Devoured (2012)

"An intense, troubling film, boasting a spectacular lead performance from Marta Milans, DEVOURED calls to mind such bleak and visceral late '70s NY urban dramas as TAXI DRIVER and DRILLER KILLER in its expert depiction of alienation and escalating horror."

The synopsis from Amazon.co.uk describes "Devoured" so perfectly that there's very little I need to add. That product description absolutely nails it, uses the word "visceral" correctly, and reminds me of the days when I used to write such concise one or two sentence reviews instead of rambling on to fill up a blog post. For someone who doesn't often suffer from nostalgia, I miss those days a lot.

But as I wouldn't be me if I didn't have my own two cents to add, I will just say that I haven't enjoyed any "low-budget" movie as much I did this one. According to the IMDb, the estimated budget was only $1,500,000. That's still a huge amount of money for normal people, but hardly anything in movie industry terms, so maybe that's one of the few points in any independent movie's favour which I'm willing to concede. You don't need hundreds of millions of dollars to make a good movie if you know what you're doing, but the caveat is that you really do need to know what you're doing.

Although this is Greg Olliver's first horror movie, he's been around for a while making award-winning rock documentaries. His IMDb profile page details how he learnt his craft the right way by going to film school and then working his way up in the industry, so he isn't one of the half-arsed hobby horror filmmakers. The result of his knowledge and experience is that he has created an impressively adult "descent into madness" drama here which, despite its obviously Poe-like elements, isn't predictable at all.

Maybe I would have noticed some flaws if I hadn't been so captivated by Marta Milans as the lead, but the attention to detail is such that I doubt there are any important ones anyway. I would like to say that Marta Milans is to "Devoured" what Gretchen Lodge is to "Lovely Molly" (2011), since they both give outstanding performances which carry the rest of their respective movies, but that wouldn't be a completely accurate or fair comparison. It also wouldn't be fair on everyone else involved. Movies are a team effort, after all.

Everything about "Devoured" is as close to perfection as the budget allows. The cinematography is excellent, and from the script by Marc Landau to the smallest acting role, this is a classy, thought-provoking, and thoroughly engaging production. There are some movies which can draw you in as if you're living in them, and "Devoured" is certainly one of them. Whether you would actually want to live inside another person's nightmare is, however, another matter.

For an American movie, "Devoured" has a very European atmosphere and grittiness about it which means that it's bound to be a bigger success overseas, even if it's only for a niche audience. Such slow burns with great characterisation are unlikely to be so highly praised by the teenage slasher crowd who just want to see boobs and blood, and that's a real shame, but stranger things have happened. No matter what your age or tastes, if you call yourself a horror fan, you owe it to yourself to see this movie.

As far as I know, "Devoured" is currently only available from Amazon.co.uk as a DVD or Blu-ray. Hopefully, a US version will start appearing in stores soon. Keep an eye on the official website for further details.

We Are What We Are (2010)

(AKA "Somos lo que hay")



"When the patriarch of the family passes away, the teenage children must take responsibility for the family chores: the preparation of the rituals, the hunting and putting the all-important meat on the table. These newfound responsibilities are even more daunting, however, when you live in the city and happen to be a family of cannibals."

Just a quick one for "Woeful Wednesday". I'm not going to spend much time on this older Mexican movie since the only reason I watched it was in preparation for the American remake which is coming soon.

Although I now love Spanish language movies (whether they be Mexican, Chilean, Colombian or Spanish), I didn't get much out of this one. "We Are What We Are" is more about the family's disintegration after the death of the father than it is about horror. There's plenty of blood and gore along the way. but most of the kills are off camera with only the aftermath shown. Don't believe the quote on the DVD cover about it being "a cannibal gore-fest" because it isn't.

Everything else you need to enjoy a movie is in place including decent (mainly handheld) camerawork and adequate acting, but the story isn't that great. For a family of cannibals, they are more about keeping a superstitious ritual going than appeasing their appetite, and they're pretty stupid in the way they go about it. Despite having some comic relief anyway, "We Are What We Are" might have been better played as a comedy.

Meh. Whatever.

I won't say that "We Are What We Are" is boring, but it does drag from time to time. There's a pretty girl in it, of course, who doesn't get to do as much as the others, so it's also a bit barren on the tottie front. Hopefully, Paulina Gaitan, the aforementioned pretty girl, will turn up in something horrific again one day because, apparently, she's become quite successful in other Mexican movies and TV shows.

