- Directed by Jeremy Kasten
- Written by Mark A. Altman
- Starring
- Marisa Ramirez
- Travis Wester
- Nichole Hiltz
- Jeffrey Combs
- Danny Trejo
- Produced by Mark A. Altman and Mark Gottwald
The subtitle, and the subject matter of the movie, is “Dia de los Muertos”, which is of course the Mexican “Day of the Dead,” but that’s not a title they could put on this movie for obvious reasons, especially because this is a zombie movie. (Curse George Romero for naming a movie after a potentially spooky holiday and then doing nothing with it!) And this isn’t a movie which should be saddled with the label of “Romero ripoff”; though it does acknowledge and draw from the larger tradition of living dead movies, it also tries to be at least moderately original, and succeeds with mixed but generally positive results.
The action starts in 1892 in the Mexican village of Santa Bonita (aka “that standing Mexican village set you’ve seen in a bazillion movies”) where local landowner Vargas Diaz (Danny Trejo) has employed a goodly portion of the town’s population in excavating the buried temple of the Aztec goddess of death. No, they never name her, and thank goodness, because trying to spell Aztec names as transliterated by Spanish priests is nigh impossible. (“Just throw in some X’s!”) He then invites the townspeople to celebrate the Day of the Dead in the tomb, but it’s a setup; he explodes the entrance to the buried temple, trapping them all alive as a sacrifice to the goddess. (Meanwhile, a young Mexican woman feverishly makes little skeleton dolls as if in a fugue state.)
“I know it doesn’t look like much, but the sign out front says it’s ‘the last hotel we’ll ever need.’”
Fast-forward to late autumn 1952, as a nuclear American family travels south of the border for a vacation. You just know it’s going to end up ugly, because the dad is Jeffrey Combs, who either whacks or gets whacked in just about every movie. Along with his wife (Ellie Cornell), his nineteen-year-old daughter Lilly (Mircea Monroe), and his younger son Ricky (Noah Luke), who’s just gotten out of the hospital after a bout with polio, they stop on a whim in Santa Bonita late at night and try to get a room at the sole hotel. They find themselves almost completely ignored by the young scrubwoman and the older lady (Julia Vera), who’s busy making skeleton dolls as if in a fugue state… Said old woman does take an interest in Ricky, and whispers guttural things to him while the rest of the family settles in… Before long, Lilly is seeing visions of a little boy in skullface makeup, and when she runs outside from the apparition, she confronts a crowd of undead Mexicans in Day of the Dead regalia.
Fast-forward another 53 years. Latino college student Alicia (Marisa Ramirez) is taking her gringo boyfriend Joss (Travis Wester) home from school in California to meet her parents, although “home” is a new ranch they’ve bought since she went to school. They get a wee bit lost and end up in Santa Bonita, where they almost run down an unusual funeral procession — unusual in that the body that rolls out of the upset coffin (Danielle Burgio) is very much alive, naked, painted with black designs, tied hand and foot, and tongueless. (As she explains by writing in the dirt with a stick: “They cut out my tongue so no one can hear my screams.” Which isn’t too accurate; sure, she’d have trouble articulating, but “AAAAAGH! AAAAAGH!” would still be a viable option.)
When you’re smilin’, when you’re smilin’,
The whole world smiiiiiles with you…
They run to the sheriff’s office, because every collection of more than ten buildings in the movies will have a sheriff’s office and a hotel; there Joss meets Sheriff Blanco (David Keith), a laid-back gringo with a bum leg who calmly takes charge of Esmerelda the tongueless girl and recommends that, with their car out of commission from crashing to avoid the procession, they take a room in the hotel. I’m not sure how quickly we’re supposed to figure out that Blanco is little Ricky all grown up; the fact that David Keith sports a southern drawl not present in the younger version of the character is an unintentional impediment to such a deduction.
The hotel is staffed by a young ethereal woman named Martia (Laura Harring), along with an old woman (doesn’t look nearly old enough, really) who sits in the corner, feverishly making skeleton dolls.
A little unsettled by the surroundings, Joss uses his almost-dead cell phone to call back up to his friend Tyler to come down, spend the night, and ferry them home the next day. Then, with some time to kill, Joss and Alicia do what all hot college couples do when given free time in a hotel room with a complimentary bottle of wine. But Alicia keeps catching glimpses of a skullfaced boy in mirrors, and by the time Tyler (Laz Alonso) and his girlfriend Erica (Nichole Hiltz) show up, both Joss and Alicia are tired of the old woman’s hisses and muttered curses, and Martia’s disturbing penchant for staring at them at the dinner table.
