User Reviews

If you sat down and thought about everything horrible thing you'd want to see on film, you'd get this movie. Both the physical and mental violence go way over the top. It's compelling enough, though, that I stuck with it to the end...although the end disappointed with some weird afterthought of a plot you know nothing about and a violent dues ex machina at the end.

A woman gets run over by two drunks. The cops throw them in the cop car. An inspector comes by, check out the car, pockets the gun he finds and discovers a camcorder. Turning it on, he finds a record of the planning and brutal torture and killing of a transvestite prostitute. We're talking BRUTAL. The effects induce nausea. The perpetrators obvious enjoy the depravity they engage in. And it's dark, horrific stuff. Honestly. No joke.

The perpetrators get taken to jail where they're similarly tortured by the cops, Abu Grahib style. One finally cracks and tells them where the prostitute was killed. While investigating it, the cops find other tapes worse than the original one. Yes. Worse. One involves another prostitute. The other is a home movie about his family and the background that spurred his psychosis.

There's no good characters in this. Everyone sucks as a person. That said, the acting is pretty good. The victims look like victims rather than just people screaming. It's also too amoral to be depressing. You get too overwhelmed by violence and cruelty for it to have any effect.

I would have rated this higher if it hadn't been for the miserable "let's make a statement" ending that comes out of left field and the appearance of...well...no spoilers.

If you have a strong stomach, give it a shot.

Spoiler alert! I'm going to tell the whole story, though there is not much to tell.

A woman is hit and killed by a car driven by two drunken men. A police investigator is called to the crime scene and, disregarding all protocols, inspects the car. In the glove compartment, he finds a video camera and a tape. Watching the recording, he finds out the two men had kidnapped, tortured and killed a male transvestite prostitute.

After torturing the two men for a confession about the prostitute's body, the police finds the hideout and, there, an old VHS tape.

Back at the station, the investigator calls the man that killed the prostitute (his accomplice recorded it) and plays back the old tape. It's a footage of the man's parents finding out about his homosexuality. The father proceeds to rape his son, while the mother watches. After that, the father forces his son to dress like a transvestite prostitute and drops him at school.

Later, on the same VHS tape, it's shown the man purchasing a gun and drugs, which he uses to dope his parents for a revenge. He forces his mother to wear a strap-on rubber phallus, covered with barbed wire, and rape his father with it.

After killing his parents, the man has a stupid fight with his sister, his accomplice on their parents murder, and kind of accidentally cuts her throat. He gets excited seen her covered with blood and masturbates over her dead body.

Twist alert! The investigator has two surprises, first, the prostitute was a close friend of him (or family, I couldn't care less), and second, the man's sister wasn't dead! She's now grey, with a bad hair, wields a knife and is seeking revenge, so, the investigator puts them together and... Credits roll.

This film is a big mess. It starts stating that 98% of murder cases in Mexico go unsolved. I don't know if that's true or not, and it really doesn't matter, because it's thoroughly irrelevant to the story, and gives the film a bad segregationist taste.

Most of the runtime is found-footage garbage (shaky camera, bad angles, bad sound, bad "acting" etc.), what wouldn't really be a problem, if they were believable. The first footage (prostitute's torture session) is plausible (though barely), because the criminals are idiots, so, yeah, why not record their crime for posterity, right? The second footage (VHS compilation) is insanely preposterous:

* Why would there be a VHS camera recording in the man's room?

* Why was there a VHS camera recording the man and his father in the car at school (by the angle, and considering the size of a VHS camera at the time, it would have to be hanging out of the car's window)?

* Why was there a VHS camera at the drugs/weapons dealer scene? Didn't the dealer notice the "small," noisy monster VHS camera under its nose?

* How did no one notice a VHS camera recording in the kitchen when the man's parents were drugged?

* The man's sister probably helped filming their father's rape by their mother, but how in hell did they manage to stick a VHS camera inside the father's rectum (yes, the film shows the barbed-wire-covered rubber phallus moving forth and back inside the father's rectum)? I mean, not even all lubricant in the universe could possibly allow a VHS camera AND a barbed-wire-covered rubber phallus inside someone's rear end, or am I wrong? I'm kind of sure that the VHS camera would do a lot more damage than the barbed-wire...

