In short: Secreto Matusita (2014)

The film consists out of the – apparently edited – footage that is the final trace of the traditional three student filmmakers (Lupita Mora, Bruno Espejo and Eduardo Ramos). The team manage to bribe their way into the most haunted house in Peru (whose backstory is explained in ten minutes or so of interviews), pack in a medium (Willy Gutiérrez) and start filming in the hopes of being the lucky ones among millions who finally get a ghost or three on camera. As it happens, they will indeed encounter quite a bit of paranormal activity, but even the surprisingly competent medium can’t save them (or himself) from some very bad ends.

Despite not really getting along with it, I found the good parts of Peruvian director Dorian Fernández-Moris’s previous film, Cementerio General, promising enough to try my luck with his next film. I’m happy I did, for while Secreto Matusita certainly isn’t any more original than the cemetery excursion, it is quite a bit more effective. For one, this is a much tighter film, establishing place and characters with effective briefness while still finding space for leading in with some nice ghost stories about the place the characters are going to die in. That last bit really helps in building up mood as well as expectation in an audience and also helps formally ground the film in the genre of paranormal documentaries, making it more convincing.

Once the POV spookery really gets going, this is still a much improved film over its predecessor – the various ghostly apparitions and supernatural shenanigans are well-timed and fun, the character reactions to them believable, and even the final act doesn’t fall into the POV horror trap of consisting of people running and screeching in the dark for half an hour that destroyed Cementerio’s middle part for me. In fact, the spooky old house stays effectively lit for most of the film, and while the camera is a bit shakier than you’d hope those of actual film students would be it’s the kind of shakiness that suggests tension and not an epileptic fit.

As a lover of ghost stories, I appreciated the film first building the house up through the kind of short, ambiguous takes that make up much of authentic ghost lore too, all of which will be important in some way or the other later in the film, and which certainly added a greater feeling of veracity than is usual in this sort of outing, as does the fact that the stories localize the house’s past in Peruvian ephemeral history, making it more specific and less generic through this.


Add to that the film’s tight running time and general air of competence, and you not only have a nice improvement on Fernández-Moris’s first film, but a genuinely fine bit of POV horror.

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.

Three Films Make A Post: You get one shot Before he kills you.

The Sleeping Car (1990): As we all know from suffering through a lot of tripe, horror comedies are difficult. Case in point is Douglas’ Curtis film about David Naughton fleeing from his divorce to college, a very young new girlfriend (Judie Aronson) and into a haunted sleeping car where only the most rote of the spooky stuff will happen, so the horror part’s pretty much a non-starter. It’s also not helped by hatchet-style editing and the often made error of confusing shouting with things being creepy.

The comedy part isn’t any better, either, for the in theory decent cast (also comprising Kevin McCarthy as hippie exorcist and Jeff Conaway as the scenery chewer of the week) has to wrestle loads of terrible dialogue that can’t let a second go by without trying to have a punch line. Which is a bit of a problem when the punch lines don’t have any build-up time, none of them is funny anyway, and the witty repartee comes over as stilted, stupid, and torturously contrived.

La Entidad aka The Entity (2015): Eduardo Schuldt’s Peruvian POV horror film about the mandatory group of film students not surviving their encounter with supernatural evil isn’t half bad, adding a bit of Ringu and witch hunt horror to the usual mix (without directly cribbing from there), and for once not ending on people running screaming through the woods. That’s what a really creepy/cool looking graveyard’s for, apparently. The acting’s a bit ropey from time to time, and one or two characters are somewhat on the annoying side but the whole affair isn’t as derivative as it first looks, is well paced and has some rather effective moments of horror. It’s not a classic but well worth taking a look, I think.

The Raven (2012): It would be much easier to get through the adventures of E.A. Poe, consulting detective, if the film – or its director James McTeigue – had any actual idea of what it thinks Poe or his work were or meant. Alas, it by far prefers hand-waving and the regurgitation of clichés about the man and his works that does little to make the character feel like more than a very special guest star in his own movie (and life). It sure doesn’t help that John Cusack clearly doesn’t have any idea what the character he’s playing is supposed to be all about either, nor that the script is as generically serial killer thriller as you could imagine.

The production design is fine, at least, and there are many shots of fog shrouded streets, as if the whole she-bang were taking place in London and not in Baltimore, but fog-shrouded streets alone do not a good movie make.

