Rating: C
Dir: Luciano Onetti, Nicolás Onetti
Star: Agustín Pardella, Damián Dreizik, Victoria Maurette, Mirta Busnelli
a.k.a. Los olvidados
The best thing this has going for it is an amazing location. The town of Villa Epecuén was a spa on the edge of a super-saline lake. But in 1985, the town was flooded and consequently abandoned. It remained largely submerged for a quarter century, before the ruins surfaced, along with the skeletons of ossified trees, killed off by the salt water. The town remains uninhabited, except for one man who returned, but its striking appearance is used to good effect here (the town was also a location for the remake of And Soon the Darkness). It simply looks like a place where bad things are done, by worse people.
Into this ominous setting (top) come a film crew, led by director Vasco (Dreizik), making a documentary about the flood. Though it seems rather over-staffed: their mini-van is largely filled with people who don’t serve much purpose for the alleged film. An exception is Carla (Maurette), a former resident who was a child at the time of the deluge, and will provide her eyewitness recollections. Before they have reached the area, they stop off at a gas station which has apparently just taken delivery of a large consignment from Red Flags R Us. Filthy bathrooms, creepy staff and home-made “meat” pies on the counter? It would make all but the most unwary change plans and decide to make a doc about puppies instead. Naturally, the characters here are the most unwary.
This means they ignore the particularly ominous building shown on the poster, with its warning notice: “SLAUGHTERHOUSE: DANGER OF COLLAPSE.” Never a good sign. After a moderate amount of faffing around in the ruins of the town, they fall prey to the residents, a cannibalistic clan of psychos loosely run by Mrs. Gas Station (Busnelli). Things become considerably less interesting at this point, when we leave the location behind, and settle in for the expected torture porn, inspired by the obvious. Call in The Argentinian Corned Beef Massacre, if you want, instead of “spam in a cabin”, as Joe-Bob used to say. There’s not much new or inventive here, and the limited amount of work put into characterization, leaves the viewer hardly shaken.
The Onetti Brothers seem to prefer extended scenes to music, playing out like MTV clips. I guess this does differentiate it from its fairly obvious inspirations. I’m not sure it’s in a positive direction. I came to this after having been impressed with their 1978 film earlier this year, but it felt like that had a considerably surer grasp on narrative. Certainly, it did front-load the story in a similar way. However, the plot both had a better structure, and felt more authentically Argentinian throughout. Here, once you’re no longer seeing the post-flood landscape, you could be anywhere in the world, wherever flesh-eating fiends gather to prey on passing tourists of an idiotic disposition. Facundo Nuble’s cinematography remains a cut above.