Satanic Hispanics

 A horror anthology tied together by very little more than an ethnicity, Satanic Hispanics brings together five Latin-American directors to tell some scary stories. The results vary wildly, but that, as we keep finding out again and again, comes with the territory.

 The first chapter - The Traveller, directed by Mike Mendez - introduces the framing device: the police raid a derelict house in El Paso to find dozens of dead bodies in what looks like a cartel killing. The lone survivor, known as The Traveler (Efren Ramirez) is taken into custody, where he's questioned by two detectives (Greg Grunberg and Sonya Eddy). As the movie progresses The Traveler admits that he's immortal, and being hunted down by death itself. And, in response to a question or something that jogs his memory, he tells the different stories that comprise the film.
 It really doesn't get much to do until the last chapter, and its dialog is severely overwritten - but Ramirez is pretty good, and it gets one really good visual gag in at the beginning.

 This fading year's horror MVP Demián Rugna helms the second segment, También lo Vi (I saw it too), and it's easily the best story in the film. No contest. It's about a Rubik's-cube-obsessed shut-in (Demián Salomón) who's unwittingly devised a way to open a door to the land of the dead, with foreseeably catastrophic results. Visually and conceptually it feels like it could fit in Rugna's Aterrados (itself a bit of an anthology film), but this one's got a lighter tone and more of an impish sense of fun. Plus one hell of an effective jump scare and some excellent effects and cinematography. Shame they couldn't think of a good ending for it.

 Eduardo Sánchez is up next, and he basically does a cute, goofy and kind of lame sitcom skit about a vampire (Hemky Madera) whose night is ruined when he discovers he got daylight savings time wrong. There's some hijinks with the police, passersby, and his long-suffering vampire girlfriend (Patricia Velasquez) as he tries to make it home before dawn - some good gags, but the humor is, in general, just way too broad, and doesn't compare at all well to (possible) inspirations What We Do In The Shadows or Woody Allen's 'Count Dracula'. It lands with a solid punchline, at least.

Then it's Gigi Saul Guerrero's turn, an interminable bit about a would-be CIA informant (Ari Gallegos) who pissed off a shape-shifting tribe's shaman (Gabriela Ruíz) and suffers the consequences. It's a weird shrug of a story that doesn't go anywhere. Maybe I just didn't get it; Have to say, though, that I found the Shaman's long-ass monologue to be gratingly pretentious bullshit.
 I took it to be a cautionary tale about pissing off ancient shapeshifting shamans. Turns out it's a bad idea: you'll end up making them tear off their cheeks.

 The last story is Alejandro Brugués's The Hammer of Zanzibar, another overtly comedic entry about a smartass (Jonah Ray!) who confronts a deadly curse that's set a deadly demon against him. It's buoyed by a likeable cast, some inventiveness and a lot of energy, but unfortunately the humor is... well, not as corny as in Sanchez's entry, but just as broad, and really, really juvenile. Not just in content but in form, as it kind of feels like a short some talented but slightly obnoxious film school kids would put together in their spare time. At least they clearly had a good time making it.

 Things finish up nicely as the wraparound ends with a confrontation between Death and The Traveler as the gaunt deity - a very cool practical effects creation - strides into the police precinct like some sort of supernatural terminator.

 Despite the unevenness and a terminal lack of cohesiveness, the film would be worth a watch just for Rugna's entry alone- but even if the rest don't add up to much, they're mostly entertaining.

When Evil Lurks (Cuando Acecha la Maldad)

 This one is really special. I usually try to avoid spoilers in these posts, but When Evil Lurks really is a movie best enjoyed knowing as little as possible about it; Go watch it now, and if you need any prodding, know it's the best, most bleakly brutal piece of horror I've watched in a very long time.

  Still here? OK then: Pedro (Ezequiel Rodriguez) and Jaime (Demián Salomon) are two stupendously hirsute brothers living together somewhere in rural Argentina. While investigating a mysterious shooting in a neighbouring field, they find a body - the bottom half of a body, to be precise - along with some weird, occult-looking equipment. They ascertain that the deceased was headed for a nearby shack, and once they get there they find that the family living there are harbouring an 'embichado' (the english subtitles translate that as 'possessed', but 'bug-ridden' or 'infested' would be a better fit).

