I saw this on the last night of our local Horrorfest 2007 and was both duly horrified and impressed. To me this is an outstanding horror film that could stand alongside Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, and Friday the 13th.
The tale provides a really delightfully horrifying mix of quasi-religious/satanist cultishness, sadistic gore, fun-loving college students plunged into terror, and nightmarish cross-cultural confusion.
The script was solidly scary; it delivers and delivers well. I really like the basic strategy: starting with a really nasty, brutal, scary torture scene, introducing the horrifyingly sadistic and creepy Gustavo; then for a fairly lengthy time we have this wonderful story full of indirection and feints and suggestiveness, including all kinds of cultural misdirection and confusion, during which I kept looking for a new horror along the lines of the initial scene of horror; and finally after this long fear-inducing build-up, we get an even more horrifying torture scene and a bloodbath to go along with it. To me this all works very, very well, and the script gets top props for this arrangement and for really solid scenes throughout. The script is even sprinkled with some really great lines: "The border has no memory." "I'll be back when I know what I'm doing."
The script was executed very convincingly. The acting was consistently solid. Brian Presley's Ed was excellent and convincing, and Jake Muxworthy gave us an excellent rendition of party-loving Henry. Valeria is attractively portrayed by Martha Higareda.
As for the cult and cult members, the script as executed gives the cult as such a strong "flavor" while giving us convincing portrayals of several very distinctively wicked members of the cult. The leader of the cult, Beto Cuevas' Santillan, was not for me nearly as salient as Marco Bacuzzi's Gustavo. Bacuzzi gives us a Gustavo who is to me so sadistic, so creepy, and so scene-dominating that I would really put him in the same pantheon of nasty horror characters as Jason and Michael Myers and Hannibal Lector.
The cinematography is consistently outstanding, and there are some really great visuals. I especially liked the scenes in the amusement park, and some of the indoor scenes: such as the early scene of a policeman looking down a blue corridor with a statue of the Virgin Mary in a niche in the wall behind him; and then another in which one of the female characters is climbing an indoor circular staircase. But really almost all of the scenes were really composed very effectively; and the gory scenes were as gory and creepy and scary as one could wish.
The only really big objection I had was to the sound, which was just horribly washed out, obscure, and sometimes almost non-existent, as in the case of several gunshots that sounded like pencils tapping on a table. I couldn't really believe that the movie's sound could be this bad, except that another audience member in my theater said he talked with theater staff, which did try to make adjustments of some kind, utterly unsuccessful.
And I'll admit that I'd much rather see Gustavo as the top cult-creep.
But all in all, this is a wonderful horror movie that deserves a lot wider recognition as such, IMHO.
The tale provides a really delightfully horrifying mix of quasi-religious/satanist cultishness, sadistic gore, fun-loving college students plunged into terror, and nightmarish cross-cultural confusion.
The script was solidly scary; it delivers and delivers well. I really like the basic strategy: starting with a really nasty, brutal, scary torture scene, introducing the horrifyingly sadistic and creepy Gustavo; then for a fairly lengthy time we have this wonderful story full of indirection and feints and suggestiveness, including all kinds of cultural misdirection and confusion, during which I kept looking for a new horror along the lines of the initial scene of horror; and finally after this long fear-inducing build-up, we get an even more horrifying torture scene and a bloodbath to go along with it. To me this all works very, very well, and the script gets top props for this arrangement and for really solid scenes throughout. The script is even sprinkled with some really great lines: "The border has no memory." "I'll be back when I know what I'm doing."
The script was executed very convincingly. The acting was consistently solid. Brian Presley's Ed was excellent and convincing, and Jake Muxworthy gave us an excellent rendition of party-loving Henry. Valeria is attractively portrayed by Martha Higareda.
As for the cult and cult members, the script as executed gives the cult as such a strong "flavor" while giving us convincing portrayals of several very distinctively wicked members of the cult. The leader of the cult, Beto Cuevas' Santillan, was not for me nearly as salient as Marco Bacuzzi's Gustavo. Bacuzzi gives us a Gustavo who is to me so sadistic, so creepy, and so scene-dominating that I would really put him in the same pantheon of nasty horror characters as Jason and Michael Myers and Hannibal Lector.
The cinematography is consistently outstanding, and there are some really great visuals. I especially liked the scenes in the amusement park, and some of the indoor scenes: such as the early scene of a policeman looking down a blue corridor with a statue of the Virgin Mary in a niche in the wall behind him; and then another in which one of the female characters is climbing an indoor circular staircase. But really almost all of the scenes were really composed very effectively; and the gory scenes were as gory and creepy and scary as one could wish.
The only really big objection I had was to the sound, which was just horribly washed out, obscure, and sometimes almost non-existent, as in the case of several gunshots that sounded like pencils tapping on a table. I couldn't really believe that the movie's sound could be this bad, except that another audience member in my theater said he talked with theater staff, which did try to make adjustments of some kind, utterly unsuccessful.
And I'll admit that I'd much rather see Gustavo as the top cult-creep.
But all in all, this is a wonderful horror movie that deserves a lot wider recognition as such, IMHO.