| Angel Negro, directed and written
by Chilean Jorge Olguin (Sangre Enterna
aka Eternal Blood), is a combination of slasher
film, and Blair Witch Project styled
faux cinema verite. This being Olguin's first
movie, there is none of the smart-assed self referential
rubbish that we, the horror fan have been forced
to accept since the Scream films.
This is fairly straight and not told with any sense
of irony or satire.
The story goes that in 1990, after a night at
their prom, tragedy struck a group of friends
and one of them, Angel Cruz (Blanca Lewin) ended
up dead. Gabriel Echeverria (Alvaro Morales) and
his friends went their separate ways, never to
speak of the incident again. Ten years later,
Gabriel, now a forensic pathologist, finds himself
standing in front of the corpse of one of the
group, who has been murdered. Over the next few
days, he encounters another murdered member of
the group and is reunited with another old friend,
Carolina (Andrea Freund), who was married to one
of the victims, Miguel (Juan Pablo Bastidas).
They decide they need to stick together, but with
Gabriel having disturbing nightmares about Angel,
they believe the killer must be very close…
Filmed very frankly, the scenes on the slab,
whose accuracy can be attributed to Olguin's
experience in an actual morgue situation, are
treated with realism. The characters all enjoy
development beyond cliché, and murder is
seen as a messy violent bloody exercise. All credit
should go to the writer/director for his excellent
practices in making this film.
Unfortunately, the presentation for the DVD is
not as clever. The subtitles appear to be written
by a Spanish speaking person with English as a
second language, and some times the actual sentences
can take a second to decipher. They are also presented
in white, which makes them, on occasion, hard
to read. My other problem with this disc is not
so much the movie, but the way in which it has
been presented. Troma have treated a quite serious
movie in the same way in which they present their
more tongue in cheek and ridiculous movies such
as Toxic Avenger and Chopper
Chicks from Zombietown. I do not have
a problem with Troma films, but there is a time
and a place, and Angel Negro
is more in tone to that of Tenebrae
or Deep Red, than Sgt. Kabukiman N.Y.P.D.
This movie did not need the cavalcade of dumb
Troma extras to get people to buy it, with the
right marketing engine; this movie would have
sold itself. |
