The Curse of La Llorona (2019)


I live in the southwestern United States, and La Llorona is a tale most people in this part of the country know even if they aren't of Latin heritage.  La Llorona, or the Weeping Woman, is the spirit of a beautiful, well-to-do Mexican lady who had the perfect life until her husband was unfaithful.  In a fit of rage she drowned her sons, and then drowned herself.  Because of her sins she is forced to walk the Earth in search of her children, and will often take any that she finds.  

When I first heard the tale it was similar to Bloody Mary - if you say her name three times in a mirror she will appear and attack.  The story I heard is that she would scratch with her finger nails rather than kill, but other versions speak of her luring children to their death by drowning or just making off with them. It's a rather effective ghost story.

I was decently excited to see that Hollywood had finally come around to making a movie about the legend.  I was less excited to find out it would be part of the Conjuring universe, since that series and its spinoffs are experiencing diminishing returns in quality.  Still, no matter how it turned out, it was pretty much something I had to see. 

In 1973 Los Angeles Anna (Linda Cardellini) is a social worker who is forced to take away the children of Patricia Alvarez (Patricia Velasquez) when she finds them locked in a closet with signs of physical abuse.  The children do not want to leave, and their mother violently fights to keep them from being taken away. After a night in the care of a children's home they are discovered to have left the facility and drowned, and Patricia is the prime suspect. 

When Anna goes to the scene of the drowning a mysterious woman in white (Marisol Ramirez) appears to her son Chris (Roman Christgau) and begins to stalk her family.  She soon figures out it is the fabled spirit of Mexican folklore, and enlists Rafael (Raymond Cruz), an ex-priest with expertise in the occult, to help rid her family of the vengeful ghost. 

Father Perez (Tony Amendola), from the Annabelle movies, makes an appearance to give La Llorona's backstory and send the family on their way to Rafael, but otherwise most of the other trappings of this cinematic universe are absent.  That includes many of the thrills of seeing events build around the family or creative scares.  There is little here that develops other than ghost shows up, family fights ghost with the help of Latin magic and ghost goes away.  A sequel is teased, but doubt that will happen unless Cruz gets brought back for one of the other connecting films.

Performances are fine, but there is not really any sense that the family is in eminent danger.  I predicted the path of the movie, including the part where suspicion falls on Anna, from the start.  It's a horror movie on rails, just using a different folklore than in the past.  As for that, La Llorona could be any other ghost that has appeared in PG-13 horror.  

That brings me to my last point; the rating may be R, but many of the PG-13 horror films contain more blood, violence or scares than this.  I don't know what the MPAA saw in this to give it that rating or if someone begged them for it just to get people to go see it.  Either way, The Cures of La Llorona was done quickly and cheaply, and does no justice to the tales on which it is based. 

The Curse of La Llorona (2019)
Time: 93 minutes
Starring: Linda Cardellini, Roman Christgau, Jaynee-Lynn Kinchen, Raymond Cruz, Marisol Ramirez
Director: Michael Chaves



 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Image
Virtual reality has been one of the most hyped, and one of the most disappointing, promises of technology.  While it promotes immersion into a cybernetic world what it really provides are video games with 20-year-old graphics and the occasional bruise when one accidentally hits a closet door.  In the case of The Lawnmower Man  what it is promising is that something with graphics just a little bit better than Dire Straits's "Money for Nothing" video will somehow change the world and alter humanity. It was laughable then and it is laughable now.  The only person not laughing was Stephen King, who demanded that his name be removed from all future advertising for the movie because he never wrote this.  The story, of which a short film was made in the 1980s, involves a man unwittingly hiring a Greek god to mow his lawn and, after said god creates a spectacle, paying for the landscaping with his life.  It's only a few pages and, in my opinion, it is one of King's worst
Read more

Things (1989)

Image
Most of the time when I hear a movie is the worst ever I know that is hyperbole. There are few candidates and I would even say the famous book chronicling the worst movies ever made got it wrong.  Plan 9 from Outer Space is laughably incompetent, but enjoyable.  The worst kind of films are the ones where no joy can be found in the watching experience, for reasons ranging from unlikeable characters to just sheer boredom.  A truly horrible movie is something like  Things.   This is a 1989 direct-to-video horror film from Canada, filmed on 8mm and dubbed once it was completed and the makers realized most of the sound was unusable.  Director Andrew Jordan and writer Barry J. Gillis managed to grab porn star Amber Lynn for an hour to shoot her as a news reporter just so they could put her face on the video box.  Most of the music was done by Gillis, and some of it by a local band called Familiar Strangers.  It was filmed in large part in Andrew Norman's basement, and most of the props w
Read more

The Omen (1976)

Image
A movie does not have to be high art to strike a chord with the public.  The Omen was an attempt by writer David Seltzer to make some money and get a nice trip to the UK.  It just so happened that because of The Exorcist the public was hungry for more movies involving demons and such, and adding a veneer of Catholicism didn't hurt either.  The Vatican's secrets are most likely of more interest to scholars than anyone else, but a religion doesn't hang on over the centuries without creating a bit of mystery.  In this case, Seltzer settled on the Revelation of St. John, the low-fantasy portion of the Bible and, instead of an hilariously named (albeit historically correct) demon named Pazuzu, with The Omen we get the son of Satan himself.  When Robert Thorne (Gregory Peck) is informed that his child has died he visits a priest at the hospital in Rome where his wife is coalescing.  He is given an offer too good to be true: a foundling, whose mother died in childbirth, was born
Read more