My Reviews of Latin American Films
Some of these reviews are quite old, perhaps as much as 15-16 years, so I can't really vouch for them representing my current opinions on the movies in question.
Listed in no particular order, except that all the latest additions will be placed on top.
Listed in no particular order, except that all the latest additions will be placed on top.
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- DirectorEmilio PortesStarsTobin BellTate EllingtonJoaquín CosioAfter a personal tragedy, a police detective investigates a school massacre committed by a student - and another massacre. Are the 3 tragedies linked to demon possession?If your idea of entertainment is babies and little children getting randomly butchered, this is for you.
2/10
And I thought American and French film-makers were depraved. Mexicans clearly have no limits either. Or perhaps the various cartel wars there have made them so hardened to extreme violence that nothing seems sacred to them anymore. If there is even the slightest risk of giving some lunatics ideas of butchering babies in a hospital, then it should not be filmed, period.
But some asswipe thought it a great idea to have someone stab every infant in a nursery, to open a film. As if the success of horror is how extreme and far you're willing to go in excess and violence. Only morons follow this credo. That's like metalheads who believe that the faster and the more "brootal" the music, the better. Or tennis pros (admittedly few of them) who are convinced that the path to success is to hit every ball as hard as you can.
As expected, the plot is dumb. But it's also very slow, only mildly atmospheric - and features a talking Christ statue!
Unintentional humour should never - repeat, never - involve a Christ statue talking like Ricardo Montalban. It looks like a marionette, really goofy, to make things even sillier. To add insult to double injury, this demon (impersonating Jesus) talks in English to the Mexican cop, which makes very little sense for several reasons:
1. This is a Mexican movie, and this statue is in Mexico.
2. The demon was addressing the Mexican cop, wanting to corrupt him. The cop would have preferred to be addressed in Spanish.
3. By talking in Spanish instead, the demon would have avoided the American investigator understanding him, hence the American would be even less likely to warn the cop to be wary of the demon's manipulation.
So Satan is a moron?
The cop's behaviour is also that of a moron, usually. Not his initial skepticism, I don't mean that: it was normal and sensible of him to doubt the supernatural. (Some reviewers seem to think he's stupid for not immediately believing in a demonic conspiracy, as if he was supposed to somehow know that he was in a supernatural horror movie! This actually reveals the audience's stupidity, not the cop's. Ironic.) His real stupidity becomes apparent later, in that scene when Satan tricks him as easily as he would a child.
No, wait... This movie doesn't trick kids, it "merely" slaughters them.
Or how about Tobin (who is such a boring actor) babbling about a "Moslem child messiah who was killed by the Crusaders in the 8th century". Now, I know that religious horrors have their own "logic" and we need to be tolerant toward some of the BS, but this is just laughable. The Christian God sent a Messiah to be born into a Moslem family? Now I've heard everything... I wouldn't be too surprised about hearing this kind of PC silliness in an American horror film, but am admittedly surprised that a Mexican script contains this kind of crap.
The mediocre acting doesn't help much either. For example, the weak scene with the fortune-telling woman stank because it was so funny to give fortune-tellers such credibility (even in a religious horror this is a stretch), but this was made even sillier by her bad acting.
The last thing you need in a possession film is lousy acting, because the majority of all exorcism scenes in such films are anyway unconvincing, corny and lame.
Or how about the "you did it!" scene? Everyone in the audience must know that the American DIDN'T get rid of the demon at that point. It's hard to believe a horror writer (or at least a writer for horror) would actually try such a cheap trick. What is this, 1928?
Or that dumb "trick" in the last 15 minutes when Robin CHEATS the audience by grinning after the cop starts butchering everybody. Trying to make us believe the priest is a bad guy after all, but in a way that makes zero sense.
The messiah child is then assigned to the DUMB formerly POSSESSED cop to guard over. Stupid beyond belief. - DirectorDennison RamalhoStarsDaniel de OliveiraFabiula NascimentoBianca ComparatoStênio, the nightshifter of a morgue, has the ability to communicate with the cadavers that are brought to him every night.The Ring of Power, just like in LOTR.