“So, do you guys have Taco Bell down here in Mexico?”
But the town isn’t finished with them yet. See, Sheriff Blanco is in cahoots with those who were going to use Esmerelda as a human sacrifice; but when she dies from shock in his custody, they need another victim. If a sacrifice isn’t made, the dead will rise from the buried temple and the local graveyard, and because the dead are finicky, the sacrifice has to be a Mexican girl. And the townspeople choose Alicia.
Thus, when Joss rescues Alicia from being sacrificed by the sheriff, the dead get impatient and rise up, surrounding the hotel for some classic barricading action. It’s the most standard sequence in the movie, with tempers flaring and brave souls braving the hordes of the dead to get to the sheriff’s office for more ammo, or Erica’s car for escape. As if in compensation, the barricading comes to an end near the climax of the movie, with a huge lump of exposition that explains a lot of stuff we thought we already understood (but didn’t really), as delivered by Martia.
There are, admittedly, several things that don’t work here… or don’t quite work. The whole 1953 sequence seems like an awful big detour just to set up the background of a supporting character who doesn’t live past the midpoint of the movie. And the idea that these four friends would barricade themselves inside with Martia and the old lady and not (a) be suspicious of them as collaborators with the dark forces that fill the town, and (b) grill Martia for all she knows, is like the unacknowledged elephant in the living room for the entire second act.
I don’t care whose high priest you are, running around in your long underwear ain’t gonna earn any respect.
What does work, though, are our four friends, with the script and the actors each getting equal credit for lifting them above the cheap cardboard characters we’re used to seeing in genre movies. Each of the four could easily have been a stock-issue cliche: Tyler the athletic black guy, Erica the cheerleader, Joss the goofball, and Alicia the final girl. But they are each portrayed in such a way that those labels don’t even begin to define who they are. And not a once do the characters exhibit that kind of unrealistic stupidity that speaks of plot mechanics instead of characterization.And the performances are first-rate, especially by Marisa Ramirez as Alicia and Travis Wester as Joss; whereas too many movie couples show obvious signs of having been thrown together by the script and nothing else, Ramirez and Wester give us a convincing portrait of two dissimilar people from different background who nonetheless honestly enjoy being with one another, and are comfortable and natural in one another’s presence. (When one considers the thousand upon thousands of young actors trying for a break in Hollywood, the fact that good performances like these are so noteworthy is really depressing.)
And slight nods to the larger world of horror cinema are appreciated — or rather, acknowledgement that the characters live in a world in which they would know horror movie conventions. Nothing as overt or self-congratulatory as in the Scream movies or their progeny; just simple common-sense things, like everyone reacting to Joss getting bitten by a zombie; does that mean he’s going to “turn”?
“Make sure you get my good side!”
For reasons I don’t quite understand, this movie has gotten more than its share of negative press. Maybe it’s because it premiered on the Sci-Fi Network (a far tamer cut, obviously); between the watered-down sex and violence, and the instinctive mistrust that the words “A Sci-Fi Channel Original” bring with them, there’s a lot to dislike pre-emptively. But I found it a satisfying if minor horror movie, a good result of a seventeen-day shoot, and a well-earned paycheck for all involved.
Some Notable Totables:
- body count: 66
- breasts: 6
- explosions: 1
- dream sequences: 1
- ominous thunderstorms: 0
- actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 3
- Jeffrey Combs (“Thomas White”) is a Star Trek mainstay, playing recurring characters “Weyoun” and “Brunt” on DS9, plus “Detective Mulcahey” in the episode “Far Beyond the Stars”; “Penk” on the Voyager episode “Tsunkatse”; and the recurring character “Commander Shran” on Enterprise
- Robert Burdaska (“Sheriff Martinez”) played “Husky Klingon” in the DS9 episode “Apocalypse Rising”
- David Figlioli (“Bull,” one of Vargas’ henchmen) played “Klingon Crewman #1″ in the Enterprise episode “The Expanse”
- (writer and co-producer Mark Altman also wrote and appeared in Free Enterprise (1998), but I probably shouldn’t count that)
