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 13th. 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.
-Steven West
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