4/10
The first third is interesting, but after the murder the plot quickly starts stagnating and keeps going in circles. Once the repetitive hauntings start, the story no longer varies but keeps moving in a more-or-less predictable loop. The movie starts off as an unusual crime horror drama about a poossy-whipped mortician who has the ability to talk to the dead, but devolves unfortunately into a haunted house formula movie after he has revenge on his cheating evil wife and her lover.
At almost two hours it is inexcusably long. I was already starting to lose interest half-way through. You wanna do 110 minutes? You'd better stay away from genre cliches then.
The movie looks like the other Brazilian movies I'd come across recently, that is to say vibrant colours dominate. This is no mono-colour American crap. Brazilians seem to be way ahead in terms of cinematography.
The last scene is inconclusive, revealing yet another flaw in this script. - DirectorJuliano DornellesKleber Mendonça FilhoStarsBárbara ColenThomas AquinoSilvero PereiraAfter the death of her grandmother, Teresa comes home to her matriarchal village in a near-future Brazil to find a succession of sinister events that mobilizes all of its residents.Laughable garbage that won the award at Cannes. Which of course makes perfect sense.
1/10
Here this movie is labeled as horror, on Wikipedia it as a western. It's neither really. It's more like a trashploitation thriller with smaller elements of horror.
The Cannes festival juries have always consisted of a bunch of decadent snobs, common knowledge, but it seems now they've just gone nuts. They actually gave this trash flick the jury prize. This base, sadistic, utterly moronic, absurd, cheap trash film is Film of the Year 2019, according to these botoxed, yacht-lusting social-ists.
At 130 minutes, this movie has more padding than a typical MST3K stinker. Almost nothing happens in the first 40 minutes, a section that tells us who the villagers of Bacarau are.
Who are they? A bunch of savage psychos, apparently. So no wonder they'd been erased from the map: Brazil is ashamed of them!
The resident musician "welcomes" two strangers (who turn out to be murderers) by singing a song insulting the woman about how "she gives great coitus then pretends she didn't". Degenerates. I very much doubt that the average Brazilian town welcomes its guests this way. Oh, right... this is a "future Brazil".
There are also several criminals/killers whom the village hide from the authorities, even treating them as local heroes. The villagers watch clips of their killings on some kind of futuristic YouTube channel on a large screen, just for fun. So yeah, the villagers are trash, just like this movie. Good fit. But they are also "the good guys" here. According to the deranged film-makers.
To further illustrate what trash the villagers are, they fail to warn the coffin deliverers that they are in danger. So they get shot and killed.
But before all of that, we are first introduced to the female "protagonist" who suitably looks like Obama. Suitable because as she passes by a corpse with the torso missing she doesn't react, she just doesn't give a hoot. Later that day, after her grandmother's funeral, she wants to have sex with a guy she hadn't seen in a long time.
He asks her: "Aren't you still in mourning?" Obama's sister: "I'm not religious."
Yeah, she's the "protagonist" (though barely has any screen time after the early section), we're supposed to root for her and that damn psycho village. Clearly she is a sociopath, just like the singer, but the writers/directors who concocted this garbage probably support Antifa, legalization of crystal meth, and who knows what else. So obviously their moral compass is why out there in outer space.
The movie actually does begin in outer space. Then the mini-UFOs. Just a dumb plot-device to make us believe aliens are involved. They aren't. Real psycho killers would use normal-looking drones, not these make-believe UFO knockoffs to draw attention to themselves. So dumb.
Basically, this movie is "Predator" mixed with "Hostel" minus the supernatural. Udo Kier (yes, that's right) leads a group of westerners who pillage and shoot random people for sport, as a competition. An absurd premise, laughable actually. You can't take trash seriously, but you can hate it.
And yet, many people do take this crap seriously. They take this silly turkey as a "metaphor" for western colonialism destroying "innocent" Latin America. Except that Bacurau, as I said, is a lair of depravity, the complete opposite of "noble savages". Besides, aren't large Brazilian cities infamous for their frequent machine-gun ghetto massacres? With so much Brazilian-on-Brazilian violence going on, it's a miracle someone was dumb enough to make a movie suggesting that western influence, i.e. Tourists in this case, is the real threat. Rio and Sao Paolo are infamous for how dangerous they are for tourists. So...
I did say the movie was cretinous though, and if there ever was an intention by these meth users to create a metaphor, then they have clearly mixed up the pot and the kettle. Brazil's tourists are never murderers, they can only be victims. Hence this premise could have only worked in a comedy.
