-30 meters distance, over the ridge we’re on, and down on the other side. The director is somewhat disappointed there were no male animals in the herd, but otherwise, it seems to have been a success. We set off back to the ranch, chewing on the dust of the truck in front of us all the way.

I enter a coma some time around 9 at night, having slept almost nothing, and having to get up at 5:30 the next morning.

I’ve been stupidly busy at work lately, and it’s going very well. In a few hours, I’m off to the Sonoran Desert to do supervision and data management on “River of Gold“, a Western movie being shot on the Red One. This is our second Red One project in a few weeks, the previous one was an 11-camera megaproduction, the filming of Vicente Fernandez’ concert in the Zocalo on Valentine’s Day.

I’ll be mostly offline while in the desert, but will take pictures and notes. Expect updates when I get back. I’m a city dweller, so wish me luck.

Parque vía, the movie directed by Enrique Rivero that we did post supervision on, has its international premiere at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland during the first weeks of August, according to The Hollywood Reporter and others. I’ve known about this for a while, but not been allowed to tell anyone. Congratulations to Enrique, Paola, and everyone else involved. I’m sure it’ll do very well, it’s a good movie.

I was asked this question in a radio interview very recently, and since I got a chance to give the URL to this blog, I figured people might be arriving here curious about it. Hello, Norwegian P3 listeners! So, there’s a small essay on the Mexploitation genre and its history up. I might add images and whatnot later, but for now, that’s where to go. It also contains some links to the most relevant mexploitation-themed posts on this blog.

Speaking of my IMDB profile being updated, Bolas Chinas is now in IMDB, which adds another glorious Mexploitation credit to my IMDB page as well. As usual with IMDB, the credits have duplicate entries, that’ll probably get fixed after a while. You can’t really expect them to get it right right away, after all they only spend some 4-6 weeks on accepting new titles.

What few readers I have might have noticed that I’ve not been writing much here lately. I’d like to, but I’ve been insanely busy. I’ve hinted at this before, and not said why, since I’ve been trying to establish a few things. But well, here it is. I co-founded a postproduction company (preliminary website) with my good friend Øyvind Stiauren, another Norwegian living in Mexico. We’ve been at it for about 8 months now, and results are starting to show, specifically, the first movie we’ve worked on to show up in IMDB, Ana Laura Calderón’s “La Isla de la Juventud“, a documentary shot on Cuba. That’s not the first movie we’ve worked on, though, the first was a feature film that was shot mostly during April-May. They’re doing pickups now, and post starts in November. There’s also a couple of other documentaries we’re working on right now, as well as several large feature films coming at the end of the year/beginning of next. We’re doing very well, and I’m quite happy.

This also means my IMDB page got updated. There’ll be much more there very soon.

In a round of poster-hunting in second hand shops, I came across this gem. It really doesn’t need much explanation, it’s the definition of Mexploitation right there: Half-naked women, foreigners (and US border patrol agents, even!) as bad guys, even more half-naked women, etc. You need to click on this image to take a closer look. And probably also make it your desktop wallpaper. Or print it and hang it on the wall.

As an additional bonus, the scantily-clad woman in the photo on the right is Lyn May, an ex-prostitute and stripper turned actress who is one of the central characters in Mexploitation history. As if that wasn’t enough, she has an enormous ass. She probably warrants a post of her own, and since I know you want to know more about enormous mexploitation asses, I will give it to you. Just not right now.

The title of the movie, Las Braceras, is the feminine plural of “Bracero”, roughly “guest worker”, but read up on the Bracero Program for some important background on US-Mexico relations and immigration.

(And yes, I blog too little. People have let me know. But I’m doing very cool stuff, and it’s definitely worthwhile, I just want to wait a little longer before I announce it here. Be patient.)

The time has come for the sequel to the craptastic Vacaciones de terror, which I reviewed a couple of weeks ago.

First of all, credit where credit’s due, I guess. This movie is a much more successful and pure horror movie than the first one, but it’s still utter shit.

Julio, the guy who made out with himself in the mirror for the longest time, and used the anti-demonic amulet he found as a rear view mirror decoration, in the first movie, is now older and wiser, and passes his time as a paranormal investigator or something. He also wears a long black trenchcoat and a horrible mullet. He’s played, like the last time, by Pedrito Fernández, pictured to the left. He’s a very, very wooden actor, although he has some agility for the action scenes, which is useful when you’re going to be dodging magically flying and on fire plastic carved pumpkins. See, this is a Halloween movie. Aren’t you glad you asked?