Qarqacha - El Demonio Del Incesto (2000? 2002?)

also known as Jarjacha - El Demonio Del Incesto

Please blame any errors and mistakes in the following on the lack of information about the film on the 'net and my doubtful Spanish.

A trio of scientists - Yvonne, Sebastien and Nielo - (they're anthropologists or ethnologists, I suppose) traipse through the Andes to study the culture of the people living in the poor mountain villages there. It's not the most pleasant of expeditions, it has to be said. Strange groaning noises in the night make the city people more than a little nervous, and when they have reached the village they're bound to study, nobody wants to open their doors at night to give them shelter. After meeting a rather panicked looking countryman holding a mirror up into their faces, they finally stumble into an unlocked building. Inside is a woman who cries over the body her dead son. Well, at least it's shelter from whatever may stalk the night here.

The next morning, the intrepid explorers meet Don Maximo, who I suppose is something like the mayor of the village (although he looks about twenty years to young for a position like this). He's very shouty and rather unhelpful, but at least he agrees to let the scientists stay in his house for the duration of their research.

His daughter - looking about five years younger than her father - is not too impressed by him anymore, it seems, and has started a rather unhealthy relationship with a relative (known to me as "the guy in the red shirt"), with beautiful highpoints of romance like red shirt guy breaking into her home while she sleeps and staring at her naked legs. Oh, and sex, I suppose.

Some time later, the three scientists see the older woman they met earlier, dragging the coffin of her dead son through the village, every villager pointedly ignoring her and closing their door. The three decide to help her carry the load to the local cemetery and bury her son. After he is put under, a man in a monk's robe appears, makes a few hasty gestures of blessing over the grave and runs away again. Which does not sound too friendly, but is still quite a bit nicer than the horde of screaming, sling-swinging villagers that now appears and wants to lynch the mourning woman for being an evil witch (who had sexual relations with her son?). The scientists give her the opportunity to flee, which the villagers seem to accept relatively peacefully, but when they return to the village, their baggage lies in front of Don Maximo's house. To no one's surprise, the other villagers don't want to take them in either, and they have to take shelter in an abandoned and ruined house, while they again hear the groans of something all around them in the night.

The next morning, the villagers find one of their own dead outside - it is obvious to Don Maximo that the man has been killed by a Qarqacha (or Jarjacha), a type of brain-eating demon that is half man, half alpaca people who have incestual relationships turn into, even after their death. It seems as if Qarqachas are also able to turn themselves into alpacas at night, and so a screaming horde of villagers descends on some rather unimpressed looking alpacas, ties them up and throws them into a barn. The next morning, the animals have transformed into two very naked people (red shirt guy and daughter, I think), who are stoned and beaten to death by the villagers.

This still isn't the end of the whole strange affair, though. A third monster is roaming the surroundings and attacks again the next night, spitting in its victims faces to paralyze them and then nibbling their brains. It also finally attacks one of the three scientists (while he is guarding Yvonne following the call of nature), whose inclusion in the whole affair never seemed all that necessary.

Fortunately, we learn, the Qarqacha is afraid of its own mirror image, giving the villagers a fine possibility to beat it to death.

Who knew that Peru had its own backyard film industry? As far as I could find out, this type of ultra cheap regional horror movie based on myth and urban legend is quite popular in the country and mostly sold on video tapes in the markets of Lima.

Much of Qarqacha speaks the international language of no-budget horror film we all know so well. It's shot on video (I don't think digital video, but I could be wrong), looks in parts as if it has been edited with scissors, is badly acted even when viewed by someone without the necessary language skills, not really directed in the sense you'd usually want to use the word, and based on a meandering script that mostly consists of scenes of people walking.

What makes the film worth watching apart from its obscurity and the opportunity it gives the non-Peruvian viewer to triumphantly scream: "I have seen a shot on video horror film from Peru, and you haven't!" is its strict regionalism. The film follows the old no-budget rule of "shoot what's there" and lucks into the fact that what is there in the Andes does look a lot more interesting and has been a lot less used in the past than the assortment of sub-urban houses and empty factory buildings its US-American and European cousins take place in. At times, the film takes on the feeling of a weird vacation tape, made in the places tourists usually don't visit, because they are poor and rather unpleasant.

What's also helpful for the non-Peruvian viewer here is that the myth the film is based on isn't too well known or documented outside the country, making its rules somewhat new and exciting for a certain type of person (me). And call me easily impressed, but I found a few of the scenes - especially the the monster hunting techniques pf the villagers - rather creepy in their rawness.

So, probably not a good movie, but an interesting one.

 

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