Perhaps they were going for a METHAPHOR, not a metaphor.
To illustrate how utterly daft the premise is, the gang of psychos turn on each other at the drop of a hat, executing whomever they are given orders to get rid of among themselves. (We aren't told who sends them orders via ear-pieces.) The execution scene at the table is hence pretty idiotic, far-fetched, laughable. Such an undisciplined, violent, moody, distrustful, volatile gang of loons wouldn't be able to work together for 5 minutes, let alone go through with such meticulous plans, and often. In fact, their leader Kier ends up shooting down one of his own team, simply on a whim. Then he tries to commit suicide. Wut?
The psychos are given really dumb B-movie dialog too. They talk like 11 year-olds. Bad acting, shoddy dialogue - all-round trashiness.
After the Bacurauans discover that they are being routinely hunted, what do they do? Lock themselves up? No, they party for a while, in the open, hence predictably someone gets killed again: a boy. Surprised by such a lack of logic? You shouldn't be: the movie's got Udo Kier in it.
Just don't think Kier is the worst actor here. He isn't, not even close. The American cast is horrible, much worse, unconvincing. They make Kier seem like De Niro. Perhaps that's partly why he enjoys making such movies.
When an older couple get attacked by the psychos, they wear no clothes. The villagers, I mean. They are naked... why? Because this is trashploitation, obviously! If you couldn't figure this out yourself you are probably new to cinema, and especially trash cinema. Check out HOW the older couple hold their guns when they kill the psychos: you will laugh. Try holding a gun that way and managing to aim at an elephant: very difficult.
The grand finale is a real letdown, totally pedestrian. Slow and very conventional, with nothing original. (Aside from the naked couple holding guns the wrong way.) We find out that the politician was in on the conspiracy, and we find out that the villagers are a bunch of pill-popping junkies, not "just" immoral psychos. A metaphor or a methaphor? Perhaps a metaphor for how "savage westerners" have every right to exploit "Third World savages"? This wasn't the intention, but that's how it comes off.
"But you fail to appreciate the movie ironically!"
Yeah sure... Whatever, hipsters.
On the positive side, the movie isn't grey, mono-colour, drab. It's colourful as Latin American movies often are. - DirectorDemián RugnaStarsMaximiliano GhioneNorberto GonzaloElvira OnettoWhen strange events occur in a neighborhood in Buenos Aires, a doctor specializing in the paranormal, her colleague, and an ex police officer decide to investigate further.Get rid of the gollums.
6/10
The first Argentinian movie I've come across, and it's much better than what one normally gets from, for example, Spanish movies.
Some unusual ideas and scenes are marred by the changing pace. The dialog is better than average for haunted house flicks, but perhaps there is a little too much bla bla bla in certain sections.
The first half is the back story i.e. The events set in the past, and the setting up of the mystery. The 2nd half is the resolution, in a sort of "Poltergeist" way. Some scenes are effective, but I didn't think much of the skinny-bald-mutant ghost scenes. - DirectorMichael ChavesStarsLinda CardelliniRaymond CruzPatricia VelasquezIgnoring the eerie warning of a troubled mother suspected of child endangerment, a social worker and her own small kids are soon drawn into a frightening supernatural realm.La Llorona redefines fidgety boredom.
2/10
There are rumours Llorona is so dull that her fellow colleagues, other Bogeypeople (Bogeymen/Bogeywomen), ignore her. Even Freddy Krueger snubs her. And that's why she's upset, and why she takes out her anger on innocent kids and even more innocent audiences.
OK, I'm not that innocent, but even I don't deserve such torture.
One of 100,000 horror films that are 100% made up of cliches, so it's not as if Llorona is a unique case. But that doesn't make the pain any less annoying. It doesn't make the idiotic plot-devices any less idiotic. It doesn't make the lame action scenes any less mundane. Not to mention predictable.
The kids refuse to say what they've witnessed - all four of them - and the only reason they don't communicate their fears and experiences straight away is... because... drum roll...
