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.
Sorry about the long delays, I’m hoping I’ll get more time to write soon. In the meantime, we’ve been doing some good work. Latest news: We did postproduction supervision on the only Mexican movie this year to go to Cannes, in the Un Certain Regard section. It’s called Los Bastardos, and we finished just on time to get it to the festival, where’s it’s been getting mixed, but generally relatively positive reviews. Apart from the supervision, we also did some VFX previsualization for it, which was fun, and very in tune with genres I like, but I guess I shouldn’t spoil that part of the movie, it’s kind of crucial. Here’s Screen Daily’s review, there’s also Variety’s review, and here’s the Hollywood Reporter.
