NOTE: This review contains spoilers.
I need to preface this by saying that there are really not many movies out there that I dislike. I stumbled across it the other night playing on Cine Latino, and a friend from Spain was visiting so I figured we could watch a Spanish language film together.
The plot to this movie is really simple. There is a male prostitute who likes to kill the people he sleeps with in very violent ways. The course of the film details his encounters with two people who live in the same apartment. The first is a female geography teacher who picks him up one day on the way home from work. The second is a gay puppet-master who lives in the same apartment.
You quite literally experience the entire agonizing forty five minutes to an hour that he spends with each person, titillating them, and then when they offer him a measly sum of 200 pesos, he snaps and you spend the rest of the time watching a long drawn out dialogue, culminating in a pretty gory end for both.
What was actually annoying was how there was all this implicit symbolism, such as heavy emphasis on mirrors, or a poster in the gay man's apartment that says "Crimen," but it's just a sign of the director trying too hard to be artsy for art's sake. Really, there is no substance at all to this. Nothing really happens. And I found the ending for the man to just be outlandish. While the guy has the crazy prostitute in his apartment, he's sitting at a window, with his back turned, giving some soliloquy. It gets better, because then he finally gets the prostitute out of his apartment, but the hooker then gives some emotional speech and kisses the guy. And I know men often think using the wrong end of their body, but come on. So then he invites the crazed hooker back into his apartment, where they sit on the bed and it then segues to a pretty interesting final scene, where you at first think there's something naughty going on, but it turns out it's just the hooker stabbing the guy to death in the neck. Oh well, at least he got a kiss, which is more than the poor geography teacher got.
At the end I just really felt cheated out of two hours of my life. I couldn't even write a deep review for this film because there's just no substance to review. The violence actually made me cringe, because they made sure to include a heavy concentration of gore. But it offers no real insight as to why the prostitute (who doesn't even have a name) does what he does. It tries to be thought-provoking by asking if the victims are actually the real slime that are getting their just-desserts, but it fails to make much of an impact. You're just left at the end feeling confused, unable to piece together all the symbols and messages and basically have to conclude that the guy was just crazy.
I need to preface this by saying that there are really not many movies out there that I dislike. I stumbled across it the other night playing on Cine Latino, and a friend from Spain was visiting so I figured we could watch a Spanish language film together.
The plot to this movie is really simple. There is a male prostitute who likes to kill the people he sleeps with in very violent ways. The course of the film details his encounters with two people who live in the same apartment. The first is a female geography teacher who picks him up one day on the way home from work. The second is a gay puppet-master who lives in the same apartment.
You quite literally experience the entire agonizing forty five minutes to an hour that he spends with each person, titillating them, and then when they offer him a measly sum of 200 pesos, he snaps and you spend the rest of the time watching a long drawn out dialogue, culminating in a pretty gory end for both.
What was actually annoying was how there was all this implicit symbolism, such as heavy emphasis on mirrors, or a poster in the gay man's apartment that says "Crimen," but it's just a sign of the director trying too hard to be artsy for art's sake. Really, there is no substance at all to this. Nothing really happens. And I found the ending for the man to just be outlandish. While the guy has the crazy prostitute in his apartment, he's sitting at a window, with his back turned, giving some soliloquy. It gets better, because then he finally gets the prostitute out of his apartment, but the hooker then gives some emotional speech and kisses the guy. And I know men often think using the wrong end of their body, but come on. So then he invites the crazed hooker back into his apartment, where they sit on the bed and it then segues to a pretty interesting final scene, where you at first think there's something naughty going on, but it turns out it's just the hooker stabbing the guy to death in the neck. Oh well, at least he got a kiss, which is more than the poor geography teacher got.
At the end I just really felt cheated out of two hours of my life. I couldn't even write a deep review for this film because there's just no substance to review. The violence actually made me cringe, because they made sure to include a heavy concentration of gore. But it offers no real insight as to why the prostitute (who doesn't even have a name) does what he does. It tries to be thought-provoking by asking if the victims are actually the real slime that are getting their just-desserts, but it fails to make much of an impact. You're just left at the end feeling confused, unable to piece together all the symbols and messages and basically have to conclude that the guy was just crazy.
