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.

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’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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Oskar is 12 years old, his parents are divorced, and he’s bullied at school. He lives in the sort of snow-clogged Scandinavian suburb of brutalist brick buildings and nowhere to go that I remember from growing up in Norway a few years later, and dreams of violent revenge on his tormentors. It’s while he’s stabbing a courtyard tree with a knife, pretending it’s one of the bullies, that Eli shows up, a girl who looks to be about his age. She’s just moved in to the apartment next to his with a man who might be her father, and there’s something strange about her. For instance, she perches in high places and jumps down effortlessly, she can’t feel cold (she says she must have forgotten how to), and she tells him without prompting that she can’t be his friend.

Of course, they become friends, and then boyfriend and girlfriend, as it becomes more and more obvious that Eli isn’t a little girl at all, although, as she says, she is 12 years old, she’s just been 12 years old for a long time. Håkan, the man Eli lives with, is her companion of sorts, and tries to procure blood for her to drink, but he’s a bungling killer, and Eli needs to take things into her own hands.

It’s a very original story, or at least a very original mixing of several familiar and very different stories, and it works surprisingly well, the low-key coming of age love story punctuated by a few bursts of sometimes extreme and shocking violence, and the supernatural elements handled matter-of-factly.

Visually, it’s also well made, although the cinematography is not spectacular, there are plenty of visual details to take note of. The whole thing is largely shot with extremely shallow depth of field, at times it’s extreme enough that Eli’s huge eyes are in focus while everything below the middle of her nose is a blur. Shallow depth of field seems to be a trend in horror movies, possibly coming out of Japan, where bokeh has long been a place to hide the horrors, complimenting the more traditional darkness of American and European horror. Eli’s particularly often treated to being partially out of focus, as well as behind panes of uneven or frosted glass, underlining the insecurity about her slippery true identity.

There’s a lot to be analyzed in this movie, and it deserves it, but more than anything it’s a very well-made and engaging film. Personally, I can identify very strongly with Oskar, and I think most everyone who grew up in the 80s, especially in Scandinavia, at least knew someone like him. In general, the characters are strong and recognizable, from the benign dead-end neighbourhood drunks to the well-meaning teachers and detached parents. I’ve been there, or somewhere very much like it, and I only wish I had found a vampire girlfriend willing to kill for me.

I still think that’s the case, but this movie isn’t that. It starts out pretty ok, with a kaleidoscope mirror version of New York buildings, which turns them into chasms and claustrophobic boxes, with no apparent escape route. Kiefer Sutherland is an alcoholic ex-cop looking for work as a security guard, and he starts working the night shift at a burned-out old department store, where the mirrors are inexplicably clean and shiny, despite everything else beeting full of soot and suitably grungy.

There’s evil in the mirrors, of course, and although a few of the early ideas are good (there’s a handprint on the mirror, but it turns out to be on the inside, and be one of many, some of which are far up away from the floor), it soon turns to some standard-issue tortured ghosts stuff. There’s a wasted opportunity when Kiefer Sutherland looks at his face in the mirror and it goes weird and distorted, which could have been creepy (like the bathroom mirror sequence that’s only talked about, but still manages to be very scary, in The Mothman Prophecies), but just looks like a bad digital warp effect.

And then it goes downhill, because since Kiefer’s an ex-cop, he needs to investigate. And when people in mediocre horror movies start investigating, the movie is obligated to come up with explanations, and they are invariably too specific, too facile, and too obvious, and everything’s ruined. This time, it has to do with a nun who might have been schizophrenic, but maybe not, and some sort of psychiatric treatment (the place used to be a hospital, dontcha know), and then Kiefer needs to hold an elderly nun at gunpoint and then everything explodes.

And then, at the end, the movie blatantly rips off the ending of Silent Hill, which was a deeply flawed film, but still superior to this one in almost every way.

I still think there’s a good mirror horror movie to be made. But sadly, Mirrors has probably made that impossible for a few years. A wasted opportunity, especially for Aja, who had shown great promise with the The Hills Have Eyes remake a couple of years ago.

While Darkness was supernatural horror with devil worshippers, dark rituals, and opening the gates of hell, [•REC] (I get the feeling I’m going to get very tired of typing that before the end of this review) is a modern zombie movie in the style of 28 Days Later and the Dawn of the Dead remake, with a touch of Blair Witch Project style “this is real footage from people who happened to be filming the event” pretenses.

In short, Barcelona local TV reporter Ángela (slightly annoyingly perky) and her camera man Pablo make a show called “While You Sleep“, basically feature reporting about what goes on in the city at night. This particular night they’re visiting a fire station, and goof around getting bored waiting for some sort of alarm so they can accompany the firemen and film some action.

Of course, that’s what they get, when they get called to an old apartment building whose inhabitants have been hearing screaming from the apartment of an elderly woman. When they break in to the apartment, accompanied by the police, the woman is bloody and behaves erratically, and then suddenly bites one of the police officers. A short time after, when attempting to get out of the building with the wounded guy, they discover that the local health authorities have sealed it off, posting armed guards outside and wrapping it in plastic.

You can probably see where this is going, and you’re right, there are handbaskets involved. It’s not horribly original, but it’s fairly realistic (especially the stuff at the beginning looks very much like what I’ve seen of unedited documentary footage), and while the start is maybe a little slow, it quickly picks up. The last 10-15 minutes in particular are extremely intense, to the point of giving me a good, solid adrenaline rush in the theatre. Also, the direction the plot takes at the end, where things get quiet and brooding and creepy, and you get a sort-of explanation of why all of this is happening (which mixes in just the right amount of supernatural horror and that particularly unsettling Catholic fanaticism), followed by one of the scariest movie monsters I’ve seen in a while, and a scene so tense I could hear people holding their breath in the theater), really, really works.

The whole “real footage” conceit is pretty good, but it fails in a couple of places. First, there’s a scene where Ángela demands that Pablo show her the footage he just shot, to make sure it’s on tape, and we actually see the rewind and then the footage play again, then cut back to “now”. I guess this could be explained that we’re not watching the footage, but the events as they unfold on the monitor of the camera, but it’s sort of unneccessary and weird.

The other thing, which is less of a problem, is that the movie has music. It’s fairly subtle, typical incidental music, but I noticed it a couple of times, and it does distract a little from the documentary feel of the whole thing. Also, if you’re really going to nitpick, people in the movie speak Castilian Spanish, while they’re in Catalan-speaking Barcelona (all signs, uniforms of the firemen, etc. on screen are in Catalan).

But these are minor problems. Once it gets going, [•REC] has you on the edge of your seat, adrenaline pumping, until the very (abrupt) end.