Arriving in Mexico to score drugs, two teens are told several stories about the locals in their small border town.
The Good Stor(ies)-Maria: After arriving back home from school, a man finds the new Mexican housekeeper running the house while his parents are away. After his friends arrive, a night of drinking results in her accidental death, though it soon becomes apparent that her grandmother, a vengeful witch, has cursed the carefree college students who caused it. This story works only because it's set-up as the classic jerks that cause the accidental death while the lone sympathizer among the group is punished as well as the guilty party. This is undone in a simple five minute revenge sequence that has no build-up, no gradual revelation of the curse working on the friends, it just comes in and soon turns into the next segment. The curses are enormously chilling and creepy, but the fact that it has to stay light in humor not only means it doesn't get a chance to become more fully developed but comes off as a mere afterthought.
The Bad Stor(ies)-Uncle Tio's Taco Truck: As a series of child disappearances start to hit close to home, a group of friends take solace in a friendly neighbor's booming taco truck service. When one of them gets involved in the disappearances, it dawns on the remaining friends that the local kids may be the cause for the chef's incredibly popular confections. The second is decent enough with a pretty lame mystery surrounding the truck worker but is mishandled with an immediately-recognizable set-up that really swerves no one, is spotted a mile away despite the best efforts to make this plot-point a surprising, suspenseful issue and gets by only with a fine stalking sequence at the end to save it as they engage in a fairly lengthy sequence throughout the house and out into the garage bordering the establishment, providing a few decent if weak gore scenes in the process but is still undone by the rather clichéd approach that runs throughout this.
El Munstro: Following along their daily routine, a group of border-hopper tormentors find a new batch of immigrants sneaking into the US and take them back to their ranch house. Settling in on their torture tactics, they realize too late the error of kidnapping this special group when they begin to fight back against their oppressors. Quite simply, this is quite a lame and rather weak effort with a lot wrong here and very few positive qualities. The segment is utterly atrocious and really doesn't have any value at all, being more of a ploy against illegal border-hopping than anything. It's more of a gang-land style retribution angle than anything to do with horror and really has very little of interest about it. The payback works because they take over for being illegally rounded-up, but it's still not good enough to save this wretched mess of an effort.
Rated R: Graphic Violence, Graphic Language, drug use and children-in-peril.
