efren_111

Recently I got a bunch of episodes of Hora Marcada on DVDrs. Hopefully one day Televisa will smarten up and release the whole thing or at least a "best of" as it was a great show.... Anyway, there were some great episodes on my discs(and some terrible too, ha) but this one really caught my attention and I was surprised when reading the credits that this was one of the ones made by Cuaron. The story is very weird and like it happened often on the show it never gets explained(which was part of the shows charm).

It starts with two young brothers breaking in to a closed theme park, in there they find three teenagers playing hopscotch, the leader named Eddy(played by show's regular Eduardo Palomo)and dressed in a funny way that looks both child and derelict like approaches them and seems very interested by them, he starts telling them children stories when all of the sudden pulls out a switchblade and starts chasing them, he gets to kill one of the kids and when he catches on the second one he gets shot dead by the police. Twenty years pass and the surviving kid is a grown man now and has a little girl. All of the sudden the other two cronies start showing up and telling him Eddy is back from the dead and wants to see him, eventually Eddy does show up and starts befriending his little girl so now he has to get rid of him if he wants to save his daughter...

The aesthetics and music for this episode were great, there is this scene with the victim and the two henchmen in a car which looks amazing as do all the scenes that took place in the theme park which more than once intercalated the violent chases with funky music that makes the whole thing weird and surreal as if you were seeing it throughout the eyes of Eddy who is just having fun.

Eddy's character is hinted to be a pedophile, if not at least a child only killer with all the same getting close through knowing the things they like methods which is quite edgy for 80's Mexican TV and Palomo Plays it brilliantly, he seems so charming and friendly when approaching the children yet keeps a dark undertone wile doing so.

It does have some low points, probably the worst thing was the actor playing the surviving kid(as an adult), the guy reacts to the friends of his brother killer showing up, his brother's already dead killer playing with his daughter and the dead corpse of his daughter's nanny like if it was the most regular thing ever and barley emotes anything.

The thing really made me wish Cuaron would give a full length horror flick a try.

This film is great, its not particularly deep and reflective it is simply what it needs to be, a pure really good commercial horror film.

I wont deny it borrows a lot of the aesthetics from J Horror however I don't see the big deal as so does every recent ghost/supernatural flick from the rest of Asia and the US. It worked for it so why should I complain about them not coming up with a whole new never before seen look when I never ask that from international films.

I went to see it in the theater in the middle of the afternoon and the place was packed(which really hindered my enjoyment but thats beyond the point), more so than any other Mexican flick I've ever seen on the theater, it was mostly teenagers of the like you would likely see on American horror films but rarely on a Mexican film and they really were enjoying it. There were screaming like crazy and more than one girl left the theater scared before the thing was finished. I've read more than one bad review by the all knowing "profetional Critics" but at the end of the day I'm sure the guys from Lemon Films will laugh at them all the way to the bank to cash their big checks, this movie will be a huge commercial success and hopefully fuel the making of horror films in Mexico.

Im looking forward for Castañeda's next flicks, hopefully after that Blackout one he will get to do more Mexican films and wont be relegated to do all his work outside like it has Happened to Guillermo DelToro.

One of the best TV shows to be done in Mexico, especially during the 80's. I remember watching it as a kid and being truly frightened by most episodes. It really deserves a DVD release if not as a whole(it did lasted for a long time after all) as a 'best of', certainly a lot more than the crap soaps Televisa is putting out on DVD now a days. I did had a chance recently to check it out again as I acquired a few DVDrs of original recordings(around 30 episodes) and its pretty much as I remembered it, some were truly frightening and well done, some where deliberately campy and humorous, some not so deliberate yet it was just fun to see how they fumbled the ball with them... However they all shared one thing(besides La Dama De Negro who appears on each episode) which was freedom to experiment, it just seems weird that the company who's soap operas are all carbon copy's from each other would allow this amount of freedom to the authors of each story, it really didn't followed a guideline of what they could do, some stories are downright surrealist, others are child minded, others are just slasher like violent... Just a series of great mini movies(each ep runs at 20 min).

I Got this film in one of those cheap 4 movie double disc paks wich i bought mainly for Return of the living dead 3, Unlike the american cover art which seems deceived a lot of people to think this was a werewolf horror flick this had a naked woman looking at her wolf like reflection on a lake and since one of the other movies was the terribly bad Wolfhound(wich instead of having werewolves or even wolves in as the cover deciveingly portraits, it has some crapy dogs and a california playmate pretending to be native irish) i was expecting your average skin flick with some bad werewolf story line, man was i wrong.

Wolf Girl is neither a horror film nor a skin flick, it is a really good drama about the pain of being diferent. The characters are well written with none of them becoming too clishe, it shows how the cruel kids have dark shameful secrets of their own, and it shows the ring master as a real father figure, one that often makes mistakes and acts towards needs and not his childs feelings but truly loves his family. The various segments of the show are quite entertaining and the music is really good. My only real problem is i can't figure out if its ment to be in the present or if they just had some errors, because of the nature of the story and the prduction design it often feels as if its ment to be set around the late sixties early seventies (they even have the good bad and ugly on the marquee on the streets background) but the cosmetics lab looks to modern and then you have shots of the wolf girl walking trougth the street were you can clearly see 90's cars that could have easily been edited out witougth ruining the flow of the scene, I find that really annoying. Overall i liked this film a lot, it just seems to be really bad marketed.