Rating: D
Dir: Ramón Peón
Star: Ramón Pereda, Virginia Zurí, Carlos Orellana, Adriana Lamar
The first sound horror film to come out of Mexico, and… Yeah, to be honest, I feel we’d have been better off if this one had been lost in the mists of time. By this time, Hollywood had already made the likes of Frankenstein and Freaks. Heck, this came out a couple of months after King Kong had terrorized American audiences. The difference compared to this is palpable; it very much feels like a plodding, amateur production, with some occasionally decent technical elements, but absolutely terrible pacing. For a film which runs a mere seventy minutes to drag as badly as this, takes some effort. There’s only so much children’s birthday party footage I can stand, y’know.
We have covered movies based on the popular Hispanic legend of La Llorona before, so I won’t rehash the basics there. This takes the basic concept – pissed-off woman kills herself and her child, then is doomed to haunt other families – and moves its origins from an indigenous setting to the conqusitadors in the sixteenth century. Viceroy Rodrigo de Cortés spurns his mistress Ana Xiconténcatl (Lamar) who has born his child, and in a fit of righteous anger, she stabs the child dead and then herself. If only the film was as tersely efficient as that sentence. Instead, it’s a meandering story involving another man, Captain Diego de Acuña (Pereda), a wedding which seems to take place in real time, and far too many thoroughly unconvincing sword-fights.
This is all told in an extended flashback, as a story read from a book to Diego’s descendant, Dr. Ricardo de Acuña (also Pereda) by his grandfather. Ricardo’s son Juanito has just celebrated – at greatly unnecessary length – his fourth birthday, and he learns that there’s a family curse, with kids of that age getting stabbed to death. There’s a hooded figure listening as the saga is told, and to my complete lack of surprise, the figure then starts trying to kidnap Juanito. However, it turns out there is a second book, which tells a completely different version of events, in another extended flashback. It turns out the hooded figure is… Well, someone who might have got away with it, if it hadn’t been for you meddling kids.
Yeah, that’s about the level of plotting we get here, and it’s painfully clear that we are back in the days of “Keep banging the rocks together, guys” era of sound cinema. Outside of the screeching of the ghost, this could well have been a silent film, and certainly does nothing to take advantage of the newfangled technology. The only moment I felt made any real impression was the ghost separating from the body and flying off, which is done fairly well for the time. But the performances don’t bring any urgency to the perilous situations in which the de Acuña family find themselves, and I found myself increasingly unable to care much. If you’re not a fan of the era, this certainly won’t convert you.