The Curse of el Charro [Import]

It's easy to be cynical about slasher movies. The fetishization of women, the sex, the violence - par for the course, but horror movie fans know that many movies rise above these tropes. For every female that is fetishized there's the Final Girl who defeats the boogieman; for every oversexed character there's a morality message about abstinence; for every violent attack there's...well okay slasher movies ARE pretty violent.

The Curse of El Charro is every ridiculous stereotype rolled into one. It's that bad.

It starts with Maria (Drew Mia), haunted by the same nightmares that caused her sister to commit suicide. Maria spends the entire movie moping. She mopes about not having many friends, mopes about being at parties, and mopes about El Charro trying to claim her soul. We know that El Charro plans to claim Maria as his bride in hell because there's a movie-within-a-movie silent film that spells this out in black-and-white. Narration? Plot? The Curse of El Charro gives up any stagecraft and just tells the audience what's going on.

In orbit around Maria are three party favors: sex-bomb Tanya (Kathryn Taylor), goth drug-addict Rose (KellyDawn Malloy), and nice girl Chris (Heidi Androl). Not one of them has any redeeming qualities whatsoever. Rose gleefully distributes drugs to Maria even though she's clearly psychotic, Tanya never shuts up about having sex, and Chris is guilty of being the sole intelligent human being who exercises terrible judgment in men, friends, and vacation spots.

The slasher isn't even interesting. El Charro is a guy in a trench coat, broad-brimmed hat, and wields a machete. He has a bit of zombie-style makeup, but mostly he trudges through undergrowth. The most interesting thing about Charro is that he's voiced by Danny Trejo, who isn't anywhere in this film.

You could rationalize that the reason this movie is so carnally shallow is because Charro's lust-object chose a life of pious service to God over the sins of the flesh. But that's letting it off the hook. The real curse here is wasting 90 minutes of your life watching this film.

First, I feel misled by the cast listing, which said Danny Trejo was in the movie. Wrong! He appears nowhere and is just the "voice" of El Charro.
The movie itself was horrible. The characters were caricatures, the plot (if you can call it that) was laughable, especially the ending, the killings were lame, and don't even get me started with the "vision/exposition via silent movie."
There were only 2 scenes I will remember (hence my review isn't titled 91 Minutes Down the Crapper): the brief scenes with Britney, whose foul mouth probably garnered the R-rating by itself (but it was funny), and the scene that takes place at 1:17.
Note that the only 5-star review here was submitted by the director. I watched this on cable, and I wanted to like the movie, but I wouldn't recommend spending money to rent or buy it.

Hysterical terrifying and monumental in the genre.... Great direction unique and storytelling. Will be looking out for future films. Had me laughing and then screaming