México Bárbaro

Normally, this type of movie would be just up my street but Mexico Barbaro is terrible. It starts off promising but the stories are short, violent, and ultimately either uninteresting or stupid. Such a wasted opportunity.

There are 2 decent stories but the rest are unrealized and foolish. I wish they had fleshed out some of the stories and cut the rest!

Mexican origin horror film, the first of which was produced in 2014 and consists of 8 short stories. Eight different directors were told to choose Mexican legends and they shot these legends from their own perspectives. Wild scenes and sexuality abound in the movies. Even though I watched the movie with a lot of prejudice, there were parts that I liked. In places, make-up and costumes were very amateurish. Names and directors of the short stories:

1- Tzompantli, Laurette Flores 2- Jaral de Berrios, Edgar Nito 3- Drena, Aaron Soto 4- La cosa mas preciada, Isaac Ezban 5- Lo que importa es lo de adentro, Lex Ortega 6- Muñecas, Jorge Michel Grau 7- Siete veces siete, Ulises Gùzman 8- Dia de los Muertos, GiGi Saul Guerrero

The second part of the movie was released in 2017.

Here are seven horror shorts that lack horror, premise, dialogue, even sound at times. The whole collection is completely uninspired, the stories are poorly developed and executed.

While photography may rescue part of some of these shorts, some just come short of everything, just like high school projects. Harsh? Maybe. True? Completely. Take for instance "La Cosa Más Preciada (The Most Precious Thing), the acting is bad, the dialogues are hands down some of the worst I've ever heard in cinema history, the whole thing was given an instagram-like "vintage" filter. This one in particular is preposterous.

The rest of the shorts, whilst more professional, are still pretty bad and absurd, there is no heart to be found. If the project was done by amateur kids, then fine, I'd give it 4 stars, but these are - self?- deemed- directors.

Also, the only Mexican thing on this are the assets (directors, actors, writers, producers, settings), there are no real legends or myths in here, just perhaps loosely 'inspired from'.

My conclusion is that a couple of Mexican rejects from 'ABC's of Death' decided to take matters in their own hands... disaster ensued of course.

I must say I was very excited to watch this since I first heard of the project back in early 2014. I was looking forward to what 'indie' Mexican directors had up their sleeve since we practically have no recognized mainstream horror directors, but no, I cannot vouch for any of them.

The first one - Awful. The second one has good boobs, good atmosphere n a bit western feel. The third one is beyond redemption. The 4th one is gross n not at all funny. The 5th one is again offensive like the previous one. The 6th one is unnecessarily shot in bnw. Camera lingers on ruined toys for a long time. There is some creepy music n then the big wtf end. The 7th one is a revenge story but done very badly with a bit of gore. The last one is silly but very gory. Its about strippers but there ain't no nudity but lots of gore. A man's nose get bitten off, another one's eyeball gets pierced, another one's eardrum gets pierced, face gets bludgeoned, face gets smashed, hand gets chopped, neck gets stabbed, neck gets sliced by a barbwire. Shockingly the end credits goes on for 16 mins.

The quality of most of these shorts is actually pretty good in terms of camera-work and cinematography. The quality of the acting ios decent too, mostly. There's really nothing to earn a low rating on those grounds. If these are representative of current Mexican cinema, they're actually pretty good exemplars to praise.

Now...the stories and approaches to horror...well, that's another issue. A couple of them weren't bad, primarily the 2nd one, set in a haunted hacienda. But somewhere along the line, Mexican horror filmmaking seems to have equated horror with disgusting and off-putting. And that's a huge problem. When you leave your audience more queasy than scared, you've failed at horror. There;s a reason the genre is called 'horror movies' rather than 'disgusting movies'. Your core audience might be somewhat jaded to gore, but that's not really the reason why (most of them) watch.

Just on filmmaking grounds alone, there's a lot of promise for Mexican cinema on display here. If these filmmakers manage to substitute real horror for excessive viscera, I'd certainly love to watch what they put out.

(Also, several of them drag out shots and scenes for far too long. But that's an easily correctable issue.)