 Pedro and Jaime recoil with fear - not just because the embichado is a grotesque, swollen mockery of a man, but because apparently embichados are a known quantity, and it means very bad things. They don't share any of that knowledge with the audience, so we're left to gather bits of meaning from context and terse comments; There's talk of Bug-ridden people, something called Incarnates, and demons - the film puts its unique, apocalyptic spin on possession and runs with it.

 The worldbuilding (to use an out-of-favour word) in this movie is masterful. There are a couple of awkward exposition dumps later, but by then we've built up a picture of what's going on and they serve mostly to fill in some gaps. And it's not like the script is afraid to leave things unexplained or seemingly break its own rules; Its priority is to scare the ever-living shit out of you, not give you the satisfaction of figuring out its lore.

 This is all demonstrated beautifully again and again as the brothers first try to contain the evil, and then to outrun it (trying to save their family along the way). I can't overstate just how gripping and intense the first half of this movie is - and it features one of the most unbearably tense suspense sequences in recent memory. I can't imagine how that bit would play if you somehow don't figure out what's going to happen, but at a guess you'd miss out on the suspense but get the mother of all jump-scares.

 The good news is that the back half is still damn good. It loses a little of the first part's incredible momentum and makes a couple of minor missteps, but there's still plenty of fucked-up imagery and horrible shit to go around, and it steps up its game again in time for a ruthless litany of final scenes.

 Writer/director Demián Rugna carefully stages every scene for maximum effect, fostering a bleak sense of doom, that things will inevitably go to hell... and with admirable dedication to the mayhem that ensues when they do. Cinematographer Mariano Suárez and composer Pablo Fuu maintain the ambiance beautifully. This one... this one fucking rocks.

Terrified (Aterrados)

 The poltergeists in Terrified do not fuck around. At first they seem happy just taunting poor Clara (Natalia Señorales) with voices from the pipes and banging from the other side in the wall. That's until her husband Juan (Agustín Rittano) finds her later that night being hurled telekinetically from wall to wall, face smashed to a pulp.

 The same spooks are content to harass neighbour Walter (Demián Salomón) with more standard ghostly hijinks; moving his bed at night, making all sorts of noises, and generally causing disorder. The poor guy is a nervous wreck (it's never explained why he just doesn't go to a hotel or something), and spends his time at work trying to get a paranormal investigator to go check his house.

 He finally succeeds convincing her when he gets footage of a mysterious naked emaciated man wandering around his house; By the time she finally pops up, though, Walter's gone missing.

 The most horrifying - or, terrifying, I guess - event is reserved for poor Alicia (Julieta Vallina), whose ten-year-old son digs himself out of his grave after getting rolled over by a bus and props himself, unmoving, at the dinner table. After leaving muddy footprints everywhere. Fuck that noise.

 Funes, the policeman in charge of the scene (Maximiliano Ghione) contacts Jano (Norberto Gonzalo), another policeman who seems to have experience with this sort of thing to help out. Jano in turn runs into Dr. Albreck (Elvira Onetto), the paranormal expert from the previous story as she's taking pictures of Walter's house, and brings her up to speed. Recognizing  that this sleepy Buenos Aires neighbourhood is somehow turning into some sort of locus of paranormal activity, they bring in a Yankee (George Lewis) and set up shop to try and figure out what the hell is going on, one of them stationed on each house. The ghosts don't take it well at all.

 It's a very episodic movie that doesn't ever really cohere into a whole and doesn't end up offering a satisfying narrative -  but the individual elements are so well made that it doesn't really matter. It's creepy as hell, tense, cheerfully nasty, and features some beautifully mounted jump scares. A fun time, in other words.

 Writer/director Demián Rugna and his crew work wonders with a low budget, offering up some neat ghosts, a fair amount of gore, and some pretty effective framing. The characters aren't very memorable, but the script does a good job of making them sound fairly authentic, and the actors sell their parts pretty well. Some of the scenes feel a bit stretched out - there's a lot of arguing, for example, about what to do about the ambulatory corpse - but other than a few scenes like that the film moves at a fair clip.
 There's also a good sense of mystery. Some possible explanations are bandied about, but the entirely fallible experts in this film don't ever clarify anything - there's no apparent motivation, no sense of a plan or rules, no seeming goal to the manifestation. Sometimes ghosts are just evil.