El Chupacabra

Humans are terrorized and mutilated by the title creature. Said prey consist of, among others, an animal control officer, an author, two idiot cops, three harmless gang members, a mad scientist and his henchman, as well as a homeless person.

The monster itself is obviously a guy hopping around in a monkey-man suit. At least there are no visible zippers.

EL CHUPACABRA contains plenty of blood, intestines, and other carnage. However, it lacks thrills, suspense, or an engaging story. Much can be forgiven due to the low-low budget. In spite of this, it does tend to drag on, and could cause the viewer to check the clock to see if it has stopped...

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.

This is a great example of what could have been a great film and a great idea but turned out to be really bad in the process. I was mainly tempted to get this because of the DVD cover, stupid me, but I did anyway and I was blown away, in a bad sense. This movie is essentially about El Chupacabra wreaking havoc around Los Angeles and it's up to a local animal cop and a writer to save the day, before two corrupt cops and two evil scientists bring them down. The main reason why I did not enjoy this film was because of big continuity errors that were hard to not notice. Along with some bad acting, okay lighting and nothing scary, this movie did not hit me as much as is it probably should have. However, compared to other Chupacabra movies, this one certainly tops the charts, just barely.

First off, the continuity in this movie is way off and I mean off the shoulders and into the ditch. There were so many points were the characters said or did something and then in the next shot, they aren't doing it or the change never occurred. Case in point: the main character has a gun, the Chupacabra attacks, he whips out a flair from nowhere and distracts and the gun in missing. The girl runs while he defends here with the mystery flair and she had no gun, then the main character is running with the girl and has the gun. Where did the flair come from and what happened to the gun. The time of day gets screwed up. One minute it is sun set and you can still see the sun and then the next minute it looks like midnight. There were some plot holes as in, why was the Chupacabra there, what were the scientists doing, what happened to this guy and why did he shoot the animal and it still lived? These things bugged the heck out of me and none of the questions were answered.

Next on the list is the acting. Boy was it wooden and bad. The main character Navarro, played by Eric Algeria, seems a bit too calm at points and too dedicated to finding out what killed a few dogs and when a tragedy hits, his emotion was just not there. Elina Madison, who played Starlina, did a fairly poor job. She was the author of a bestselling book about the Chupacabra and she just didn't seem into her role or her performance. Her acting was kind of laughable and a poor. Even for an author she knows too much about that thing, and knows how to disable a high security defense system in a hidden laboratory. Tony Criss was okay, but he seemed a bit to calm for some of the stuff that was going on. The movie reminds me of a bad reenactment to murder for some crime solving show, where the actors and actresses aren't really that committed to their work.

I rarely don't get this anal when it comes to lighting or editing, but for this movie, I could not help but be harsh on the lighting. It took me out of the movie a number of times because the lighting was so poorly directed. There were times when they were trying to be creative by adding color filters to the scene to make it more "comic bookish," but it backfired. The worse part is at night when it is pith black outside, but the scene is so oversaturated with light, it seems like its day. They keep switching from high intensity light to soft light for random scenes, and the lights seem so bright that the actors were squinting. It shouldn't be that bright that there are dark shadows at night. During the sunset when the lighting was perfect, that's the only time when the light was good, other than that it was terrible.

There were not scares in this film. There was only one time where I did jump but other than that, it wasn't scary. There were points were it probably could have been scary but it was so damn light out, you could see the Chupacabra approach the man, but if it was dark, it would have been better. Even the creature design for the Chupacabra was poor, it looked good but it was a short man or kid in a jump suit. They didn't hide his face; they showed him with no sense of mystery or any enigmatic appearance. There was a fair amount of gore, but it seemed unreal. This movie just wasn't scary, that's all.

Overall, they did Americanize a great South American legend into a blood-thirsty human eater, which the Chupacabra isn't. In fact, it was scared of people and it only killed goats, sheep, dogs and deer because it was said that it hated the smell of humans. But, then were would the story be? I did not enjoy this film for any reason, but I will give them credit for trying to make a good film with good intentions. I would not recommend this film to any horror fan, but if you like indie or B-movies, you should check this out. Also, if you are easily tempted by cult-classics, you'd enjoy this film. I didn't, I won't see it again, but in some deep sedated way, I enjoy these kinds of movie just to see what the other side of Hollywood is making.

According to this masterpiece of film-making's script (pun intended), Charles Darwin was full of nonsense when he presented his evolution theory, because he made absolutely no mention of any alien intervention. For you see, aliens sent Chupacabras to the earth and they form the missing link in the evolution theory. However, the rest of the film clearly seems to emphasize that Chupacabras are a typically Puerto Rican phenomenon, so I don't really know where that fits in. Are they saying all Puerto Ricans are aliens? Whatever, it's all pretty irrelevant anyway. The only thing you need to memorize is that "El Chupacabre" is an utterly cheap and imbecilic amateur B-movie, lacking tension, character development and any form of style. Several duos of people are chasing this goat-munching monster (remotely resembling the midget version of the Pumpkinhead demon) through the streets and ghettos of an ugly city. We have an untalented dogcatcher and a nagging female novelist, a pair of obnoxious cops and the supposedly evil scientist with his dim-witted accomplice. Since they all are extremely incompetent in what they do, the monster can carelessly carry on devouring all the Latino immigrants of the neighborhood. The monster itself looks okay and the make-up effects on his victims' leftovers are acceptably gross and bloody. The acting performances are irredeemably awful and headache inducing. Particularly Eric Alegria is pitiable in his first and only lead role as the overly ambitious employee of Animal Control. Yes, it's an incredibly stupid film, but surely you have struggled yourself through worse and less amusing low-budget garbage.