Ramírez

karlovy Vary film fest EMPIRE MAGAZINE by Damon Wise From Spain comes Albert Arizza's Ramirez, a serial-killer thriller that looked quite ropey (it was a bad projection from a DVD, I think) but strangely held my attention. Ramirez himself is a drug dealer from Madrid who has a sideline in murder; one is a prostitute, another is a party girl trying to find a cab, another is a gay guy who picks him up in a bar... There's no logic, except that Ramirez does weird pop-art portraits of his victims, which he doesn't seem all that interested in either. On paper, it sounds like another naïve genre movie, but there are some excellent flourishes, particularly in the characters that Ramirez meets. It's also bold stylistically; Arizza plays games with sound and silence to very creepy effect. The final scene is one of the oddest and most disturbing I've seen for a while, even though I can't even begin to think why. It's all drawn from the same, dark Latin well that gave us Chile's Tony Manero, and it ultimately transcends its very low (50,000 euros) budget.