The Curse of El Charro

Watching this movie is like watching a car crash in reverse. It begins as a blurred, direction-less, and confused mass of visions and concludes with the climax and falling action occurring in a ten minute span. It's an hour and fifteen minutes of sex and drugs, until the director remembers that it's a horror movie and kills almost everyone in a ten minute span. To give a basic plot summary, a group of young women driving through the desert are stalked by a killer "ghost," who is really just a really tall guy in a poncho. The most frustrating thing about this movie is that you don't care for the characters, in any way at all. They aren't likable enough to make you want them to pull through, but aren't annoying enough to pray for a painful death. All except one particularly foul-mouthed girl, who is thankfully given minimal screen time and an extra bloody death, but I digress. Three of our four heroines seem to have double parked outside the studio, as they indulge in sex, drugs, and advanced stupidity as if they want to die as quickly as possible. Our fourth leading lady is plagued by constant violent visions and confusing flashbacks, including a memorable(for all the wrong reasons) flashback which takes the style of a Charlie Chaplin film, but without any humor or quality. Our evil ghost, channeling the spirit of Michael Myers, walks around in pure silence, the only problem being he is TOO slow and it takes an hour for him to get any serious killing in. Since our villain is traveling with all the speed of molasses in January, the director fills in time with enough bong hits to make Cheech and Chong envious. By the time El Charro actually begins his work, it's a good bet that you'll either be asleep or, in my case, toughing it out because you don't like leaving things unfinished. Either way, you won't see much.

I have watched some of the worsts wastes of film in my time but this is by far the very worst. Too bad the director and producer weren't among the victims so that we could have been spared this travesty to film making. The movie made absolutely no sense. The sound director didn't appear to know what they were doing. This movie was definitely done on the cheap since the lighting and the sound both were sub-standard, considering that the actors and actresses were all unknowns there should have been more than ample money to hire people to properly do the sound and lighting. The next time that the investors decide to invest in a movie I hope they remember how pitiful this one was and decide against it.

Maria, still plagued by recurring nightmares of her sister's suicide, is talked into a mini- vacation in order to alleviate her stress a bit only to be stalked by a murderer in the Arizona deserts in this infuriating horror B-movie.

Two of the main character's are under-acting blank slates, the other two are ultra-annoying awful bitches. I didn't care.if El Charro killed all of them so the movie would just be over and thus put an end to my misery.

Eye candy: Tabitha Stevens and KellyDawn Malloy provide the T&A ; Victoria Vangas gets topless (alas her character's dead)

My Grade: D-

In California, Maria (Andrew Mia) has awful nightmares with and visions of her sister that committed suicide one year ago. Her roommate Chris (Heidi Androl) invites Maria to travel with her and her friends Tanya (Kathryn Taylor) and Rose (KellyDawn Malloy) on vacation to her uncle's house in Saguaro, Arizona, to relax. When the group arrives in the house, they immediately go to a night-club to have fun and chase some local guys for sex; however, the evil El Charro (Andrew Bryniarski) is seeking Maria killing her friends with his machete.

The slasher "The Curse of El Charro" is a gore mess. The characters in general are unpleasant and I do not understand how the four girls could take a road trip together: Maria is a deranged woman; Tanya is an amoral slut; Rose is a lesbian drug dealer; only Chris seems to be an average person. The screenplay is awful, and in the beginning, Maria is confessing her nightmares to a priest that seems to know something about her fate. Then, a group of young women from California that seems to be in a permanent heat goes to a desert place in the middle of nowhere to drink booze, use drugs and have sex with hillbilly strangers, in a totally weird and unusual situation. The creepy El Charro kills every character with his machete without any further explanation. The conclusion seems to indicate that the insane Maria actually killed her friends, but it not clear. My vote is three.

Title (Brazil): "A Maldição de el Charro" ("The Curse of El Charro")

When I saw El Charro, the first thought that popped on my mind was that this movie should be named "The Curse of What Could Have Been". That is, if the scenario actually made sense. The movie begins with Maria, a rather annoying girl mourning the suicide of her sister (and by the way, we never do find out what made Lucia kill herself), going on a small vacation with four "friends". Incidentally, the friends are four archetypes, such as the good old American Beauty (the only one who cares about Maria, apparently), a hip hop star wannabe and a goth pinup would be. Curiously enough, the last two get along fairly well and seem to enjoy the same kind of music. How that is possible, one can only wonder. How do you we get to the juicy parts? After a lot of patience. The script is unbelievably slow and 3/4 of the movie seem to serve as filler. This was especially noticeable in the bar scene. The girls, after having a brush with the law (avoided because the driver takes the mutter into her own mouth, er, hands), decide to stop in a bar and drink before continuing their ride. Sounds only natural, correct? That is exactly what we would do if we were on a trip between states, escorted by police in a bar. The bar, operated by a fundamentalist American with bad taste in music, seems to be patronized by a weird mix of hillbillies and psychos. When the girls want to leave (understandably so), the police officer makes them sit down because they will "miss the show". The movie then proceeds to show us a goth guy in a suit screeching in an old microphone lyrics that apparently should tune us in the movie, because they are relevant to the heroine's situation. ...Ok guys, you've stumped me. The patrons, BY DEFINITION, should rise as one and get that idiot of the stage, for one. He is completely irrelevant to the movie. He is filler. The whole scene is filler, as every clue that is revealed is just not important enough to justify this travesty. Even though it is true that the actresses don't act in this to save their lives, the truth is that they are given almost no space to even try. The characters are flat and two-dimensional, trapped in their own delusional worlds. No growing for the heroine during the length of the movie. She doesn't, say, come to terms with her sister's suicide. She doesn't even save herself. An angel with fake wings and a tattoo does it for her. This is a shame, because this movie does have a couple of nice scenes (when the crew doesn't go wild with the camera, that is). An old time movie sequence in the middle of the movie gives the story away in a much more interesting way that the heroine would ever be able to. The music at the approaching of El Charro is rather good. El Charro himself, although dumber than Jason the Hockey Mask Boy, has a couple of nice scenes and a certain presence. It's not his fault he's not given enough space to actually DO something beyond slash like there's no tomorrow. and why slash, anyway? Why not just a gun? What is the justification behind this? There is none. The script in this is just terrible, plain and simple. The actors are uninspired. When closing in, El Charro looks like a black metal fan with bad, bad corpse painting on (Immortal would kick his ass). The pace is slow, the sex scenes not really that interesting (and that WAS a shame), and the deaths find the viewers completely supporting of the ghost. I would have done it too, El Charro. It's OK.