This movie was a Mexican-Spanish movie, dubbed into English. It was shot in Tijuana and Baja California, financed by the US, and released at the Toronto international Film Festival. Although it won several awards, this movie was again one of those things that people either absolutely hated, or they loved it.
I wasn't very enthusiastic about this film, which is why I passed it over several times. That and the fact that I would have to read the whole thing, which I usually don't mind as I always use close captioning anyway, but in this case I would have to pay very close attention since my Spanish is very poor – I am not bilingual, but can pick out most of a conversation when I hear it.
However, because this was a horror movie I was reviewing, I could not count on that. I had to read the whole thing. Unfortunately. The story started out interesting, went to stupid, then to WTH, back to interesting, back to stupid, and then to I really just don't care anymore. I think the main problem I have with this movie, just to give you a heads up, is it was like a person handed this director a script and said, 'this is an interesting story, make it'.
But then that director tripped, and dropped the script into a lake. He fished it out and decided to use it anyway, although half of it was now gone, and a lot of the remaining pages were really smudged. That's what this movie feels like – you're only getting part of a story and it's not the good part. The more you watch, the more questions you have. And you're not going to get any answers so don't even hope for them.
We start with a gratuitous lesbian sex scene. I've used that phrase several times, so let me explain to you what I consider to be a gratuitous scene in case you think that I am prejudiced in some way. When something is gratuitous, what I'm trying to say is that the scene did not need to be in the movie, had nothing to do with the plot of the movie, or did not include main characters in the movie. It just so happens with movie makers lately that lesbian scenes (like found footage, hand held cameras and 3D) seems to be a 'thing' with them to try to make their movies more popular. This kind of scene is simply to titillate the audience without giving them any substance or story – just nudity.
So we have these two women who go unnamed. They hear a pounding on the door. One runs to answer it. This I also do not understand - why people think that when they hear pounding on their door they have to run to get it. The same goes for telephones. They practically kill themselves trying to answer it. Do these people not know about answering machines?
The one answering the door is met by a brute of a man. When her partner comes down the stairs, to her horror, she sees her girlfriend being beaten viciously, then having several of her fingers cut off. Her girlfriend somehow scares him off and he runs into the night.
We then see (in full daylight) the man climbing a pile of rocks (get used to this, you're going to see it a lot), strip off his clothes, and paw the ground like an animal, dropping his box which is full of human fingers. Apparently he's been doing this for quite a while. Too bad that all the fingers look the same, meaning none have aged or are different colors, in fact, they all look like they came from the same hand - if that hand had thirty fingers.
We move on to our family of four. We have Barreiro and Caro, and their prepubescent children. The children are playing in the sand outside of what I guess it's supposed to be Tijuana. The parents are out having a picnic. Suddenly the boy comes running up, saying his sister has been injured. This is where we get our first WTH. They make a huge deal of the girl who apparently has experienced her first 'time of the month'. They take her to the nearest gas station (thanks a lot parents), to get the girl cleaned up. We get 'treated' to a precious scene of sand with a small pool of blood in sharp focus. Okay, we get it. You're gonna gross us out to make up for the script pages you lost.
While they're there, the mother notices a strange man watching them. That's what you get when leave the door open to a freaking public bathroom. They prepare to leave, but the children want to continue playing. So the two parents, being totally responsible adults and because Tijuana is a totally safe place for children to go off and play by themselves with no one around, let them. While the kids are gone, they do a little fooling around and fall asleep. They wake up and notice their children never came back.They do a little searching, but find nothing. They call the police in a panic who tell them to stay at a nearby motel. This is nonsensical as the movie progresses, and you will see why, unfortunately, as I did. The parents sit there, basically yelling at each other for leaving their children unsupervised.
Then they think of that weirdo that was looking in at their little girl and they think, hmmm. They stayed the night, and now they're not the cuddly little 'let's have some nooky in the car' people, they're the 'why didn't you watch the kids better' people. In the morning, basically hating each other, they get ready to go home. But miracle of miracles (I said, with massive sarcasm) the police show up with their two children, looking just fine. How nice. They claim to have gotten lost among the rocks in a cave.
So our happy family once again heads home. They show the mother with a large bruise on her side, but if you're expecting any kind of explanation as to what it is and how she got it – you haven't been paying attention. That was in that half of the script that still in the water or that got smeared when the director stumbled.
The other half of the script that the director still can read apparently says: Naked, naked, argue, argue, look scared, look scared, naked again, argue, argue, naked, naked, naked, a little bit of story.
Later, like it makes any difference now, the mother looks through the dirty clothes apparently trying to find her daughter's panties showing evidence of her first, umm, feminine experience. She can't find them. For whatever reason, this prompts her to take her young daughter to a gynecologist. She's informed that her daughter (I'm sorry but I had to watch it so you get to hear about it) does not have a hymen.
