Barbarous Mexico

It is not scary, nor funny, is just dull and simply stupid, basically all the segments seem amateurish at best, seriously, i have seen better works from film students than most of the shorts in this piece of garbage.

Two stars out of ten, and that is just because of the good gore in one of the segments.

As a Mexican I apologize to the international horror community for this embarrassment .

Please, do yourself a favor and skip this one.

The quality of most of these shorts is actually pretty good in terms of camera-work and cinematography. The quality of the acting ios decent too, mostly. There's really nothing to earn a low rating on those grounds. If these are representative of current Mexican cinema, they're actually pretty good exemplars to praise.

Now...the stories and approaches to horror...well, that's another issue. A couple of them weren't bad, primarily the 2nd one, set in a haunted hacienda. But somewhere along the line, Mexican horror filmmaking seems to have equated horror with disgusting and off-putting. And that's a huge problem. When you leave your audience more queasy than scared, you've failed at horror. There;s a reason the genre is called 'horror movies' rather than 'disgusting movies'. Your core audience might be somewhat jaded to gore, but that's not really the reason why (most of them) watch.

Just on filmmaking grounds alone, there's a lot of promise for Mexican cinema on display here. If these filmmakers manage to substitute real horror for excessive viscera, I'd certainly love to watch what they put out.

(Also, several of them drag out shots and scenes for far too long. But that's an easily correctable issue.)

The first one - Awful. The second one has good boobs, good atmosphere n a bit western feel. The third one is beyond redemption. The 4th one is gross n not at all funny. The 5th one is again offensive like the previous one. The 6th one is unnecessarily shot in bnw. Camera lingers on ruined toys for a long time. There is some creepy music n then the big wtf end. The 7th one is a revenge story but done very badly with a bit of gore. The last one is silly but very gory. Its about strippers but there ain't no nudity but lots of gore. A man's nose get bitten off, another one's eyeball gets pierced, another one's eardrum gets pierced, face gets bludgeoned, face gets smashed, hand gets chopped, neck gets stabbed, neck gets sliced by a barbwire. Shockingly the end credits goes on for 16 mins.

Here are seven horror shorts that lack horror, premise, dialogue, even sound at times. The whole collection is completely uninspired, the stories are poorly developed and executed.

While photography may rescue part of some of these shorts, some just come short of everything, just like high school projects. Harsh? Maybe. True? Completely. Take for instance "La Cosa Más Preciada (The Most Precious Thing), the acting is bad, the dialogues are hands down some of the worst I've ever heard in cinema history, the whole thing was given an instagram-like "vintage" filter. This one in particular is preposterous.

The rest of the shorts, whilst more professional, are still pretty bad and absurd, there is no heart to be found. If the project was done by amateur kids, then fine, I'd give it 4 stars, but these are - self?- deemed- directors.

Also, the only Mexican thing on this are the assets (directors, actors, writers, producers, settings), there are no real legends or myths in here, just perhaps loosely 'inspired from'.

My conclusion is that a couple of Mexican rejects from 'ABC's of Death' decided to take matters in their own hands... disaster ensued of course.

I must say I was very excited to watch this since I first heard of the project back in early 2014. I was looking forward to what 'indie' Mexican directors had up their sleeve since we practically have no recognized mainstream horror directors, but no, I cannot vouch for any of them.

No pun intended - this is a collection of short movies. And one that is ... well fantastical. Much of this is not really on the realistic side of things. Still it has themes that some people may feel a connection too. Or even some cliches (drugs and prostitution to name but two). As you can tell already, you can not be squeamish or sensitive. Well you can of course, but you can't be that and watch this and hope for the best or whatever.

The quality of the shorts is all over the place, as is the quality of the picture. Though technically speaking (also no pun intended) it is meant to look certain ways ... for certain short movies. Or segments, since this is one after the other ... with no apparent connection ... but that should not matter ... not seen the "sequel" yet, but I assume they had a bit more money ... will watch when I find it on a streaming service ... sooner or later ... the cover/poster is amazing too.