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.

Following up on the theme of biases and weirdness in Mexican media, while in a taxi at a stoplight today, I got an issue of “Publimetro”, a free, ad financed city newspaper, which, according to one of the owners, is directed towards the middle classes and upwards. The mixture of getting their money exclusively from ads, making the readers not even the secondary customer, let alone the primary customer, and a focus on the moneyed elites, leads to some, shall we say, odd priorities in the editorial policies.

On page 17 of the 26 September issue, in the entertainment section, there’s an article of almost half a page, on En el hoyo being the Mexican documentary with the biggest box office of all time. It’s a big succcess, it’s possibly going to be Oscar nominated, it’s been in several festivals, and so on. A rather large article. But, there was a weird omission in the article. What’s the documentary about? After skimming it a couple of times, I noticed that it is indeed mentioned, in part of a sentence at the end of the first paragraph:

[...] the documentary, which looks at an aspect of everyday life in the city.

Hm, that’s awfully general. So, what’s the documentary really about? Well, I happened to know, and if you don’t, it’s easy to find out from the IMDB page, which says:

A portrait of the construction workers involved in building the second deck of Mexico City’s Periferico freeway.

Oh, that’s a lot more informative. I wonder why the paper doesn’t just say that?

Well, maybe it’s because the second deck of the Periferico was a successful project of Mexico City head of government Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who went on to be a leftist presidential candidate, and is currently arguing that he’s the real winner of July’s presidential elections, instead of conservative Felipe Calderón, favorite of the upper classes, who harbor a hate of López Obrador comparable to that of US republicans for Bill and Hillary Clinton. If you think it sounds weird to not mention a public works project just because of the politician who started it, think again. Miguel de Icaza mentioned people in his family who are conservative enough and hate López Obrador enough that they refuse to use the second deck of the Periferico, for exactly this reason.

It wouldn’t do to upset what Publimetro owner Antonio Torrado Monge calls “socieconomic levels A, B, and C”, now, would it, just to have an article that actually gives you some information about its main subject? Oh no. Wouldn’t do at all.

I’m going to try something new. There’s long been a lot of weird stuff going on in Mexican media, stuff that makes me laugh, or shake my head, or turn the TV off in disgust. There seems to be precious little discussion going on about the quality and values of Mexican media, so I figure I’ll give it a shot. So from now on, I’ll review and comment on Mexican TV, advertising, and general media goings on. I thought about making it a separate blog, but I don’t think I write enough to fill up even this blog, so it’ll go here, at least for now.

A few days ago, I saw this commercial for Gamesa’s “Emperador” (Emperor) cookies. It’s a fairly typical Mexican scenario, where the parking guy uses (or abuses) what little power he has over the clean-cut upper classes, refusing to let the guy in the car park. But this is no ordinary fresa guy who needs a parking spot. This guy eats emperor cookies, and thus has an emperor inside!

Check out what happens.

So the morale is, if someone denies you a parking space, you should have your shock troops come in and throw them to the lions. It’s only fair, dirty proles should know their place. This sort of attitude is very often how Mexican commercials get their laughs, playing to middle and upper classes’ sense of entitlement and feeling that they are somehow the ones who are being treated badly in Mexican society, while the lower classes are lazy and have it in for them. It’s a common theme, and a common feeling, but it’s rare to see the delusion expressed as clearly as this.

This is the music video I acted in a few months ago. It’s currently playing on latin music TV channels, and on YouTube for your viewing pleasure. I appear several times, although in relatively short flashes. I’m the tallest of the bad guys, the one who gets kicked in the face at the end.

Oh, and I’m back, I went to Norway for a month. Expect more soon.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind is promoted as a sort of literary thriller, along the lines of Umberto Eco’s Focault’s Pendulum or The Name of the Rose, and people also seem to compare it with Borges a lot. Those comparisons aren’t exactly wrong, but I think they sort of miss the point.

More than anything else, The Shadow of the Wind is about synchronicity. The young protagonist, Daniel Sempere, goes to the “Cemetary of Forgotten Books”, is entrusted with a novel by mysterious author Julián Carax, and soon, events in his own life start to echo those of the Carax’ life. The novel in the novel is also titled “The Shadow of the Wind“, which should give you some idea of the direction in which this is headed. A mysterious man has been burning all copies of Carax’ novels, and is after the one Daniel has, which might be the last. The mysterious man uses the name Laín Coubert, which is the name of the devil in one of Carax’ novels, and so on and so forth. There’s also a large helping of references to 18th century gothic horror, romance, and adventure novels, especially later in the book, which of course are exactly the genres Carax wrote in.

The large story arc is interesting enough, and it’s skillfully executed, although some of the “mysteries” are not too hard to figure out, and the main mysteries to be revealed are more the details of how things happened, instead of the larger revelations it seems Ruiz Zafón wants the reader to experience. In the end, however, this doesn’t matter too much, since a lot of the joy in the book is in the details, especially, perhaps, in the humorous ancillary characters, such as Fermín, the ex-revolutionary turned homeless drifter under the Franco regime who Daniel and his father take in and give a job in their bookstore. I found myself looking forward to any sequence where he would play a prominent role, since his hilarious anecdotes and outrageously brazen solutions to problems are the book’s high points.

The ending is not entirely unexpected, and perhaps a bit pat, but by then, you’ve been so thoroughly charmed by the characters (not to mention Barcelona, which is as much a character in the book as anyone else) that you don’t care too much. Highly recommended, especially if you don’t take it too seriously. It’s not as intellectual as Eco or Borges, but it’s at least as enjoyable, especially if you love books.