There’s a lot to like about this jokey Spanish horror flick, which opens with an amusing locker room sequence providing nudity and a machete-wielding mock-SCREAM killer. The parody of the Wes Craven movie both in this scene and later moments points toward the movie’s weakest element : its endless chain of pop culture references is, at times, embarrassingly out-dated. Hence we have (sometimes admittedly funny) nods to the “fat girl” in TITANIC, CROCODILE DUNDEE (“THIS is a knife…”) and THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. All of which are more than a decade old.

   The set up, following a delicious title sequence in which the actual title is carved into a cadaver’s chest, is simple and bizarrely reminiscent of AMERICAN PSYCHO II. Young Macarena Gomez is sexy, and knows it. She’s also a gal who kills on a regular basis without conscience. She is harsh during sex (“Are you inside already?”), has a short-lived pooch named Jason and routinely stores decaying severed heads in her fridge. She reads “Cosmo Killer”, a mag. with helpful job-specific articles like “69 Ways To Get Rid of Annoying Corpses” and factoids like the fact that a good old fashioned strangulation burns 25 calories. She is also fond of acting out a variation on TAXI DRIVER’s iconic scene in front of her mirror : “Are you calling ME trashy?”.

   In this colorfully designed flick, backed by a suitably warped soundtrack encompassing weird renditions of “Barbie Girl”, Gomez talks straight to the camera, telling the audience “In this one, I’m the boss…” and directly referencing FRIDAY THE 13^th. When mulling over why she kills, the best she can offer is a curt “Why not…”. The movie follows her serial-killing shenanigans - with back-story conveyed via a song and dance routine - before it ventures into zombie movie territory when her fellow students, in trying to come up with a cure for the common migraine, inadvertently create a “brain impulse decoder” that brings the dead back to life. Among those dead are many of Gomez’s victims.

   Gomez’ hugely enjoyable, spirited central performance does a lot for this occasionally undisciplined irony-drenched splatter movie, which revels in hackneyed fan boy in-jokes like a key setting named the Jorge A Romero Institute. It’s energetic and often impressively stylized, with split-screens, self-conscious rewinds and witty gore including a stiletto heel to the forehead bit. The constant nudge-nudge dialogue references (notably to THE EVIL DEAD) wear a bit thin after a while, and the late-in-the-day shift into zombie-land is neither seamless nor does it make the most of a sadly sidelined zombie rat.

   Nonetheless, there are cute ideas, including the prominence of a chainsaw that no one can figure out how to operate and a character who deliberately shoots a male zombie in the cock…because that’s where his mind is. It’s a breezy view for genre fans.