El Chupacabra

Well, what can I say besides "utter s**t." This is, literally, a pain-inducing movie!! How ANYONE can stand to sit through this tragically long (by being more than five seconds long) trainwreck of plot-holes, confusing characters-that-come-out-of-nowhere-and-are-NEVER-explained, to the ass-tastic camera work is well beyond me!

Goddamn, I hate this movie! My friend and I rented it because we wanted to rent a cheesy horror movie to watch late at night and be slightly scared (but most likely just end up making fun of it, via MST3K)*. Guess which one ended up happening! That's right- the latter of the two (good job! You get a gold star!). But we really didn't need to make fun of El Chupacabra because it is SO freaking horrible, that we ended up laughing simply from watching the movie (and believe me, we did NOT laugh at the so-called "humorous" moments in the movie). We laughed at how appallingly sad and deplorable El Chupacabra is.

Well, if you want to torture someone, tie them up to a chair and force them to watch the movie that cockroaches, lice and diseases avoid - El Chupacabra.

*If this sounds familiar, it's probably because you've (unfortunately) read my review of Alien 51. Sadly, both movies were made by the same two "directors" (that's right, TWO DIRECTORS! I guess they had to get two dumbasses to come up with enough bull***t to fill El Chupacabra and Alien 51).And please avoid both movies at ALL COSTS!!!!

Every so often, a movie comes along. This is one of them.

Really, what can you say about bargain-basement junk like this? El Chupacabra (or simply "Chupacabra" - the movie box, trailer, and movie itself can't seem to decide which title to use) is a really good example of what happens when you give some guys a camera and $20 and tell them to make a movie by the end of the week. It's full of no-name, no-talent people, plus a guest-villain appearance by some guy from Naughty by Nature (personally, I'd stick to music, because his acting isn't good). The whole thing has an amateurish feel. The "star" has trouble remembering his lines, let alone delivering them with any kind of feeling. Monster attacks are confused, filmed in extreme close-up and rapid cuts that defy any sense of what is happening - and, flagrantly flaunting convention, the monster is about twice as slow and three times as awkward when it attacks from a point-of-view shot. The dialog ranges from clunky to laughable, and can be unintentionally hilarious in places (in this respect, it rivals the great works of Ed Wood, Jr. and Coleman Francis).

Some time was put into the monster design, though it doesn't match the description given by the film's "expert," and it looks as if it may have been an off-the-shelf Halloween costume that the prop guys modified. Even assuming it was entirely original, it's less inspired than adequate, and given the astonishingly low quality of the rest of the film and props, it's likely that most people will be underwhelmed.

I've no doubt that El Chupacabra will make money. But it's only because they only need to sell about 5 copies to cover their costs. Even for a low-budget direct-to-video flick, this one is bare-bones. And in movies, as in just about everything else, you tend to get what you pay for. A few hundred dollars and a script rewrite (or, for that matter, an actual script) would have done wonders. It still would have sucked, but only as much as all the other low-budget direct-to-video flicks suck. As it is, it's in a class by itself.

Hail to the chupacabra, baby.

Boyle Heights, Los Angeles: legendary South American goat-sucking vampire, El Chupacabra, is on the loose, feeding on anyone unlucky enough to cross its path. Animal control officer Navarro (Eric Alegria) and Chupacabra expert/author Starlina Divide (Elina Madison) attempt to track down the creature, but find their progress hampered by a pair of dumb cops, money hungry locals keen to capture the beast for a fat reward, and a couple of nefarious scientists who want the monster for their experiments.

Stinking higher than a two-week-old taco, El Chupacabra is an incredibly bad horror movie that even fans of incredibly bad horror movies might struggle to sit through. With its dreadful script, awful direction (by not one, but two talentless hacks—Brennon Jones and Paul Wynne), laughable dialogue, and some of the worst acting this side of a porn flick, I recommend this film about as much as I do drinking the tap water in Mexico.

As Navarro and Starlina proceed with their investigations, viewers are treated to some incredibly weak gore, the worst designed book jacket in history, the most unconvincing dead person I've seen since the blinking corpse in Dr. Butcher MD, and a high-tech computerised security system consisting of a keyboard nailed to a post.

To be fair, for a guy in a rubber suit, the monster itself is fairly creepy (hairy, with big claws, and a face like a particularly ugly bat), but its appearances are few and far between, with more screen time spent on the tedious trials and tribulations of whiney Officer Navarro than on the killer antics of the titular creature (just how many times is it necessary to see Navarro handing in paperwork to his bitchy boss?).

If, like me, you make the mistake of wasting your hard-earned cash on this dreadful latino bilge (in my case, it was a whole 50p), consider using the disc as a coaster for your tequila rather than actually watching it.

My God, is this movie bad! When will the super-talented folks at York Entertainment realize that sooner or later viewers will get wise to their product and not be fooled by their better than average DVD box covers? Sure the "film" was shot in 35mm but the cinematography is average at best and the "acting" -- well, it's another non-Screen Actors Guild horrorama in the casting department. Too many of these ultra-low budget horror films are made today with non-SAG actors because the cheapo production companies don't want to pay actor residuals and the result is 70 minutes of unwatchable filler.

The screenplay seems to have been written by blind-folded, trained chimps and the resulting pages put together at random. On the only plus side, the "Chupacabra" monster suit is decent and I'm sure the makeup effects guy did the best he could do with the tiny budget he probably had. I dare you to watch this (or ANY of York's recent releases) without fast- forwarding through it.

I rented this movie in hope of an at least semi interesting creature feature. What it turned out to be was a badly done joke. This movie really stank, the acting was terrible with the main actor putting obvious breaks in between all his lines because he obviously can't remember his lines. The lighting and film making

are horrible and above all the script is possibly the worst one I have ever heard. The monster though scary looking were hardly worth the watching. There were

a lot of things that could have been built on but never were. Over all this is a major zero movie and not even worth the time I spent watching it. Thankfully I didn't pay to see it!