In short: Crowley (1987)

Uruguay in the 80s. A pretty unpleasant looking vampire (director and everything else Ricardo Islas, going all animalistic and unpleasant for his version of a vampire) we’ll later learn is named Crowley digs his way out of his grave and starts right off with killing his first victims in examples of home-made gore. The police in the usually quiet town is rather in over their heads with the case, though they do think about their inhumanly strong killer who leaves his victims drained of blood possibly being an actual vampire pretty quickly.

Fortunately, the local teenage population is very on the ball, with bookish Andres (Juan C. Lazzarini, I believe) doing research that suggests a backstory from colonial times; curiously, one of Andres’s teen acquaintances, Maria (Fanny Bertinat) looks exactly like Crowley’s mandatory lost love. Given this vampire’s very animalistic style, one really doesn’t want to be her in this case.

So let’s hope the cops, Maria’s boyfriend Jorge (Daniel Lacoste?), and Andres will somehow manage to kill the bloodsucker before things become really unpleasant.

For a gory vampire movie shot, directed, and so on, in Uruguay (a country with very little of a film industry) by a teenager with a camcorder and no budget, Crowley is rather a triumph. It does at least demonstrate the raw talent Ricardo Islas has and had, with a script that certainly isn’t high art but mostly hangs together logically and thematically, and doesn’t drag, presented with can-do home made gore that may defy your ideas of realism and good taste but certainly does that with an eye-gouging enthusiasm I absolutely admire. At the very least, the movie shows dedication by everyone involved at all times. This is the sort of project that can and should be proud of flourishes like hand-drawn titles. These are of course an amateurish thing to have in your film, but it’s the sort of amateurism that breathes dedication, enthusiasm and love.

While the film is probably overlit – given how blurry and washed-out the prints of the film I’ve encountered are, I wouldn’t bet money on or against it – there are also more than a handful of clever moments in staging and framing, and a whole lot of clever visual ideas that get Islas and co around the limitations of their locations and non-budget. For my tastes, that’s certainly enough to provide Crowley with a real atmosphere of the strange. It’s not the slick and developed kind of strange you can achieve when you have a budget and technology, obviously, but the sort of thing that can happen with talent and luck, a breathe of mood and a skewed sense of a specific place and time that’s worth a lot to me in a movie.

And that’s what makes a weird camcorder-shot little movie from late 80s Uruguay as worthwhile as many a film made for hundreds of millions of dollars.