To get the story going again, I guess, the children need to see a psychiatrist. They draw pictures of a truck with a man. The father jumps to the conclusion that this is the strange man at the gas station who looked in the door and who acts like a creep even though he hasn't actually done anything. So I guess it doesn't matter what country you're in, if you don't look normal, you're evil.This brilliant psychiatrist decides that the children have been through a traumatic event. Well, massive duh on that one doc. He also decides that this trauma included something sexual. The children also had signs of bruising. That's it. What, you expected an explanation for that? Why? Nothing else is been explained, has it? You sure want a lot, don't you? The father is past rage, now convinced that our not-normal-looking guy in the van did something to his children.
So let's get this going a bit faster 'cause it's way too long now. The parents, convinced that this not normal looking man had something to do with their children being weird, drives the kids past this guy who is standing by his truck and they start to scream. Well, that's enough evidence for the mom and dad. Leaving their children with a babysitter, they go out for revenge. This law-abiding couple go out, find the guy, and murder him. I guess at this point, the director decided he needed to equal out the nudity with gore. 
Just as a side note, because this movie is driving me crazy, this dictating software keeps wanting to capitalize Gore, so the makers must think that Al Gore is quite the psycho. It also must think I'm the worst English speaker in the world because it is trying to translate what I tell it into Klingon and as boring as this movie is, I am getting quite for Klimt inn shore kife. I don't know what that means, you figure it out. That's what it keeps doing to me.
This is the part where the parents driving there and having to wait in a hotel completely knocks this movie from the odd come on to value know what I just don't care anymore category. DAMMIT SOFTWARE PAY ATTENTION! I SAID that this knocks the movie from an oh-come-on-now type of movie to one where I just don't care anymore. If these two small children can walk to this place, then 1. Why the hell do the parents have to drive there; and 2. Why did they have to stay in a motel?
She finally talks to the babysitter about what happened the night she disappeared, leaving her ripped up clothes behind. We see part of the scene where they were just sitting there when all of a sudden she blanks out as her eyes roll up in her head. Well, sort of.
Finally, the mother decides to check out the cave. An extremely well-lit cave. An it-doesn't-matter-how-deep-the-hole-is-the-sun-still-shines kind of cave. As she gets near the opening she finds a ton of melted candles in a kind of shrine.
At the bottom of an awful short looking drop, are the dead bodies of her two children. Again, what a surprise. She runs out of the cave, and the cameraman, apparently being bored out of this freaking skull, decides to treat us with zooming in and out shots of different rocks around this cave. As if that were something to keep us occupied while she sits there and cries. So she goes home. Ha! Fooled you! She doesn't go home, she slowly crawls into the cave - again. This is so we can waste another five or ten minutes while AGAIN she searches for and finds AGAIN the bodies of her children - AGAIN. She figures somehow (and we get to see some sort of flashback) that the daughter fell and hit her head, and started to fall over this awfully small ravine. The brother, grabbing her hand, attempted to pull her up, but fell with her. Because this is a movie and they are apparently made of glass, they both die.
In other words, they've been dead for days. So now that we know the kids at home are actually dead, the movie starts to beat us over the head with the paranormal theme of every other movie made since the 1999 gee-I-wish-I-could-have-killed-them-first The Blair Witch Project. Every time her daughter screams, for whatever reason she's deciding to scream, the lights flicker. When the mother goes to her son's room, she finds him floating in the air. Just floating. That's it.Now the director tries to save this movie by eking out a little bit of story after ringing out the script. There's been this gentleman (Identified only as Encargado gasolinera, or Charge Station which yes, I know is not a name) hanging out at the gas station throughout this whole movie and now that the mother knows that her children are dead, he approaches her. How nice. He says this mountain (which is not a mountain, it's a hill) has a weird energy and it is a place of demons.
What? Oh no no no, you don't get an explanation, this is just a little exposition to get you to the end of the movie. The not-normal-looking dead man named Lucio thought he could control the evil by putting up the candles. That's why he always hung around the place. That's why he knew her children were dead. Apparently, Encard.... uh, the gentleman's daughter was the woman at the beginning of the movie. He says she was the last victim of the worst serial killer the area has ever had.
Let's wrap this sorry mess up, shall we? The woman finally goes to her husband. She drags him into the cave and shows him their dead children. This is where it ended a little differently than what I had already written down. Just a little. My version had the children sneak up behind them and kill them. What actually happened made no sense whatsoever.
When she tried to explain to her husband that their children were no longer really their children, he pulled a pistol from his briefcase and shot her in the head. What. The. Hell. We then get this nauseating camera work of zooming in and out of rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks until we hear a second gunshot.Our final scene is of demon mom and demon dad (pffft) somberly getting into their car as a small earthquake tells the gentleman at the gas station that… What? The world is screwed? He needs to go around shooting all of these non-humans that he knows are about? Or should he just wait for the credits? I am so glad I did not see this in the theater because they felt the need to end this with an ear shattering piece of music that was horrible along with the credits.
Which, I guess, was appropriate, because this whole movie was just one big headache.
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