... In order to stretch the plot, and to make the female lead appear to be the culprit. How original. How daft. As if kids would fear being laughed at about witnessing anything supernatural. If REGULAR kids ever underwent such events and threats, they would freely, gladly, immediately, shamelessly and loudly describe everything to the nearest adult who's willing to listen. Instead, these IRREGULAR Unhollywood kids shut down, because, hey... how else do we stretch the plot?
But at least the movie taught me that exorcist priests quickly recover from serious bullet wounds. All they need is a bit of rest, a lie down, and after a half-hour they're good to go. I just wish this great classic lasted that long.
Now even this review is starting to bore me. Anything related to this film bores me.
No more evil Mexican bogeypeople for me. If I can sit through this, I can sit through a Will Ferrell comedy.
I am indeed stronger than ever before. But also extremely bored. - DirectorLuis BuñuelStarsClaudio BrookSilvia PinalEnrique Álvarez FélixSimon, a deeply religious man living in the 4th century, wants to be nearer to God so he climbs a column. The Devil wants him to come down to Earth and is trying to seduce him.No sheep were harmed.
5/10
No animals were hurt in the making of this low-budget motion picture - except a kicked sheep, who had died days later from its injuries. The actress Silvia Pinal who committed this atrocity, quite fittingly in the role of Satan, has apologized to the families of the sheep for kicking it to so cruelly, expressing her regret for having listened to Bunuel's directorial instructions to "kick it as hard as one would kick a non-Communist", and her charm has worked for a while. Up till now, that is. Now, decades later, the sheep's families and all their members (all 1,498 of them) have decided to sue the Bunuel estate for damages for their unjustly slayed relative. All of the world's sheep, including the politically strongest New Zealand sheep, have united to support the Beh-behs in their fight for legal and moral justice - all except the sheep who enjoy Bunuel's overrated movies, naively believing that they're watching meaningful, clever "art".
How many times do I have to play the Grand Wise Man to all these deluded and pretentious "art-movie" fans? STOP LYING TO YOURSELVES THAT YOU UNDERSTAND AND LOVE MOVIES LIKE THIS, AS A WAY TO DEAL WITH YOUR INFERIORITY COMPLEX.
If you feel your intelligence isn't what you want it to be, or if you feel you have failed in life in any way, deal with it head on, instead of shoving your collective heads into the movie-land sand like some silly ostrich.
SOTD is a watchable oddity, nothing more. A very good premise; but a wasted chance; much could have been made out of the ascetic-sitting-on-a-large-pencil idea. It might have been revolutionary in its attacks on the Church back when it was made, but the film is now dated, seeming like a pitiful, insufficient prelude to REAL religious satire, something brilliant like Monty Python's "Life of Brian". I find it appalling, hilarious, and even frightening that some people found this movie hysterically funny. There were only one or two moments that came close to making me... chuckle? Grin? Move my upper lip about a millimeter? Perhaps two? If this is supposed to be funny, then I guess it must be brilliantly intellectual, too - at least to the numbers of film-critic and film-student sheep that infest this sad world.
As an atheist, I'm all for the Church being satirized - but in a clever, funny way, not like this. Besides, as I already mentioned in my "Viridiana" review, when an attack on religion comes from a Marxist - of all people - then the effect (if there is one in the first place) is ruined, because that would be what is called "hypocrisy": a Utopia-believing Marxist CANNOT mock religious belief. Utopia is decidedly similar to Heaven, don't you think? Bunuel's God is a certain Marx. You might have heard of him. He is almost universally loved by Hollywood and Euro-trash directors and actors.
I found out that Bunuel ran out of money (reminding me of a certain chubby overrated American director with O.W. initials) while making SOTD, hence stuck that rushed, absurd ending onto the movie. So that's most probably why this is considered a short film, whereas in fact it is an incomplete feature-length film. That he ran out of money may be an explanation for the stupid, dull ending, but it is in no way an excuse. All I care about is the end-result on the screen. And it is average, nothing more. Perhaps Bunuel running out of money was a blessing in disguise, at least for the viewer. Something tells me that watching 90 minutes of this would have been worse.
Tell you what... I vow to stand on one leg, like the ascetic Simon, for the rest of my life if someone shows me a Bunuel movie which justifies his ridiculously hyped up, inflated reputation.
The movie features Silvia Pinel, whom I hadn't seen before. A rare beauty. That's what female movie stars used to look like before the 90s. Now we have Drew Barrymore, Jennifer Aniston, and Cameron Diaz... Pathetic.
