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.

Mondo Schlocko posts a YouTube clip of a Hijo del Santo cartoon. It’s actually pretty decently animated, and lots of recognizable Mexico City landmarks and stuff. Spanish language dialogue, and looks fairly modern, apparently from Cartoon Network. Go check it out.

The Horror Blog posts a short Bloomberg interview with Roger Corman. I’ve got a lot of respect for the man and his work, and while the whole interview is worth a read, there’s one quote that stands out. The Horror Blog also chose the same quote, and I think it’s worth repeating:

“The strategy was to make the best possible film for the money. I’ve seen so many people slough off low-budget films. You cannot do that. When Jonathan Demme did his first film, which was for us, it was a woman-in-prison picture. He said to me, “I’m going to make the best woman-in-prison picture ever made.” That’s the attitude that you must have.”

And holy shit, is he ever right. And more than that, he’s actually agreeing with me. Ok, that sounded pretentious. When I finally saw Bolas Chinas, the low budget movie I acted in last year, I was disappointed. Not because it was a low-budget movie with largely amateur actors; I already knew that. I was disappointed because the director, who also wrote the script and edited, had not realised the full potential of the thing. The script wasn’t particularly good, and it also wasn’t finished before we started shooting, and the editing was incredibly sloppy and careless.

The problem, again, isn’t the budget. It’s that people don’t care. In this case, lots of people involved were originally making “art film”, and did this project for fun inbetween other, more “serious” project. And it’s fine to make a movie for fun, I guess. But it’s not fine to not care about it. Making a movie is hard work, and lots of it. If the people who are doing it, when they get tired in the middle of the project, as always happens, say “fuck it, it’s just a project for fun, my real, serious art movies are what matters, I’ll just do this as quickly and carelessly as possible”, then what you get is a movie that sucks, instead of a movie that’s at least competent and decent for the resources you had available.

If you’re going to make a movie, make the best movie you can. Maybe even make the best movie of its type ever made, if you can bring yourself to say that (I’m not sure I could). But always do the best you can, give it 100%, because if you don’t, if you stop caring, it’s going to suck, no matter what the budget is. There are lots of big-budget turkeys that are obviously a result of people not caring, not caring because they don’t believe in the project, or they believe it’s going to be a blockbuster no matter what, or for any number of other reasons. And they flop. Low-budget movies where everyone does their best usually come out at least decent, and the people involved often get a chance to make another movie, maybe with a bigger budget.

If you’re going to do something, do it right. If not, just don’t bother, because it’s going to suck. Roger Corman agrees with me.

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.