* Why the hell did the man and his sister put the VHS camera to record their boring, nonsensical conversation on the aftermath of their parents' murders (the one that ends with the man killing his sister)? They are clean and tidy, so that probably happened a good time after they killed their parents and, probably, disposed of their bodies. I mean, it was VHS, people didn't go around recording everything, all the time, because it sucked to carry the camera and the tapes around (and the power cable, because the batteries didn't last that long).

Considering that very little happens in this film, there's a lot of loose ends:

* How did the man's sister become a zombie? Or, otherwise, how did she survive having her throat being cut open? And, in that case, why did she turn grey?

* What happened to the man's friend (the one that helped kidnapping the prostitute)? He's never shown again after the police torture scene. Did the police kill him? Will it come back grey, with a bad hair and thirsty for revenge?

All in all, it's a no-mystery, no-thrills thriller, just a very lame excuse for torture porn, with a forced twist ("look, you failed to kill your sister, now she's here to kill you," and, for some reason, the actress is painted grey, so, what, is this a surprise zombie film?!)

The best thing about this film is its IMDb score: how on earth/hell can this piece of junk have a score above 1?

Incredibly grotesque, a sordid, creative film, an experimentally crude story, but with a great value in Mexican cinema making a big difference in contemporary terror, strong but different, tells a conventional story from where everything, fetish, traumas And other elements that form the profile of a maniac, a serial killer who walks loose and films snuff films for fun.

I love horror. And I love the most downright awful, vile and despicable horror I can get my hands on. But it still has to feel like a movie. It still has to feel like there is a point. Just showing us clip after clip of the most horrific things that can happen to a person isn't enough. The movie did have a chance to justify everything at the end, but it let that slip too.

To get into some spoilers, the movie shows us some awful torture scenes, then is shows us a little bit of an explanation about why the guy doing these things is so messed up. Then at the end the movie sets itself up perfectly with a character from earlier coming back with an opportunity to take revenge on behalf of herself and every other victim we have seen in the movie. The character moves forward with a dangerous smirk on her face. And then the credits roll. Sigh.

Of all the things we have had to sit through and watch happen to innocent people, we couldn't get to see even a minute of revenge taken on the perpetrator? It makes no sense. That was very disappointing.

The movie is pretty messed up and if that's all you care about then you might just have a good time. If you're like me though and need more structure and purpose then you will probably struggle with it. 4/10.

Short review, but this movie is spectacular and bridges found footage with extreme cinema perfectly. Another user already compared this to Marian Dora's work or A Serbian Film and it is justified. CERTAINLY not a film for everyone, and I'd steer anyone borderline on watching it away from the film, unless your familiar with other brutal pieces.

6/10 from me. The plot existed but fell short, and the stupid "SiStEr iS aLiVe" thing took the movie down a huge "peg" for me.

This is a movie that will constantly keep you interested. It never gets boring, but it does get confusing at times. Pretty much it's a movie about how Mexico is crime-infected. Pretty much two killers accidentally had a car crash. Nobody ever captured them, until the crash. We then get our main "hero who", that finds the camera they own. In the camera, we find how nobody even noticed, that they found a transgender woman, that they decided to torture and kill. Because of this, the two get beaten up by the police, until one of them says where the location of the murder is. The police go there and find two tapes. One where one of the two kills and rapes a prostitute. While the other tape is pretty much the history behind the killers, that he grew up in abuse. He grew up in a homophobic family, where his father and mother abused him for being bisexual or gay. Well, that's when he decides enough is enough, and he along with his sister went and kill both of their parents in a gruesome way. His sister then was turned on and was about to have intercourse with the brother, but the brother could not get a hard-on, so she says that he actually might be gay, which makes him rage, and tries to kill his sister. The ending is amazing, the police officer shows him that his buddy killed himself and that his sister is alive, and that she is responsible for other murders, and far as I understood, the transgender is a family member of the police officer, so the officer lets the sister do the justice both for him and her. This film is what August Underground could have been with a plot. I never got bored watching the film, i only got confused at times. If you are not a shock film fan, i doubt you will watch this, however, if you liked movies like Guinea Pig, The Butcher, Grotesque, and Hostel, this might be your cup of tea.