Sick and tired of Euro-trash "classics", i.e. bad, overrated dramas? E-mail me if you want to read my totally altered subtitles of Ingmar Bergman's "Autumn Sonata", "Cries & Whispers", or "Passion Of Anne", but also the non-Bergman "Der Untergang". - DirectorMakinovStarsEbon Moss-BachrachVinessa ShawDaniel Giménez CachoA couple take a vacation to a remote island - their last holiday together before they become parents. Soon after their arrival, they notice that no adults seem to be present - an observation that quickly presents a nightmarish reality.Come Out And Kill Me.
1/10
What do if you're with a pregnant wife:
1. Don't bring her to a Third World Country (dunno where this takes place), much less a remote island in a Third World country. There are enough First and Second World countries to pick from as SAFE tourist destinations when your wife is pregnant. Visit the Third World countries on your own, or with your male friends - and armed with knives and guns.
2. Don't leave her alone, even if you're visiting a First World country. You just don't do that, especially in a remote location, a small village. Are you the man the protector or the man the careless metrosexual buffoon?
3. Especially don't leave her alone when it finally enters your thick Chris Martin head that you're both in danger. We could forgive this Chris Martin look-alike for splitting up with her on THREE occasions earlier, but even AFTER he witnesses a murder he suggests they split up! These are his actual words: "You stay here and if you see anyone, scream". No, I'm not kidding. OK, now that's what's called Darwinist selection: idiots and their idiot offspring have lesser chances of survival because they're idiots.
4. When visiting a store in a remote village on a remote island, do try and notice the corpse lying on the floor just a meter away from you. Chris Martin is a bloody buffoon. I always knew that, even before this movie.
5. If you rent a boat to visit a lone Third World island where you don't know anyone, at least make sure to first fill up the boat - especially after its owner explicitly tells you there's not enough gasoline in the tank for a return trip.
If you want to make a good horror film, you should:
1. Avoid trying to do remakes of dumb 70s films. Re-doing one only makes you dumber. The two movies then become "Dumb and Dumber".
2. Avoid trying to do a remake of Hitchcock's "Birds", replacing birds with children. That movie sucked, and it was with birds that are much more convincing in this role. Evil-kids movies very rarely succeed because they're simply silly.
3. Avoid making garbage.
What a dumb premise: "who can kill a child?" says one of the survivors pathetically. Who can kill a child? Really? Ask Nazis. Ask Hitler. Ask Pol Pot. Ask Stalin. I am sure if you ask around you'll find plenty of people who can kill kids - and I mean NORMAL non-violent kids. Let alone rabid lunatic murderous kids that need to be shot down. I love it when airhead exploitation flicks try to get philosophical. "But can you kill a child?" Of course we can! As that stupid dock scene shows, when Chris Martin goes into Charles Bronson mode and slays/injures a bunch of kids. It's almost comical, almost like slapstick.
You see, if this idiotic nobody-kills-kids premise held any water, then all the armies using child-warriors in various African and South American conflicts would all be victorious and undefeated because nobody would kill the kids. But that isn't the case. Why? Because adults absolutely have no problems killing kids, certainly at times of war - especially if those kids wield weapons. In fact, some deranged loons even enjoy it. Let alone in this kind of situation. I guess you could say a Sting song would be appropriate: "The Mexicans Love Their Children Too - A Little Too Much". (I don't know if this actually takes place in Mexico, which I realize isn't a Third World country. It could be almost any Central American nation.)
When a person is in mortal danger, the survival instinct kicks in. This happens automatically. We all have it, even pacifists, liberals, vegans and hipsters. (Well, perhaps not hipsters. I could sort of see them giving up in the face of such danger and even offering themselves to these kids for an easy kill.) Hence to even pose this question "who would kill kids?" is asinine. People will kill ANYTHING that endangers them - and often even when it doesn't. So yes, this has got to be one of the dumbest premises in the history of all horror films. So all the adults were easily murdered because none of them fought back? So very dumb.
And that extremely predictable ending that any horror/thriller fan must have seen coming way in advance.
Nor is there any explanation why this island's kids suddenly all became homicidal sociopaths. Hence this movie is a joke, and I presume the original it was based on is just as lame.
