Bosque de muerte (1993)

If you want to make a decent horrormovie there are a few rules. The most important one is: Keep the viewer interested in what is happening on the screen. Bosque de muerte is a mexican slasher that fails miserably with that. When you want to make a horrormovie you should try to have an even flow of events, a little gore here and there, a little excitement, a couple of thrilling events. This movie does nothing of that. It just sleepwalks with a group of mexican youths (played by 30 year old actors) going to a house in the country all while the girl whose dad owns the house sulks over the fact that her mother died there fifteen years earlier. Of course, this will have an impact on the youths lives but only after about sixty minutes into the eighty minute long movie! That's right, nothing happens until there's twenty minutes left. People go around moping, having silly flashbacks and fish. Someone disappears but you have no idea of what happened to him until after the seventyminute mark. Then all of a sudden we get a couple of violent murders, the killer is revealed in a groaninducing sequence and then its all over. Just like that.

It's a shame since the movie actually starts out fairly well. We see a couple of people doing stuff in the woods while someone is watching them with a scoped rifle. We skip forward a few minutes and we find out that the guy watching is a forestranger and the people in the woods were sawing down trees illegaly, so naturally he shot off the leg on one of them. Without even batting an eyelash, the police even congratulate him on a job well done. I like movies that open with some sort of bang and Bosque de muerte does a fine job of that. Unfortunately, it's all downhill after that, the rangercharacter is introduced as someone who has a deep love for the forest and that's why he shot the guy but nothing is made of it. It has no impact whatsoever on the plot other than introduce him as a red herring. The final fifteen minutes are actually fairly decent as horrormovies go, gory and exciting but why not sprinkle some of the red on the rest of the movie? It's never really boring, like Iced for instance, just kind of meanders on, then all of a sudden it's over. Not as bad as it sounds actually, but nothing I would recommend to anyone, other than for the fact of the novelty of watching an mexican horrormovie.