I really don't have anything else to say about this movie. It has a few similarities to "Spider Baby" (1968), "The Hamiltons" (2006), and "Mum and Dad" (2008), but it's not even close to being as entertaining as any of them, and the ending is full of clichés. Thus, I wasn't completely disappointed, but I wasn't amazed by it either. "We Are What We Are" is simply an instantly forgettable movie which could have been so much better.

Here's a trailer for the remake (with the genders of the family members changed) which I might not watch now. It does look quite good though.

Curandero (2005)

"A journey that takes one man into the bowels of black magic in Mexico City."

While I was out taking my thousands of empty Monster cans to the recycling bin, I decided to have a quick look at the new releases in Target and came across this little gem. By "gem", however, I do actually mean "an obscure 8 year old former Miramax/Dimension title which has finally been released by Lionsgate".

Fearing the worst of any DVD with the words "Robert Rodriguez presents" on its artwork, I didn't buy a copy of it but waited until I got home again to watch it online. It's not directed by Robert Rodriguez (nor is its real director Eduardo Rodriguez any relation to him) so I figured it would be worth a "rental".

Set in a similar grainy-looking, washed-out world as "Borderland" (2007) but played like a gorier mixture of "Constantine" (2005) and "Night Watch/Day Watch" (2004/2006), "Curandero" is very much a product of that time and tries hard to be another cult action-horror. If it hadn't been for those other movies and all the financial shenanigans at Miramax, it may have succeeded back then too.

The characters are actually quite good although very similar to the heroes and villains of Timur Bekmambetov's adaptations of Sergei Lukyanenko's "Dozor" tetralogy. Carlos the charismatic curandero isn't a million miles away from being Anton Gorodetsky from "Night Watch" complete with hallucinations, and his enemy Castaneda (Gabriel Pingarrón) is really only a far more spiteful version of Zavulon. Castaneda is almost as nasty a piece of work as any of the narcosatanicos in "Borderland" but without the good looks of Santillian.

Carlos Gallardo and Gizeht Galatea

Even the plot is quite similar to "Night Watch" and "Day Watch" with a "chosen one", lots of magic in a modern day urban setting, and some scenes which look almost identical. A certain chase through a market only needs "The Gloom" for it to be lifted straight from "Day Watch". It's a chicken and the egg conundrum as to which really came first given the date of this movie.

With hardly anything explained as you go along, nothing is handed to you on a plate immediately. Everything is explained eventually so just bear with it. I like this way of storytelling, but it was a major criticism of "Night Watch" and "Day Watch" from the hard of understanding crowd who tried to cover their ignorance by using words like "foreign mythology" in their reviews when that wasn't really the problem. Suffice it to say that none of these movies have any traditional mythology except that which has been invented for the story itself. Huge exposition scenes may be lacking, but since nobody does exposition properly anymore, that's another good thing.

There's lots of gore, a very Mexican colour palette which you will either love or hate, and a very beautiful heroine in the form of Gizeht Galatea as federal agent Magdalena. The partnership between Magdalena and Carlos is so like that of Olivia (Anna Torv) and Peter (Joshua Jackson) from "Fringe" that I wouldn't put it past J.J. Abrams and his team not to have taken some inspiration from this movie. Oh, yes, there are subtitles too so thickies need not apply.

My only problem with "Curandero" is that the pacing is a little bit quick over the ground. It's no worse than "Constantine", but I could quite happily have watched another hour of the same characters doing their thing. The effects are great, but the characters would certainly have benefited from some more fleshing out (no pun intended).

I highly recommend "Curandero" if you are looking for something slightly formulaic but a bit different. It's not really worth the new release price, but you can watch it online for $3.99 and probably find it in a Redbox kiosk.

Alucarda (1977)

"A young girl's arrival at a convent after the death of her parents marks the beginning of a series of events that unleash an evil presence on the girl and her mysterious new friend, an enigmatic figure known as Alucarda. Demonic possession, Satan worship, and vampirism follows."

Due to a recent debate on the "Better Geek Than Never" podcast about naked exorcism scenes which nobody seemed to know about, I thought I'd better do a very quick review and recommendation of "Alucarda" for you.

Unless you are the kind of person who loves Jean Rollin, Jess Franco, and most of the "nunsploitation" movies released by Redemption on VHS back in the '90s, you probably haven't heard of "Alucarda" or its director Juan López Moctezuma before. I can't say that all of his movies are worth acquiring if you are just an average horror fan, but "Alucarda" certainly provides a nice upgrade if you were brought up with Hammer.