The soundtrack is pretty good though, as is the film visually. A good story would have looked nice in this setting. This nonsense is so very far from that. - DirectorAlejandro BruguésStarsAlexis Díaz de VillegasJorge MolinaAndros PerugorríaA group of slackers face an army of zombies. The Cuban government and media claim the living dead are dissidents revolting against the government.Cuba the way Oliver Stone never saw it.
8/10
No major spoilers here. It's a friggin' zombie film!
This refreshing Cuban-Spanish zombie comedy will definitely annoy every McDonalds-munching day-dreaming couch-potato Western-Marxist hypocrite, for it does not glorify the mankind-loathing decadence of rabid Communism or its psychopathic coffee-mug iconic perpetrators – as 95% of all movies with a political message do. In fact, JOTD is an obvious bashing of Castro's Cuba and its 60 year-long downward spiral, marked by poverty, misery and brainwashing. Speaking of which, brainwashed liberals/avatards and nerdy left-wing film-students, so spoiled by decades of watching only their political views being represented in movies, will be quite surprised to know that the image of Che Guevara – for once – isn't used on the big-screen to symbolize freedom.
Havana is in the midst of a zombapocalypse, and the tyrannical regime is incompetent to deal with it. What they are marginally successful in is launching a media campaign whose objective is to portray and label the zombies as "imperialist dissidents", part of a US ploy to destroy the country. Hence the word "zombie" is used only once, by the Bible-hugging foreigner; instead, the living dead are referred to jokingly by the survivors as "dissidents". "Forget America, this time we have a real enemy."
Unlike what you'd normally expect from a horror comedy, nearly all of the funny moments are dialog-related. As a result, JOTD has most of its highlights in the first half-hour, much of which isn't dominated by zombies. The second half-hour sees a quality-drop of sorts, since that is when most of the cartoon violence takes place; after all, there are only so many ways in which you can kill a zombie, and the majority of those we've already seen in many other such movies. Although, to be fair, JOTD does provide moments of zombie-slashing/physical originality as well, with some rather fun gore, and can outshine nearly every zombie comedy with ease. The last half-hour is a marked improvement over the middle, with a lot more dialog again, hence more of those wonderful quips by the two male leads.
The characters, even though just part of a silly zombie flick, appear more real than most characters in your typical American dramas. They are not morally perfect; in fact, they have many flaws, and aside from Juan's daughter all of them are a bit dodgy, to put it mildly. This too is a refreshing approach, steering well from the American/British clichés of the morally squeaky-clean (hence absurd/unreal) hero.
Speaking of what's real and what isn't, JOTD has another essential thing going for it: it does NOT look like a modern Western horror film at all. What I mean by this is that JOTD doesn't have that computer-software-ruined mono-colour filtered/plastic downbeat/depressing look that we've been cursed with in the past decade or so when it comes to American, British and French horror films. (Kudos to the rare exceptions.) JOTD looks very refreshingly real, the colours are stark, vivid, vibrant, and most importantly - they are all there: it's not just green or blue or yellow. That way, the movie serves as a nostalgic reminder of what Western horror films (more-or-less) used to look like once upon a time back in the 70s and early 80s, at a time when a movie's look wasn't decided on some idiot's laptop, but by the quality of the cinematographer and the director.
If anyone is worried that a Cuban movie might be a little lacking in the special-effects department, have no fear: the effects are great, as are the distant shots of Havana burning.
The fact that the female cast is both beautiful and sexy (Andrea Duro and Blanca Rosa Blanco) is just the icing on the cake.
Forget "Shaun of the Dead", this is the one to watch. - DirectorGustavo HernándezStarsFlorencia ColucciAbel TripaldiGustavo AlonsoA young woman becomes trapped inside a house and is unable to contact the outside world as mysterious forces haunt it.The Silly House.
2/10
It's one thing to deceive the viewer in order to throw him off the track, to give him false leads, in order to present him with the end-twists that he couldn't/shouldn't anticipate. It's something entirely else to lie and cheat the viewer, such as is the case in this muda casa. Lying to the viewer is a cop-out, a desperate ploy that takes place when the writer and the director cannot think of an intelligent/logical way to set us up for the plot-twist.
