Rating: D+
Dir: Andy Crittenden.
Star: Gley Viera, Liseth Bitar, Grace Guzman, Paloma Santaella.
I guess here’s as good a time as any to announce this year’s 31 Days of Horror will be another countries feature, showcasing movies from around the world. This was originally under consideration, representing Colombia, but it had appeared previously. We actually managed to find a full set of 31 different locations – albeit with some slight bending of the rules – and so this one was eliminated. Having now watched it? Yeah. It’s pretty dull, despite laudable efforts to incorporate local folklore into the mix, and a decent sense of place. Though it is made in English which… While making sense from a commercial perspective, might have been a mistake: certain actresses appear less familiar with the language than others.
It’s a familiar story. Sam (Viera) has inherited a house from her estranged father, and finally gets round to visiting the rural Colombian village where it’s located, with a bunch of her gal pals. The warning signs are there early on, in unfriendly locals who tell them the entire town is closed for a religious festival. There are also tales of the lake nearby, which the natives treated as sacred. Nobody was allowed to swim in it, because it supposedly conferred eternal life on the bather. Crittenden has put the effort into the back story here, creating from scratch his monster, a creature called the cachume cupay, which he says is a homage to the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
You don’t get to see as much of it as I would like. Not because it’s particularly good – because it isn’t. However, it would have reduced the time alloted to the human characters, and that could only have been to the movie’s benefit. There simply isn’t enough going on there, with only one (1) of the group removed from circulation until well past the hour mark. They’re blandly interchangeable, with the exception of token blonde Lupe (Guzman), who is amusingly malicious, and perfectly willing to do whatever is necessary, to survive. I respect that. There is also Bitar as Gabriela, who suddenly turns into Burt Gummer in the final reel, when she starts mixing together a few household chemicals in the proper proportions. Pity this can-do approach wasn’t there from the beginning.
Instead, there’s far too much sitting around by the group, and the collective making of poor decisions, waiting for the cachume cupay to show up. I was left rolling my eyes at the unironic use of hoary old clichés, like the lack of phone service, or the ladies stumbling across a journal kept by Sam’s father. What are the odds? Naturally, it manages to be vaguely threatening, rather than offering any clearly laid-out and helpful advice. The town cult, whom I expected to be deeply involved in proceedings, do little except hang around in cloaks. They’re the laziest bunch of human sacrificing evildoers I can remember. Though, again, while you have to respect that lethargy, I want something more out of my occult organizations.