By Jay of the Dead
Note: If you’d prefer to listen rather than read, here is my audio podcast review. (It starts around the 22-minute mark.)
Before I discuss “The Curse of La Llorona” (2019), I would like to begin this review with a preface about grief-stricken mothers and drowned children. Uplifting, I know. (Oh, and incidentally, for those who don’t speak Spanish, it’s pronounced “La Yo-Roh-Na.”)
Most monsters don’t start out monstrous. They are made monstrous by some terrible experience that happens to them or someone they love. The saddest love songs are always “somebody done somebody wrong” songs. Horror movies are built the same way: Somebody done somebody wrong… Just as vegetation grows out of nutrient-rich volcanic soil, the most potent Horror seems to grow from the fertile aftermath of deep sorrow or deep rage, usually both.
Spoilers for the original “Friday the 13th” (1980) ahead:
All Horror fans know that the slasher killer in the first “Friday the 13th” movie is revealed to be Jason’s mother, Pamela Voorhees. Presumably, she was not always a monster. She only became a monster after her little boy, Jason, drowned in Camp Crystal Lake, due to the negligence of distracted counselors who were too busy “gettin’ busy” to watch her son.
The grieving mother’s unfathomable depths of sorrow and rage transform her into a bereaved monster who is compelled to brutally slaughter nine innocent people. (The body count for that first “Friday the 13th” totals 11 if you include Mrs. Voorhees and the snake, so I believe nine is correct.)
Ironically, Mrs. Voorhees’ monstrous actions perpetuate more evil and thereby steal away the youths of other loving parents. Through this tragic cycle, evil doesn’t just continue, it multiplies — perpetuates — grows!
Fast forward to present day, 39 years later, we have director Michael Chaves’ “The Curse of La Llorona,” a supernatural ghost movie that’s situated squarely within “The Conjuring” universe.
At this point, I’ll lightly touch on back story-oriented plot points from “The Curse of La Llorona” that are revealed in its curtain-raiser opening and about halfway through the film, but nothing I would consider to be major spoilers.
So, perhaps, at this point in my review, I should warn that very mild spoilers lie ahead for “The Curse of La Llorona”:
Our monster in this film was also created by a “prior evil” in which “somebody done somebody wrong.” La Llorona lived in Mexico in the 17th century, and she was very much in love. But when her true love broke her heart by committing adultery, she was so angry (deep rage) and hurt that she wanted to hurt him back. Therefore, she drowned their children that they had together, which she immediately regretted (deep sorrow), and if I recall correctly, forthwith took her own life.
So far, so good. The narrative is checking all the boxes on the monster-making formula: You’ve got a non-monstrous person who was victimized by somebody else’s prior evil, which transformed her into a monster through deep rage and deep sorrow. But this is where Pamela Voorhees and La Llorona diverge:
Mrs. Voorhees proceeded to “displace” (to use a psychology term) her vengeance and kill all camp counselors, not just those who were arguably culpable for her son’s demise. And while that’s not just and it’s not fair to kill completely innocent strangers years after the tragic event, she simply went nuts and had a vendetta for all camp counselors. Fine. We can buy that.
But in “The Curse of La Llorona,” we learn that in her cursed, evil spirit form, she continues to be a child killer — and here’s my problem — so she can “search the Earth, looking for children to take the place of her own children.” What?
I’m not sure I understand it correctly, but I think La Llorona believes that if she kills other children, she could potentially, somehow “swap out” her own dead kids. But after centuries of haunting and killing, she has taken many children and has thus far never redeemed the lives of her own offspring. I may be straining over a gnat, as they say, but it removes all the teeth from this monster.
To me, her motivation is flawed, anyway. If she had killed her step-children (her husband’s children with a previous partner), then that would have made more sense. But it doesn’t add up that, in the midst of her heartbreak, she would pull down a whole mountain of even greater heartache upon herself by murdering her own children.
Pamela Voorhees is one of the greatest “sympathetic antagonists” that I know — and perhaps the best Slasher killer ever — solely due to the fact that we can sort of understand why she goes on a rampage. I’m a parent. I get it.
But by contrast, La Llorona’s attacks on children — particularly her own — don’t make sense. It would have made much more sense if she became a violent man-hater and serial male-killer, something like the serial killer Aileen Wuornos. She was hurt by a man, so now she kills men. Mrs. Voorhees was hurt by camp counselors, so now she kills camp counselors.
At any rate, though this film is director Michael Chaves’ feature film debut, he is also directing “The Conjuring 3,” which is currently in pre-production and slated for release in September of 2020.
“The Curse of La Llorona” was released wide in theaters on April 19, 2019. It has enough creepiness and scares to warrant a theater viewing, though I’m rating it a 6.5 out of 10 and calling it a rental. It’s a perfect Redbox rental or a worthy stream on Netflix.
To its credit, this movie has some decent “children in peril” sequences, such as the creepy bathtub scene shown in the trailer (and here). The film does a good job of capitalizing on the vulnerability, ignorance and naiveté of children. It also has some good moments with a pull-down attic ladder, as well as a curtain (also teased in the trailer).
La Llorona is a very physical ghost. She can push kids down stairs and throw mom around, which is a decent “battle” sequence. This movie even has a very brief Christmastime moment, if you want to save this for December.
In addition to its handful of decent scares, I also appreciated “The Curse of La Llorona” because it has some siege narrative elements, an entertaining warrior priest-turn-shaman played by Raymond Cruz, and it has Horror happening to those who deserve it least. Oh, and this movie even has a very different looking Patricia Velasquez, whom I adored as the lethal, body-painted Anck Su Namun in “The Mummy” (1999). She has a few scenes, but I bet a lot of people won’t even recognize her.
I always feel the need to admit that Supernatural Horror, ghost, haunted house movies, aren’t really my sub-genre. Sure, they often scare me. But I don’t particularly enjoy them or seek them out. I think my problem with Supernatural Horror films is that initially there are no parameters. Fighting the monster in its supernatural realm seems impossible.
But then there is usually some type of guide. Somebody who knows some specialized information that is somehow very accurate for how to battle the opposing supernatural evil. Then this guide is able to explain the parameters of this particular war and also provides supernatural weapons. That just seems like a lot of extra steps. Just set your Horror story in our everyday reality — the one whose bounds we already understand — and let’s just skip all the superfluous exposition.
Finally, and I’ll address these two points further sometime in the future: The unnatural scares me far more than the supernatural. For instance, it is unnatural for a mother to drown her child. In the opening of “The Curse of La Llorona,” we see a mother (in mortality) drown her child, and that’s scarier to me than anything else she does as an evil, supernatural being.
And my second and final note is, I think it bothers me that faith often does very little in a Horror movie, that is, until the plot needs faith to work.
Rating and Recommendation: The Curse of La Llorona (2019)
Jay of the Dead = 6.5 ( Rental )
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