Dir - Raúl Araiza
Overall: MEH
A feature-length continuation of writer/director Raúl Araiza's supernatural soap opera El maleficio, El maleficio 2: Los enviados del infierno, (The Hex 2: Messengers of Hell), takes its cue from Dan Curtis' The House of Dark Shadows, which retooled plot points from its daytime program for the movie version.T he story here focuses on one of the series' main bad guys, Ernesto Alonso who portrays a practitioner of the black arts that is on a quest to find his Bael-worshiping successor. Unfortunately for him, the young chosen one is a teenager that is in love with his own sister and because Alonso also has the hots for said woman, things do not go according to plan. Arbitrary telekinetic powers, The Omen-styled "accidental" death sequences, a continuously ominous musical score, and two different paintings that seem to omit unholy power, there are a number of fun genre elements thrown into the mix. As far as Araiza's presentation though, the word "fun" is not as fitting as one would hope since it plays its cards too seriously to lean into any of its inherent silliness or exploitative value. Humorless and dour, it gets points for sticking to its macabre tone, but it also feels its length and only delivers in fits and starts.
(1988)
Dir - Damián Acosta Esparza
Overall: WOOF
Arguably the sleaziest film to ever come out of Mexico, The Infernal Rapist, (El violador infernal), lives up to its apt title. This is the type of gutter trash that one can skip over large portions of, (if not the entire movie), while also ignoring subtitles since it follows a rinse and repeat framework for eighty-three minutes that consists of nothing more than some guy chatting up his victims, giving them drugs, raping them, and then killing them. Said hopeless romantic is played by Noé Murayama, who has all of the charisma of your creepy uncle that should be kept away from children. His title character is a convicted murderer that is left alone in his electric chair immediately after getting fried, only for three fabulously dressed female demons to show up and grant him immortality, drugs, and pleasure so long as he continuously rapes, murders, and carves "666" into the flesh of his conquests. He definitely does this and the entire ordeal is sporadically broken up with hot-headed police officers who rough up "fags" and make the usual complaints that the media is laughing at them and blah, blah, blah. How a dead man waltzed out of jail and roams around freely on a murder spree for so long is left hilariously unexplained, but anyone coming to this expecting narrative coherence is watching the wrong movie. It is cheap, boring, painfully moronic, and pathetically offensive, but for those who are in the mood for garbage, you cannot do worse than this.
(1989)
Dir - Pedro Galindo III
Overall: WOOF
Slasher movies suck for a number of reasons and one of the primary ones is that it is impossible to give a shit about characters who are A) all idiots and B) exist in a universe that runs on arbitrary logic. Pedro Galindo III's Hell's Trap, (Trampa Infernal), pits its cast of morons against a Vietnam vet who went loco in the woods; woods that everyone ventures into on a dare as to which group of friends/enemies can kill a bear first. The flimsy jumping-off point is made worse by a drawn-out sense of pacing that will lose most viewers long before the first kill happens at about thirty minutes in. Once these dumb-dumbs realize that they are being picked off, instead of fleeing their isolated location in their properly working automobiles, they insist on staying put because the killer has traps everywhere, (traps that in no way hindered their arrival on road), thus we settle into a mind-numbingly boring and unimaginative "picking everyone off one-by-one" framework. On paper, mixing First Blood with your typical masked slasher piece of garbage might sound like a fun bit of stupid to indulge in, but all of the existing problems render this a forgettable and insulting waste of time. So in other words, it is just another 80s slasher movie.
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