Nahual (2025)

After having been attacked by an elderly woman in a house in Chicago that basically screamed “witchcraft”, an encounter the old lady doesn’t survive, social worker Katia (Jenny Sanchez) is understandably traumatized. She takes some time off work and travels to a resort somewhere in rural Mexico.

Shortly after Katia’s arrival there, a series of killings committed by a very fast, very strong, and very strange animal begins. At the same time, Katia begins changing, in behaviour and appetites. It soon becomes clear she has been possessed by a malevolent animal spirit, a nahual, and is indeed the monster killing the locals.

The indigenous people know this sort of thing of old, but that doesn’t mean it is going to be easy to get rid of what has become of Katia.

To my delight, microbudget veteran Ricardo Islas is still making films. He is apparently still from the US, his homebase for two decades or so, but in the case of Nahual, the production was probably shot in Mexico, with a cast of exclusively Spanish language speakers. Which does give the director’s return to the realm of the were-creatures (see Plenilunio for his first, classic, visit there) a strong sense of the local, generally an asset in any production, particularly in the microbudget realm where you have to find your uniqueness because you typically can’t afford to construct it. How much of the local here is an imagined one or how much of it a real one, I’m not in a position to say from Germany, of course.

This is clearly made on the very cheap, with many of the cast members not professional screen actors, but the central roles are well-cast, and nobody is the kind of horrible you shouldn’t cope with in a film made on this kind of budget. Pleasantly for my old ass, this is very centred on middle-aged people who haven’t jumped into the well of chirurgical youth too enthusiastically, which, as the feel of locality does, provides this with a nice base of reality for the supernatural to work on. Plus, in how many horror movies do you find a normal looking, indigenous Mexican woman as the eventual heroine?

His decades of experience as low budget filmmaker have provided Islas with a full toolkit as a filmmaker: his script is much better structured than these things often are, his character work, while not exactly deep, is precise and adds enough interest to everyone involved you are invested in their final fates, and though some of the direction is rough around the edges, there’s a solidity in the visual staging and the editing that simply works. When it is called for – the monster attacks and a great suspense scene in the climax particularly come to mind – Islas’s work becomes focussed and effective.

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.

In short: Red Screening (2020)

aka The Last Matinee

Original title: Al morir la matinée

A rainy night in the early 90s. Engineering student Ana (Luciana Grasso) certainly has not expected the night she gets when she takes over the night part of a double shift for her projectionist father. The cinema is nearly empty – one suspects “Frankenstein – Day of the Beast” isn’t quite the attraction – so it should be a quiet enough night, but a mysterious killer (Ricardo Islas, godfather of Uruguayan indie horror as well as the director of said “Day of the Beast”) is murdering his way through the audience that is there in increasingly gory ways. That’s what you get when you light your cinema in the reds and greens of Italian horror, I fear.

I’m often not terribly fond of films like Maximiliano Contenti’s Red Screening that mostly seem to exist to pay very heavy stylistic homages to other movies, but then, many films of this kind never manage to reach the aesthetic joys of the films they are looking up to. This one, on the other hand, would have been a major entry into the later, most gory parts of the giallo if it had been made thirty, thirty-five years ago. It not only presents increasingly insane and surreal gore gags with just the right gloopy and unreal quality to make them interesting as well as parts of the mood of the film, but even before the first drop of blood falls, Contenti uses all the best elements of the Argento-style giallo to build a dream-like mood of artificial rain, strange colours and a spot-on soundtrack, and uses a certain nostalgic view on the bad sides of the cinema going experience to great effect. It’s a bit like one of those French or Italian elegies on the cinema, just with an eye on better movies, and more eye mutilation. And yes, apart from the homage, the film does quite obviously have a thing or two to say about the act of seeing and watching in horror movies.

Of course, it’s not just Italian horror and US slashers and Bigas Luna the film is built on. The double homage to Islas is rather wonderful, not just including one of his films (that looks much better on the screen of the movie house than in the version I’ve seen) but also using him as the increasingly inhuman and bloodied killer (final girls can be rather brutal). Islas is great in the role, giving a physical performance that really makes the panic of his victims perfectly believable.

Contenti’s direction is often spectacular, doing the classic low budget filmmaker trick of turning the need to keep the number of locations and characters into a virtue, using a lack of resources to produce a tightness of space and time. Though, really, Red Screening doesn’t make the impression of lacking anything at all – the production design, the look, the whole aesthetics feel exactly as they should be and are meant to be.