Carne cruda

When four friends go camping in the woods they are expecting a luxury campsite. Instead, thanks to a long out of date guidebook, they end at an abandoned site. To make matter worse they find a strange group of naturists there. Quico is bitten by one of them and soon starts feeling unwell. Later on he gets a craving for human flesh! The leader of the group comes to visit him and explains that he is now one of them; a cannibal. Will he be able to fight off his urges or will he too murder people for their flesh?

The opening scene, where Quico and a friend watch a horror movie, tells us just what sort of film this will be: rather cheesy, a little sleazy and somewhat gory. The plot is pretty basic but provides an excuse for some gory moments and mild nudity. It is clearly fairly low budget but manages to be quite fun; it plays with genre clichés in a knowing manner and uses physical effects rather than glossy CGI. The acting is solid enough; I'm sure the cast were hamming it up deliberately in many scenes. On the down side it never gets really scary. Overall I wouldn't call this a must see but it passed ninety minutes well enough.

These comments are based on watching the film in Spanish with English subtitles.

A lighthearted horror comedy about cannibalism that never really hits its stride. Characters limited by unnaturally stereotypical behaviour meet flesheaters while camping, but the behaviour is never clarified as either a separate breed of people, or transmitted like a virus. There seems no hint that people are disappearing or dying, yet their flesh is abundant.

Some witty references on a meta level - opens with a scene from a horror film, and has a 'raw meat' celebrity chef, but doesn't quite integrate these fully into the story. A Hindu vegetarian chef appears to eat meat and have an almost mystical grasp of what's going on, but again sits slightly outside the story arc.

The stereotypes are the biggest failing, though.,the macho, predatory real estate agent; disinterested police; the histrionic French food critic; the nymphomaniac friend; the bullying ex-husband. It would have been nice to have some character development, rather than these cartoon figures.

Enough fun to keep you engaged for the short runtime, but far from memorable.