Seven Cemeteries

I like Danny Trejo. I think he's an awesome guy and a badass. But his movies are almost universally awful. This does not mean I don't own more than one of them.

So I didn't expect much from this one, and at the time I'm writing this the rating is 4.3 so that didn't bode well. However, I was surprised-pleased, actually-that it wasn't near as terrible as I'd prepared myself for. Yes, it's low budget and the sfx are poor. The plot is pretty thin but consistent. Trejo is Trejo and the other actors earn their meager paychecks. There's some humor and its short runtime keeps you from getting bored or overthinking. Seriously, I don't get the hate. It's not so bad if you have a sense of humor and like Ramirez movies.

And I must be the only one who recognizes that this is a zombie takeoff on "The Magnificent Seven." It gets an extra point just for that.

A movie about a couple who try to hold off a bunch of criminals down by the border who are trying to muscle them out of their ranch. Things get heated with the criminals and things end up bad so they call in bravo (danny trejo) who of course was was a people's hero back in the day to come and help them out. Thing is bravo has just been released from prison after 40yrs and hes old and all his old gang are long dead and he doesn't really wanna get in trouble but after finding himself on the wrong side of a corrupt local cops stolen rifle things change and he's saved by a lady called bruja who dabbles in the occult and gives him the power to resurrect a squad of dead criminals and heros of his choice back from the dead to help him fight the criminal gang and save the ranch.

This sounded great on paper but in action the movie is pretty terrible. There aren't many funny parts in it and the characters are just cheesy and for some reason all keep dropping jokes about recent events even though they have been dead for 30+ years... It's obviously not a great movie and obviously not a great comedy but its watchable if you have nothing else to do.

When it comes to a Trejo movie, one always knows that it can go either way, can be a great treat like Desperado or Bad Ass, or it can be some terrible , basically unwatchable garbage.

Seven Cemeteries is somewhere between the two, but closer to the latter. The few raving reviews out there are clearly fake, calling this magnificent and wonderful is ridiculous.

It is still watchable, if only barely. It's incredibly amateurish, as if a bunch of high school kids banded together with a phone as a camera and grabbed a few random guys from the local diner to goof around and call it a movie. There is hardly any story, the acting is basically non existent, dialogues and the script in general are extremely simplistic. The pacing is totally off, at least half of the very short runtime is spent with a slow build, with very little payoff in the end. Let's not even mention the "special effects"... Still, it has a little bit of charm, a few small chuckles. All I can say is that it's not entirely terrible.

Now, while I hadn't heard about this 2024 movie titled "Seven Cemeteries", I still opted to give it a chance, as I stumbled upon it by random chance here in 2025. Sure, I wasn't harboring the biggest of expectations to the movie.

Writers John Gulager and Joel Soisson put together a fairly enjoyable script. It certainly was something unique, I will say that much. And yeah, it was actually a watchable enough movie, I will say that much.

The movie does have a pretty good cast ensemble, and there are some familiar faces on the cast list, with the likes of Danny Trejo, Lew Temple, Efren Ramirez, Noel Albert Gugliemi and Vincent M. Ward. The acting performances in the movie were fair.

The scene where one of the zombies readjusted his broken neck was so cringeworthy to watch. It was some of the worst looking CGI effects I've seen in a long, long time. It was so fake that even a blind person would go "really?" But other than that, then the effects in the movie were actually fair.

A watchable movie, for sure, but hardly one that warrants more than just a single viewing.

My rating of director John Gulager's 2024 movie "Seven Cemeteries" lands on a five out of ten stars.

In Texas, in a small town at the border of Mexico, the crime lord Abuelo (Sal Lopez) wants the ranch that belongs to Carmela (Samantha Ashley) and Matteo (Raul Casso), but the land belongs to their family for years and they refuse to sell. Abuelo stabs Matteo to death and tells Carmela that she has until the end of the day to deliver the ranch to him. Meanwhile, the old Santana Bravo (Danny Trejo) is released from prison on probation after serving twenty-eight years wrongly accused, and visits Matteo. He learns what happened to him and out of the blue, the corrupt Sheriff Jake (Ronnie Clark) arrives with his deputies and executes Bravo. A witch (Maria Canals-Barrera) brings his body to her cabin and resurrects him. Further, she tells Bravo that his blood can resurrect the dead. Bravo goes to seven cemeteries to bring back his old friends to defeat Abuelo and his men and protect Carmela and her ranch. The showdown between Bravo and Abuelo will begin.

"Seven Cemeteries" (2024) is a lame B-movie indicated for fans of Danny Trejo, who is too old to perform the badass he was in the past. The plot is full of cliches, and the humor does not work. There is no development of the one-dimensional characters or situations, the locations and the acting are very poor and the crew seems to be amateurish. My vote is three.

Title (Brazil): Not Available.