Hey there Los Angeles Fright fans! Time for another Friday Night Frights!
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Generally we strive to bring you gems from the horror movie vault, but we also love offering up intriguing new films whenever we can, like Tucker and Dale Vs Evil, Stake Land, or Kill List. This week I’m pumped to be screening one of the more entertaining films I saw at last year’s Fantastic Fest, Juan of the Dead — which has been winning audience awards at film fests around the world. Because my cohost Sebastian and I really wanted to have director Alejandro Brugués on hand for a Q&A we needed to break with our traditional Friday at midnight schedule…
This show will be on Thurs 21 at 7:30pm @ The Cinefamily.
So this week I guess we’re Thursday Early-Evening Frights! Boogah boogah!
Quoth the FNF power blurb:
Fifty years after the Cuban Revolution, a brand-new hostile takeover is taking place, but these rebels only want one thing: to chomp your flesh. Welcome to the very first independent film to emerge from Castro’s World in half a century! Our hero Juan is a shiftless procrastinator, but knows an opportunity to make a quick buck when he sees one — so when Havana is overrun with zombies, Juan bands his friends together to form a ragtag “cleaning service” militia, ridding households of unwanted, undead loved ones. Much like Romero’s late-‘70s gold standard in satirizing modern culture through zombification, Juan of the Dead takes every opportunity to hilariously skewer the everyday ins-and-outs of Cuban society, from the government classifying the putrid hordes as “dissidents”, to public transport that still runs regardless of the bloody carnage. And, it’s gloriously splatterific from top to bottom — would we have it any other way?
Check out the trailer!
For theater info or ticket purchases go here.
CONTEST
I feel like this is fairly obvious, yet it apparently could stand to be more obvious: This screening is happening in Los Angeles.
As always I am giving away some free tickets (each with a +1). To enter all you need to do is send an email to wormmiller@gmail.com with JUAN in the subject line. Include your full name. I will only be contacting the winners.
Good hunting!
2 comments
Had the pleasure of catching this recently. It’s a little rough around the edges but the obvious enthusiasm of the cast and crew is infectious and help carry the film. I’m sure it’s destined to be a cult classic.
I had the misfortune to buy this on DVD, after heavy rotation of the promising trailer on AICN and terrestrial telly. £9 down the shitter.
The film is derivative in the worst sense, failing at the emulations it attempts, and where it tries to depart, or build on, existing gags, just falling hopelessly flat (I’m particularly thinking of the rooftop scene between Juan and his best mate, the “gay” line, his mate falling asleep, etc.).
The performances are lame, the action is ridiculously amateur, but these are all secondary to the fact that the script is just horrible, horrible, horrible. To says the characterisation was weak implies that there was an attempt at characterisation in the first place. The plot is full of holes, unmotivated actions, unexplained character shifts, and poor, poor efforts at homage.
There were a couple of inspired ideas (zombies can’t drown – ergo, large expanses of water are not a problem for them – they just walk underwater across the seabed), but also a couple of frustratingly unanswered questions raised (why are some zombies fast and others slow?).
Agh. Don’t waste your money. Watch SOTD instead. Or 28 Days Later. Fuck it, watch The Care Bears Movie – you’re much more likely to have nightmares/get laughs from that than this fetid heap of mouldering turnips.
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