And yet, only half-way through the movie, I had strong suspicions that Laura herself is the killer. How did I reach this conclusion, given the writer's lies and the director's pathetic manipulation? Simple logic: the movie had both apparitions AND a real-life murderer, something that isn't quite possible, i.e. the muda casa at first offers us a genre-meshing, almost paradoxical situation. A ghost and a real killer? I consider these two to be mutually exclusive in a horror film. (Though it undoubtedly could work in a ZAZ comedy.) This ghost/killer contradiction helped me reach the only explanation that was left, that the damn muda casa must have neither: no ghosts and no hidden killer. Hence: homely Laura must be the murderer.
So in spite of the lies and the shoddily set-up story, I still managed to predict the ending – and way before we were given the first hints that something odd is going on. (I am patting myself on the back as I write.) Perhaps remembering "Shrooms" helped. It's not as if this movie has a terribly original plot-twist.
We are cheated/lied to in the most blatant way possible: Laura is shown as the victim, while totally erroneous/fallacious scenes that could not possibly implicate her in the murders fill the screen. The only way this moronic premise could have worked, without being stupid, would have been to show ALL the early events from Laura's perspective i.e. literally from her viewpoint, as if she were holding a camcorder. This approach would have meant that we almost never get to see her (except when she looks in a mirror), which would have been an added bonus since the actress playing Laura is so damn unattractive. So everyone wins.
Alas, the film-makers had decided to treat the viewers as utter cretins instead, hence the swindle. They hoped that the crucial revelation that Laura is insane would somehow explain and justify their own cheating/lying, and all of the BS scenes early on; scenes that, with hindsight, mean absolutely nothing. Well, they failed.
The main premise/set-up is not the only source of rubbish in LCM. We also have a series of stupid things going on once Laura "escapes" (ha ha) from the not-so-silent house. She just happens to run into Nestor, her former lover, who calmly decides to inspect the house in spite of seeing her covered in blood and in utter panic. So calling the police first was not an option? OK, you could argue that he didn't want to call the cops because of the photos that are in there. Fine; then how about at least going up to the cellar with some sort of weapon? Nestor finds his ex covered with blood, in hysterics, sobbing about an attack, and yet Nestor goes up there, with no weapons, never even considering calling someone for help, and very predictably gets attacked. It's absolutely ridiculous.
Even more ridiculous is the scene when he leaves Laura in the car in order to briefly inspect the house - "BRIEFLY" being the key word here. He returns after just 18 seconds (!) with the following words: "there is nobody inside the house". That must have been one helluva lightning-fast house-inspection. 18 seconds for a house that big? I would think that an entire football team would need at least a few minutes to check the house completely for any potential intruders.
More nonsense. When Nestor goes up to the cellar, he finds neither a body nor any blood. He even makes a comment that the cellar hadn't been visited in a while. This implies that Laura must have killed her Dad downstairs – and yet where is the blood? Where is the body? Nestor should have seen either the body or some blood (or both) downstairs. Laura had no time to clean up the mess. Or did she? Of course, I forget that the writers and the director are LIARS and CHEATS, so perhaps Laura did clean up the living-room before Nestor's arrival in some ulterior universe in which the ACTUAL plot was going on – while we (the suckered viewers) were watching the FAKE VERSION of events, the stuff that never happened, the moronic-universe version of events, such as Laura sobbing, running away from a hairy arm going for her neck, the ghosts, and that crucially phony scene in which her father appears to be murdered upstairs in the cellar while Laura was downstairs.
To make matters worse, the movie has such an ugly – modern – look: it is an almost uni-colour film with nothing but shades of putrid green. (Horror) movies used to look beautiful/natural once upon a time in the 70s/early-80s, but nowadays most horror films are shoved through filters, made to look incredibly unappealing as if this ugliness somehow magnifies the horror. It doesn't; it simply makes the movie look ugly.
It's never even hinted why her two victims killed her daughter, nor is it even entirely clear whether they did! (Remember: she's nuts.) This renders the story even more pointless.
Furthermore, this damn boring casa drags on. The intro alone lasts an entire 17 minutes (an eternity in the horror genre), during which absolutely nothing happens. All we have in those 17 minutes is a crappy-looking actress and a movie that looks like a bird poo-pooed on it. I can find an ugly woman and bird-droppings myself, I don't need a movie for that.