Rating: C-
Dir: Raúl Cerezo, Fernando González Gómez
Star: Ramiro Blas, Paula Gallego, Cecilia Suárez, Cristina Alcázar
Not often I’ve seen a film which runs out of gas so completely. In the first half, it’s heading towards a briskly entertaining, small scale piece of SF/horror. However, it simply runs out of good ideas, and the second half instead has painfully little to offer, in the way of developing its plot or characters credibly. Let’s start with the good stuff. Three passengers join very talkative driver Carlos Blasco (Blas) in a cheap ride-share. There’s mother and daughter Lidia (Alcázar) and Marta (Gallego); Marta is being dropped of at her father’s, because Lidia is taking up a new job abroad. There’s also Mariela (Suárez), a nurse who is on her way to pray for a miracle.
None of them initially like Blasco, who might or might not be an ex-bullfighter, and whose vehicle is crappy, but beloved by him. Matters are not helped when he takes a back-road to avoid paying motorway tolls, then ploughs into a figure standing in the middle of the road. Reluctantly, Blasco turns round and they pick up the victim, only to find they may no longer be human. The van previously passed a potential crashed UFO in the area, and we open with an unpleasant encounter suffered by a pair of foreign backpackers. Worse, whatever is ailing the victim – beyond being run over by Blasco’s van – appear to be infectious, and it’s not long before some of the other passengers are feeling the worse for wear.
So far, so good. The problem is the film’s inability to follow up on this with anything as engaging, relying on far too predictable elements, such as Marta’s inevitable bonding with the blatant father figure represented by Blasco. I admit the pair do have decent chemistry, which helps make Blasco not just the tired, chauvinist trope he appears initially. But it’s mostly on the plotting side where I have qualms, with too much driving around to no particular purpose, and a dubious effort at resolving what the heck we just sat through. For example, the van eventually shows up in a town, which is all but deserted, and it’s painfully apparent why – just not to the characters.
Given what they’ve gone through, they should be thoroughly attuned to the scenario. Instead, it’s similarly convenient how nobody here has a mobile phone, and the absence of internal logic as to how the creature operates, is particularly infuriating. Its abilities, powers and talents, appear to be whatever the film needs at the time. For example, it moves quickly at some points, but when Blasco breaks out the ol’ bullfighting moves, it’s suddenly borderline glacial. Does it other infect people by coughing up an alien foetus into them (top)? Or by simple contact? It feels as if they made all the rules up as they went along, on the way to that blatantly obvious ending. Some decently gloopy effects aren’t enough to hide the problems, and it’s a pity it couldn’t build on a strong early foundation.