Also saw the new horror film The Curse of La Llorona. This is a film about a Mexican myth – the Crying Woman – and is partially being targeted at the Hispanic community who are a not-insignificant box office audience for scary movies. There’s a question then as to why they hired a non-Hispanic actress (Linda Cardellini who does fine work here) to star in a movie that’s focused completely on Hispanic folklore. I have that misgiving too but I’ll try to focus on the basic issues of the movie… like why it’s such a generic, unsurprising, repetitious, redudant spook show that hardly leans on any of the actual folklore.
So, yeah, La Llorona is the vengeful crying ghost of a 16th century Mexican woman who drowned her children after finding out that her husband was cheating on her. Now she is used as a kind of boogie-woman: Children should behave or La Llorona will come steal them away. This film stars Linda Cardellini as an agent for Child Protective Services who investigates a Mexican-American family only to find the kids locked in a closet. She frees them, not realizing they were being protected from La Llorona… and now the spook is after her kids too.
So, yeah, this movie is pretty bad but it does, to be fair, offer a few good sequences and an effective jump scare or two. It’s clear the first-time film maker has some talent and can put together a reasonably atmospheric environment. But the script is just dumb, the film ultimately dull and full of repetitious and unoriginal scare attempts, and it does nothing with its Mexican folklore. They could have told a story of this mythological creature in, you know, Mexico. But setting it in LA (and saving on location shooting), they still had the opportunity to play into Mexican American themes and storylines. But, no, all they really wanted to do was introduce what ultimately is a generic ghost who knows how to cut the power and blow out the candles among a host of random, inconsistent abilities.
And there’s a sudden, random surprise in the film too.. this is part of the The Conjuring cinematic universe, something the marketing never once mentioned (for some mysterious reason). It’s a tenuous, limited connection based on a “Hey it’s that guy” character actor who played a very similar Catholic priest in the movie Annabelle. But, as it turns out, he’s the same character and there’s a quick, blink-and-you’ll-miss it flashback to the Annabelle doll. For what it’s worth.
Ultimately, this is a slog of a horror film lit by brief moments of cinematic talent and some good acting. The good does not outweigh the repetitious, redundant, and wholly unoriginal storytelling and script though. You’ve see this movie before if you’ve seen any of a dozen horror flicks in the past ten or twenty years. It does nothing unique, it offers stupid character doing stupid things, and it squanders its potentially interesting use of a unique piece of folklore.
Score: 64