Review of the film almanac of absurdly funny horrors “Tales for Halloween”

The film-almanac of absurdly funny horrors “Tales for Halloween” (Satanic Hispanics) is in theaters. Five Spanish-American directors – Alejandro Brugues, Mike Mendez, Gigi Sol Guerrero, Eduardo Sanchez and Demian Runa – were completely justified, according to Mikhail Trofimenkov, the original title of the film, which can be loosely translated as “Damn Latinos!”

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The Texas town of El Paso, bordering Mexico. Twenty-seven mutilated corpses in one room. Curious murder weapons, including a meter-long wooden phallus from Zanzibar, indispensable in hand-to-hand combat with nervously foul-mouthed African demons, and a holy bullet loaded with shavings from the Calvary cross, equally indispensable in shootouts with Satan.

Two hyper-body-positive and heterosexual detectives – “Tales” is delightfully incorrect in places – need to pin these corpses bloody nose on the only survivor of the massacre – an unkindly squinting pepper named Juan Garcia, which is similar to the Russian “Ivan Ivanov”. However, according to police archives, this particular Juan Garcia has been dead for a long time. But in his own words, he, on the contrary, has been alive for a long time. And he is not Juan Garcia, but a 542-year-old immortal native of the ancient Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, owner of many unpronounceable names.

Any person’s head would turn 360 degrees from such confessions, but not the border cops. And this is not what they saw in their El Paso. Yeah, the investigators are rejoicing, so you lied and said you were born in the United States, now we’re deporting you! Well, he lied, he shrugs, but you won’t have time to deport him, because now Death himself will walk into the police station in high heels, and you won’t think it’s enough! In the meantime, before Death comes, listen, dear viewers, to a few tales about people from the other world.

This is not a spoiler. This is a synopsis of the first ten minutes of a two-hour film. It’s only the beginning.

Jokes are jokes, but Mexicans laugh at death seriously. Just remember their “calaveras”, the cheerful skeletons that are dragged through the streets at the carnival on the Day of the Dead and which were drawn by such great graphic artists as José Guadalupe Posada.

Some “Tales” have a rather gloomy lining. The hecatomb at the border is a reminder of the mass deaths of illegal immigrants from Mexico to the United States. And the short story about a CIA agent embedded in a drug cartel – he was cynically belatedly taken across the border and given over to be torn to pieces by the American bosses – about the savage criminal-civil war that has been raging in Mexico since 2006.

The quite courageous position of directors is something like this. The world doesn’t care about these deaths, well, we will, as is typical for us, dance our dance of death, in which the drug lords will turn out to be agents of the ancient chthon. Well, what can you do with her, with this chthon, if she has powerful witches from the Olmec tribe on her side?

However, the directors cheerfully put under the knife not only their own cultural identity, but also their borrowed, Hollywood identity. One of the short stories begins with a killer parody of the debut of “Pulp Fiction”: lovers who met at breakfast, who once quarreled over the waitress’s mistake with the order, find out that the diner where they are sitting has not existed for a long time, and they themselves are not exactly the same, who they seem to be. When Death enters the police station, the similar punitive expedition of the Terminator from the first episode of James Cameron’s epic, of course, will not completely fade away, but will fade considerably.

But among all these humorous humors irrigated with blood and brains, a short story under the unpretentious title “Vampire” shines as a pure, naive, absurd diamond. An old vampire, always dogging his young, only 198-year-old wife, has a chance to have a lot of fun only on Halloween night. On a night when no one knows the difference between human blood and cranberry juice, and the police happily take pictures with a ghoul waving the bitten off head of a hipster. Only here’s the problem: the ghoul grandfather gets confused in the transition from summer to winter time, and dawn for him – you understand.

So what if this novella is reminiscent of such masterpieces as “Dracula Father and Son” (1976) by Eduard Molinaro or “Dracula, Dead and Happy” (1995) by Mel Brooks. By and large, this is a story of eternal love, which, of course, rhymes with blood.