Pedro Fernández is joined by another Mexican singer, Tatiana, who was a pop singer back when this movie was made, but shortly after switched to making music for children. She’s pictured on the right, and plays a girl who’s a successful pop singer, and also the daughter of a famous movie producer. You know, the kind of movie producer the people who produced this movie will never, ever become. She also has a little sister, who’s annoying, and will become important to the “plot”.

After a brief intro sequence that serves to introduce our two main characters to each other, and for Tatiana to invite Pedrito to her sister’s birthday party, which is on Halloween, and is to be held at the movie studios where their father makes his movies. When Tatiana leaves in the car with her little sister, Pedrito notices that the sister has a diabolical doll similar to the one from the first movie, and becomes worried. However, before he can do anything about it, he must confront a raving mad old man who warns him about the dangers of the doll, gives him magical stone seals that will protect him from evil, tells him about an ancient tome that will give him vital information, and then promptly runs out into the street and gets killed. I guess they hired that actor for just one day of shooting.

Pedrito, determined to get to the bottom of this, goes to the library to read the book. And there, in a typical Mexican library with cheap 70s metal shelving and all sorts of boring non-fiction books, he finds the ancient, crumbling tome of demonology. I think it’s right next to some sort of engineering textbook.

Skipping ahead a bit, at the party, Tatiana performs, the little sister cuts herself stupidly when trying to cut her birthday cake, causing blood to drip onto a witch figure on her cake, which is then eaten by the demonic doll, which sits under the cake. The doll transforms into some sort of lizard monster, kills a studio technician, and everyone runs off, except Pedrito, who stays behind to check things out. Oh, and the father gives the birthday girl seven silver coins.

Later, in the girls’ home, the little girl remembers she left the coins at the studio, so she and her older sister go to get them. In the middle of the night, to the place where someone was horribly murdered by an unknown perpetrator. And they seem to think it’ll be a fun adventure.

Once there, they run into Pedrito, the little girl has another attack of near-fatal stupidity, and gets grabbed by the monster, the silver coins get stuck to a wall and electrified, Tatiana disappears, but is somehow transformed into a sugar figure on the birthday cake, and Pedrito saves her by jumping into the burning cake (yes, it’s on fire) and sliding across it in his black trenchcoat, getting covered by frosting, which is gone in the next shot. The sugar figure transforms back into Tatiana, and now it turns out they must rescue the little girl before sunrise, or she’ll be gone forever.

In the meantime, a guard at the studio calls the producer father because Tatiana’s car is outside, and then gets killed by the monster. Producer dad gets out his revolver and sawed off shotgun, puts on a denim jacket, and goes off to the studio. Everyone runs around a lot, the monster flings burning magically flying plastic carved pumpkins at Pedrito, the father shows up, shoots the monster in the head, which has little effect, suspects and tries to beat up Pedrito, then finally realizes they need to do something else. They get the electrified silver coins out of the wall by splashing them with holy water from the studio Virgin of Guadalupe shrine, melt them down to make a seal that can kill the monster, and somehow free the little girl.

However, Tatiana is stabbed in the stomach by some sort of wood rod, and dies. Pedrito must face the monster, and after a lot of rolling around on the ground, he throws the seal into its chest, shuriken-style, which makes it catch fire, and Tatiana come back to life. Everyone’s happy, and the movie ends with not one freeze frame, but two (first one of Pedrito, then one of Tatiana).

God, this movie is horrible. But if you want to see mariachi singers and children’s musicians battle lizard monster witches (for some reason, they call the monster a witch), then you don’t have that many options, and this movie is for you.

A Mexican comics collective that calls itself Parranda de Moneros has a comic out, “Paranormal Directo“, a collection of six short stories based on the two concepts “paranormal event” and “public transport”. I’m not sure it’s on sale yet, but the cover promises, well, ghosts and ghouls on a Mexico City subway train, and lots and lots of tits. The whole exaggerated female anatomy thing is overdone in comics, and I’d like to see less of it, but then again, Mexican horror comics, from an independent publishing collective, no less? You don’t see that every day.

I’m not sure it’s on sale yet, but I want it, and when I get it, I’m going to review it here.