vivachile

I caught up with this movie in the late eighties when I rented it on a local video store. It was a bad recorded VHS tape transfered directly from a bad 35mm copy. The main reason I rented it is because Carol André, the beautiful actress from the SANDOKAN TV series was on the cast. The movie is incredibly awful, beyond the worst I have seen so far. Bad actors, terrible acting, horrible script, unintelligible plot and some sequences that really made me feel guilty for having rented it. Unforgettable is the character Polo, one of the most naff villains to appear ever on an action movie. Also the scenes with the silly and clumsy main character jumping in and out of windows really made me laugh out loud. No doubt I expect the day to watch it again to laugh again at it. But this time I expect not to pay a single cent.

This movie was the big hype of 2004 in Chile. The director visited almost every mass media he could to promote the film, even 3 months before its release on theaters. With this, the film had an amazing start at box offices, everybody went saying it was a big success. But let the truth be said now. The movie is awful. Director Nicolas Lopez portrays himself as the main character, a complete nerdy loser who is the object of rejection of everybody at school, the daddy boy of the class beats him, the new Spanish beauty almost ignores him. Everything goes bad for him. Director Lopez tried to imitate the style popularized by Spanish director Alex De la Iglesia, but tried to transplant it to Chilean idiosyncrasy. The result could have been much better if he had had a good script. Some superb Chilean actors as Fernando Farias, Ernesto Belloni and Kathy Kowaleczko are absolutely wasted here, given them such minimum characters which weren't properly developed. The result is a complete mess which is not funny nor entertaining. After this movie, seems very difficult for Lopez to get some new high budget to make a mainstream movie (this one cost more than a million dollar), so it seems he will be condemned to return to his infra cult circuit where he was born and probably will remain there for the rest of his movie director life.