Thanks Tubi.

I’m a little saddened by the idea that Danny Trejo has been in two films now that I was unable to sit through, the first being Vampfather and the second being The Legend of La Llorona. Actually I did finish this movie, but it took two sittings. I’d go down the route of putting Trejo on my blacklist for film watching but he seems to be increasingly doing my job for me. I looked up a couple of Trejo films from 2022 to see if I’d be interested in having them on my list, and you can’t find them anywhere. He did a film called A Pray For Judas, but it doesn’t even have an IMDB listing.

I was also using the excuse that I didn’t want to pay $5 to rent any of his movies, and they are so unpopular nobody is even pirating them, but increasingly they are showing up on Tubi. Well there’s my excuse.

The Legend of La Llorona is such a bad film its creation should be considered a hate crime. Directed by Canadian white woman Patricia Harris Seeley who looks like the closest she’s come to encountering Mexican culture is a Doordash order from Chipotle, the film has all the acting and budget of what might be considered a less memorable episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark, especially when the dad who faced with the stress of possibly losing his son shouts of “for frick’s sake!” Was this made for Nickelodeon?

If you want a really good La Llorona film, I highly recommend 2019’s La Llorona directed by Guatemalan horror filmmaker Jayro Bustamante. It’s available on Amazon Prime.

The Legend of La Llorona pulls its stale plot out of the trash, dusts it off, and presents it as edible. A white family travels to Mexico to “get away from it all” as the mother deals with the convenient plot device of recently losing a child. Autumn Reeser plays Carly Candlewood, a woman who has no chemistry with husband Andrew Candlewood played by Antonio Cupo. Despite Autumn being Scottish and Antonio being Italian, their child Danny is very Spanish, being played by Nicolas Madrazo. Hey Andrew, you might want to get a paternity test. That poor child, growing up in a home where everything is boiled and unseasoned.

The trip to Mexico seems to be a way to fit in the plot device of the white family having a deeply religious Mexican servant without being called out for a tired and kinda racist trope, since the home they are staying at is hosted by Veronica (Angélica Lara) who doesn’t even get a last name. She’s not their maid, she’s the hostess. The movie randomly doesn’t subtitle the Spanish dialogue so the white people can ask “what did you say?” so the actors can repeat it in English and waste everyone’s time and pad this out to 90 minutes.

And the reason I say The Legend of La Llorona is bad enough to be considered racist, is that it just about barely pays lip service to the legend. La Llorona is a Mexican spirit who stays in or near the water and kidnaps children, her origin in folk tales typically being a woman who drowned her children in a fit of rage after seeing her husband cheating on her. In her regret, she drowns herself and instead of moving on to the afterlife comes back as a ghost in search of children to make her own. Any child will do.

Patricia Seeley’s version of La Llorona involves a Mexican mistress having a baby with a rich man only for him to reject both of them. He sees her possibly thinking about drowning the baby and takes the kid before hitting her in the face with a small rock and then she’s a phantom or something. Yeah, that’s the origin story. To top it off, Seeley sprinkles in some really dumb shit to amp up the storytelling, doing unorthodox things like having La Llorona start appearing in the day or taking Danny Trejo because she’s “getting stronger,” and they say it very casually like it’s a coherent plot idea that has any impact on anything.

Seeley also doesn’t understand plot pacing, given Danny gets kidnapped about five times over the course of this hour and a half film only to inexplicably just show up a minute or two later. Maria is really bad at kidnapping children for a spirit we literally see whisp a child away into smoke in a flashback. The last twenty minutes or so are shot day for night and there’s multiple scenes of people attempting to shoot the ghost with a gun. None of the jump scares in the movie are even the least bit frightening, given there’s no tension buildup and the CGI is pathetically bad.

Even the characters aren’t very frightened in the film, as most chase scenes showcase our heroes running at a light jog.

The Legend of La Llorona is crap and the only positive thing I can say about it is that Danny Trejo kinda looks like he cares. At least he seems more energetic than he did in Vampfather. Actually I can say two positive things. Zamia Fardiño plays Maria/La Llorona and also seemed to enjoy hamming it up for the camera. I won’t mention the embarrassment that the guy who scored this film, Tim Wynn, also scored The Starving Games.

Edgar Wuotto is a handsome man.

Rating: F