Juan López Moctezuma's first movie, "The Mansion of Madness" (1973), is on the Mill Creek Entertainment "Chilling Classics" pack, and it's the one which most people have seen. Far fewer people have encountered his second movie, "Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary" (1975). It was a considerably better yet slightly too talky pulp horror movie which led to Moctezuma getting quite a reputation for having lots of blood, nudity, and attractive girls in his films. The badly paced plots of all three of his '70s horror movies were, arguably, more of an afterthought than anything else, but "Alucarda" was the last of these as well as being the peak of Moctezuma's career.

Susana Kamini and Tina Romero (above) are, obviously, the best reasons for watching "Alucarda" unless you just want to see priests and nuns flagellating each other. It's not really worth spending a great deal of time talking about the merits of the rest of the cast, since although they all did a great job, most of us have ever heard of any of them anyway.

Undoubtedly, the most famous actor in this, Claudio Brook, who is highly entertaining in a dual role as Dr. Oszek and the "Hunchbacked Gypsy", will only be known to you as the preacher in "The Devil's Rain" (1975), which is another underrated gem which I have yet to write a review of.

As you can work out from the very poor anagram in the title, "Alucarda" is mostly a vampire movie based very loosely on "Carmilla" by Sheridan Le Fanu. As such, it follows much the same pattern as Hammer's earlier "Karnstein" movies, but it has a possession angle to it which may have been inspired by "The Devils" (1971). Despite some oustanding camerawork and a couple of really nice effects for the time, "Alucarda" doesn't have much originality. It even blatantly borrows from "Carrie" (1976) for one of its later scenes.

Personally, I've always thought that Susana Kamini as Justine was not only better looking but a much better actress than Tina Romero who played Alucarda. Your opinion may differ as, in fairness, neither of them seemed to have all that much acting ability, even though it was more than enough for what the story required them to do.

Perras (2011)

"Ten girls are suspected of committing a horrible crime, and until they confess, they won't be able to leave their school."

It's not often that I watch any Mexican films, but something about "Perras" intrigued me. I'm not sure if it was the beautiful cinematography or the mystery which wasn't revealed until the very end, but I loved every second of it.

I have no clue who the director, Guillermo Ríos, is or what he has done before, but I could tell that he was influenced by "Whispering Corridors" (1998) and "Amélie" (2001). That's no bad thing either because I love those movies. "Perras" even made me want to watch the rest of the "Whispering Corridors" series although I know that I'd be very disappointed.

There was even some similarity to "Dead Friend" (2004) which is known as "The Ghost" on Netflix. Although the plots are completely different, I think that you'll also see what I mean.

"Perras" means "female dogs" or "bitches", but I'm not sure that the latter is the best translation. The title really refers to the lowest class of Mexican girl rather than their bitchiness towards each other even though there was plenty of that going on too. Even re-translating the title as "sluts" or "wannabe sluts" might be closer to the truth yet still not entirely accurate.

As a probably completely misogynistic insight into the suggested world of Mexican teenagers, "Perras" certainly had a lot of social commentary which you can take or leave. If you also believe that "Quadrophenia" (1979) was in any way a fair representation of 1960s Britain then you'd be wrong too. I don't think that "Perras" was ever supposed to be a refection of reality, but the internal logic of the film makes it appear to be so.

Of course, the "real" critics and film students would have a field day dissecting "Perras", but that's not what I ever choose to do. I watch movies to be entertained not to have the preachiness of "Kidulthood" (2006) or even "Kids" (1995) forced into my subconscious. "Perras" was a lot more subtle than either of those pieces of nastiness even though there were certainly a couple of very shocking and bloody scenes as well.

Given that this was all in Spanish, I'm inclined to say that the acting was excellent. The really bitchy girl, Sofia (in the centre of the picture above), was outstanding, but there were no weak links at all.

I don't know the names of any of the actresses, and I have no idea of their ages, so this may make me sound like a pervert, but some of them were incredibly beautiful. They made me wish that I was at least twenty years younger and lived in Mexico so I could be rejected by all of them. Seriously, the girls in this were hot!

As for the mystery itself, it was masterfully played out. Being dropped into the middle of things (in medias res, baby!) with various flashbacks while not knowing what the "horrible crime" was until the end was an absolute joy for me. I liked all of the characters and could have watched another four hours of them if the director had chosen to do it.

"Perras" was not a movie which could ever have a sequel without going in a very different and mainstream direction, but I'd definitely like to see more of these characters as they grow up.

Like a very tasty but small-portioned meal, "Perras" left me satisfied by the quality but still wanting more. I highly recommend it.