In short: Don’t Panic (1987)

Late teen Michael (Jon Michael Bischof) has just moved to Mexico City with his mother. Still, his birthday party is quite a large one, though mostly filled with kids he neither really knows nor likes, or virtual strangers like his instant crush Alex (Gabriela Hassel).

One of the local idiots, Tony (Juan Ignacio Aranda), brings an ouija board (as always, for reasons I’ll never understand, pronounced by everyone as “WeeGee”) to the festivities. Using it apparently awakens some kind of evil force, and so Michael soon has a whole load problems of the sort teenagers outside of horror movies usually miss out on: his eyes turn a merry red at times, and he has visions in which some of his class mates and acquaintances are stabbed to death with a dagger. It may or may not be some sort of mental connection to the supernatural killer – the film sure isn’t going to tell. Later on, there’s also a head made out of TV static making regular appearances, warning Michael who the next victim is going to be, and asking him to get them out of town. When he tries, he can add psychiatric attention to his problems.

Despite all the murder and mayhem around him, our hero still finds time and mind space to successfully romance Alex, of course.

Just having watched Rubén Galindo Jr.’s somewhat insane and most certainly insanely entertaining Grave Robbers some weeks ago, I was going into this earlier piece of Mexican 80s horror by the same director with particularly high hopes. Unfortunately, they weren’t really fulfilled, for where the Galindo’s next movie reaches some remarkable heights of individual, late 80s-tinged craziness, Don’t Panic is a rather less exciting mix of 80s horror cheese and variations (he said politely) on scenes from other, more popular horror movies of the decade. There’s rather a lot of the first two Nightmare on Elm Street movies in the film, but really, if you made a successful 80s teen horror movie, you’ll probably find elements cribbed from it, or at least played with in an obvious manner, in here, too.

Though, to be fair, there’s a certain amount of visual flair to the supernatural set pieces here that does stand Galindo Jr. in good stead, even if none of the ideas in the movie are actually his. Alas, the film does take its time getting there, frontloading the terrible teen romance and dire scenes of improbable teen interactions before the going gets good, so a viewer will have to keep awake by critiquing 80s fashion and counting very slowly to one thousand through the film’s first third or so.

But hey, we will always have Grave Robbers.