Rating: C-
Dir: Patricio Valladares
Star: Romina Perazzo, Domingo Guzmán, Carolina Escobar, Cristian Cuentrejo
This Chilean slice of SF/horror has a good idea at its core, only to be undone by a structure which removes any hope of it being executed successfully. It mostly takes place in a remote area of the country, around the town of Los Lleuques (which does exist) and the ominously-named Snowdevil Mountain (which does not). It is a region which has long been the location of inexplicable incidents, such as reports of UFO encounters. But the area’s scenic beauty continues to attract hikers, campers and other visitors. Among them are Kevin (Guzmán) and his girlfriend Evelyn (Perazzo), to whom he’s planning to propose during the trip. BIG mistake, basically sealing their fate.
An even bigger gaffe is Evelyn hearing a noise in the middle of the night, and leaving their tent to investigate. When Kevin discovers she’s missing, he goes in increasingly panicked search of her. He finds Evelyn naked, traumatized and covered in goo, having been the victim of an alien abduction. She’s now pregnant. And has a bit of an insatiable hunger for human flesh. Sadly, this is where things go disastrously wrong. For rather than proceeding down this intriguing line – a little bit Alien, a little bit Species – it suddenly jumps back a dozen years. Worse still, we enter found footage mode, with a film crew shooting on location in the region, whose lead actress vanishes. The momentum which had been percolating nicely, vanishes as if beamed up into a UFO.
There’s then another side story, of a similar unexpected pregnancy, and the subsequent child, though this does have some interesting ideas. The director used his daughter to play the alien offspring, using home-video footage to depict her growing up, which gives a nice sense of continuity. Until her other parents show up, at least. We eventually get back to Kevin and Evelyn, though I had largely forgotten who they were supposed to be by that point. There is a cop, Jorquera (Cuentrejo), whose presence somewhat ties together the three sub-stories. But the film still feels the need to have a lengthy epilogue in the form of a TV news report, to try and tie together all the remaining loose ends.
It appears this is a feature-length version of a TV series, and it’s possible that may be part of the problem. The drastic swings in style and content could have seemed less obvious if they had been in different episodes. Though most shows telling an overriding story arc do have a certain consistency of look and feel, not present here. My long-held aversion to shakicam did not help matters. Yet there were still some points at which I felt this worked. Perazzo’s performance, as someone driven by urges beyond her control, felt similar to Marilyn Chambers in Rabid. A simple switch to a chronological structure for the story, with Det. Jorquera slowly becoming convinced of the alien reality, could have worked wonders. Instead, it’s a frustratingly messy entity.