The Wind of Fear

I've just recently saw a preview of this film in the distributor's little theater. It's a peculiar film; not bad, very atypical for the Mexican industry, with serious flaws but also great moments and incredible acting.

Although is a remake of a cult classical Mexican film, the story takes quite a detour from the original. It intrigued me because it tries desperately to be very commercial and very artistic at the same time.

The premise is basic horror stuff -a suicide anorexic girl is confined in a psychiatric center haunted by a ghost-, and curiously enough, in a few minutes I was completely immersed not in the supernatural side of the story, but in the profoundly human interaction that the plot manages to establish between the characters.

Some aspects of the movie are kind of cheap (al least in front of the budgetary standards established by the pyrotechnical Mexican horror film "Km 31"), but the cast is so great that you forget the economical restraints of the piece.

Mexican actress and -believe me- next Hollywood star Martha Higareda, looks and acts very different from her previous roles (she was always the good looking girl next door), while Danny Perea -the girl from Duck Season-, makes quite an impression as the disturbed and beautiful Josefina, a character that is begging to have her own movie.

I don't have a clue of what are going to think the fans of the original movie, but I can say this: be prepared for a big surprise. You can like it or not, but the movie doesn't leave you indifferent. You really care for this characters... And, by the way, the music of the movie is really beautiful.

If you think this will be anything like the original, please don't waste your time or money, this is a bomb of the worst kind. Moronic writing, bad acting, a bad movie in all respects. The first 40 minutes, if you haven't fallen asleep yet, you'll beg for something, ANYTHING, interesting to happen. The rest is even worse.

A good movie if you are trying to go to sleep.

The character have no interesting qualities whatsoever, in every horror movie, character need something to make you at least care for them, in this movie you beg for the ghost to appear and kill this bunch of rotten girls nobody cares about.

Even the "wind" a real and scary character in the original version is almost completely missing in this "remake".

Nothing in this movie holds up to the original, but the worst thing is the writing, no character behaves consistently.

Time passes and this movie is revealing a lot of good stuff. The acting is very strong and Danny Perea, specially, creates a beautiful and tormented character. It's very different than the original in terms of emotion and ambition and, of course, it's not perfect but nonetheless is a strong piece of cinema. Carlos Enrique Taboada's intentions of creating a love triangle in the story are finally realized; this shocked many people when the movie was released, but it was the original intention of Taboada. It seems that the movie was made with very little resources, but the director takes advantage of that and creates a very special dark and romantic mood. It has very little in common with Mexican contemporary cinema. Don't miss it.

Having not seen the 1968 original, I will not comment on the remake in comparison. I will look at it on it's own.

Martha Higareda (Smokin' Aces 2: Assassins' Ball) and Verónica Langer ("The Crime of Padre Amaro") head this primarily female cast, with a great performance by Elizabeth Valdez.

The film was not really very suspenseful, and there was no horror. It was a basic ghost inhabiting a body to get revenge against the one who killed her.

Outside of a few short nude scenes, there is really nothing to recommend this film.

A girl (Martha Higareda) tries to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge. When the attempt is thwarted, she is committed to strange mental institution for very sexy and suspiciously mature-looking Mexican girls. She and her equally troubled fellow inmates are attended to by a creepy female psychiatrist. Strange supernatural things begin to occur, largely connected to an eerie abandoned tower on the hospital grounds. Eventually the protagonist is possessed by a vengeful spirit. . .

This is a largely unnecessary remake of an earlier 1967 Mexican film with the same title ("Even the Wind Is Afraid"), but it's a pretty different film other than both have the same eerie looking tower and a girl-on-girl striptease scene (although naturally the scene here goes a lot farther). I understand why some of the anglo-phone Mexicans are contemptuous of this film, but very few people outside of Latin America have ever seen the original since (to my knowledge) it has never been released with English subtitles. And this is such a different film, it really deserves to be judged on its own merits (or lack thereof).

Martha Higareda is most famous for playing another boarding-school girl in the 2006 Mexican film "Ninas Mal" where she showed off her breasts a lot. She shows off pretty much everything here, but aside from that, they're very different movies--that is a raunchy comedy and this is pretty much a straight horror film. Of course, female nudity doesn't necessarily make for a good film, but it's also an odd thing to complain about. I did find it a little strange that these "teenage mental patients" all look at least twenty, but are wearing school uniforms for some reason (hmmm, sexy 20-year-old girls in and out school uniforms--I think I'm starting to understand now). As a HORROR film, this is pretty weak, and not really a spot on the original, but it is mildly entertaining at least, and there is nothing in it that really justifies some of the hate. . .