In short: Cementerio General (2013)

Iquitos, Peru. A bunch of teenagers decide to assuage the grief of one of their own for her dead father by sneaking onto the picturesque Cementario General by night and holding a ouija board session. As you will surely be surprised to hear, things don’t go too well, and soon a possessed eleven year old does what possessed people in movies do – though she has to play on tomb roofs instead of hang in ceiling corners on account of a despicable lack of ceilings – and everyone runs around, screeching. But wait, there’s more, because all of this is part of some revenge plot for some adulterous family business. The film doesn’t bother to get into why the kids not part of any of the families involved have to die too.

At the beginning and in its final act, Dorian Fernández-Moris’s Cementerio General is a decently shot, if been-there, done-that low budget horror movie, just coming from Peru instead of a backyard near me, again demonstrating that the drive to make a horror movie, any horror movie is something like a universal impulse. The young actors are decent enough, the director stages scenes with a promising eye, and the long-suffering viewer is hopeful for whatever follows. However, once the full-on POV middle part of the story came around, my patience frayed increasingly. There’s a certain amount of night-vision shaky-cam and running around screeching in the dark I can take with no problem, but once a film does like Cementerio General and adds quite a few out of focus shots to what feels already like a lifetime of shaking and screeching, even I start sighing sarcastically. Even more so when I encounter this in a film that demonstrated before, and will demonstrate in its final act, too, that it knows how to stage things straight and somewhat effectively.


The possessed kid is neither terribly convincing nor used very effectively either. All this leaves us with a film that has an okay beginning, a godawful middle, and a decent ending.