México Bárbaro

I don't have words to talk about this waste of time. The Mexico's horror cinema is just an upset...

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.

I loved all the films, and each offers something a little different than the last. I'm looking forward to researching the directors involved and finding more of their works.

"The Omen" is a horror movie. "Bram Stoker's Dracula" is a horror movie. This.. Is not. This is a pile of trash. There's no suspense in the air, it's just bad acting, bad directing, bad cinematography, and there's literally no plot.

I kept waiting for it to at least get tolerable. I was bored and annoyed, but when I saw a child being abused, I was done. The directors are clearly sick and need a mental health screening. Again, there's horror films (which I love), and this semi-snuff film trash is not one. The only people who would enjoy this plot less piece of crap are muderers, rapists, and other general sickos.

I also don't mind subtitles. I have watched several great foreign films.

Do not watch this unless you want to be annoyed at the very least, or absolutely disgusted at the worst. If this film was matter, I'd use it to line a cat litter box.

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.)