|
|
It really started like a normal night for bus driver Miguel (Carlos
Carrasco) and his conductor Junito (Julian Urriola), until Miguel gets
spooked by a pretty girl who turns into a decaying corpse before his very
eyes while he's having a leak - and suddenly he drives the bus way above
the speed limit, just to get away, which in turn is noticed by two
bumbling cops (Renan Fernandez, Blas Valois), who stop the bus but crash
one of their motorbikes doing so, so they also commandeer the bus to bring
them back to headquarters. But there's the problem, they soon realize they
have no idea where they are, they notice they're low on gas ... oh, and
they're apparently followed by a bunch of witches. They somehow make it to
a church where the priest (Leo Wiznitzer) tells them they're in the middle
of the Chiriqui jungle, hundreds of miles from home, but where Miguel
comes from, and when he apparently has accidently kicked off an urban
legend when leaving his fiancée (Alejandra Araúz), who then tried to
kill her daughter and got run over by a bus. And it seems now that whole
story comes to catch up with Miguel. Sure, he and friends are safe as long
as they're in the church, but somehow they manage to burn down the church,
crash the bus they're getting away from, have to ward off cannibals, and
ultimately fight it out with the local witches coven that resulted from
above urban legends - and they're not equipped for that fight ... Diablo
Rojo PTY, supposedly the first horror film out of Panama, is above all
else one thing: Wild - basically it's a hodge-podge of horror mainstays
held together by its bumbling protagonists (along with a good portion of
dark humour), all done with a distinctly Latin American flavour that puts
emphasis on folklore, the macabre, but also strong primary colours and a
certain joie-de-vivre despite everything horrible going on on screen. And
the film really doesn't hold back in terms of gruesomeness, be it horrible
creatures or pretty explicit scenes of dismemberment. The result then is a
really fun ride that should sit extremely well with every horror fan with
at least a bit of a predilection for the exotic and macabre.
|
|
|