Title: Santeria: The Soul Possessed Director: Benny Mathews Cast: Nito Perez Jr., Kevin Rankin, Maria Fonseca Sotolongo, Rico Thuewalker Review: Santeria has always been one of those religions where everybody gets spooked whenever it gets mentioned. Images of human/animal sacrifices and blood rituals pop to mind whenever Santeria is referenced and it's always been a religion that people find spooky, scary, frightening and just plain strange. It's a secretive religion that doesn't like for their beliefs and their practices to be well known. And every once in a while a movie will come along to try and explore the whole thing and exploit the supernatural aspects of Santeria, cant really say I blame them since said religion deals so heavily with the supernatural, bloody animal sacrifices and rituals. This is one of those movies trying to take full advantage of Santeria's notoriety, but failing miserably.
The story is supposedly based on a real life case of a boy named Ricky. Ricky receives a message from what he thinks is the Virgin Mary. The whole barrio in which he lives in being composed mostly of Mexican folk buy into the whole vision deal and make a big deal out of Rickys supposed connection with the Virgin Mary. In comes a priest who's interested in exploring the whole thing for his television show (The Brother Neil Show!). He, along with a few other members of Ricky's family plus a photographer get together and try and decipher what's really going on. Is Ricky being visited by the Virgin Mary or is it some other evil spirit fooling him and trying to take advantage of him? Well, if you let yourself be fooled by the cover of this movie, you'd swear this could possibly end up being a kick ass horror movie. Something that will chill you to the bone. But it really isn't. It does have interesting subject matter to deal with, what with Santeria and all its rituals, this could have made a really good horror movie. But it didn't. Mainly because it fails to conjure up a dreadful atmosphere. Its low budget didn't help it any, since the film looks like it was shot on a video camera. The director does as good a job as he can with what little money he had (was that a glimpse of promise in the direction?) but a movie dealing with the supernatural in my opinion should have a decent budget for special effects or else you just end up with a bunch of cheesy home made computer effects that completely take you out of the movie. And that's what happened with this film. The cheesy computer effects are quite literally laughable and just don't help the movie, specially a movie that's based on true events. You don't even need visual effects to create a scary atmosphere, but this film decided to use them anyways even if they didn't have a budget for them. Too bad.
The movie also fails to go really into Santeria as it only scratches upon the surface of this religion. In fact, it shouldn't even be called Santeria because its not really about the Santeria religion. Its more about the phenomenon of Virgin Mary sightings and how a kid who thinks it's the Virgin Mary really ends being harassed by an evil vengeful ghost. The only element that really has to do with Santeria is Ricky's mother who does a couple of rituals to try and save him, but that's it. So don't be fooled into thinking that you are going to see a movie that really goes into the whole thing and you might learn a thing or two about Santeria
cause you wont. So to me at least it was a disappointment from that angle as well. If you want to see a good movie about the subject see The Believers with Martin Sheen. Now that's a good Santeria horror film that will scare you and even teach you a thing or two about it.
So all in all, this movie was an extremely bad low budget effort that fails to deliver what it promises with its title and its poster. Its got a lot of bad acting, a lot of horrible cgi effects and its just a bad production. I watched it only to see if it would get at least a little better but it didn't. It only got worse and worse until I finally I was given no choice but to exorcise the DVD from my DVD player. The power of Christ compels you NOT to watch this pseudo horror flick! You've been warned.
Rating: 1 out of 5
