Cañitas, presencia (2007)

Highly Overrated But Still Good

It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

So, you are entertaining the idea of watching this Mexican flick? Perhaps you heard that it is based on a very famous book authored by some big-time researcher? Well, as you know there are different ways of being famous and this movie and its related book are extremely famous for being perhaps some of the worst ever works of fiction made by any person during the course of human history. It's author is a well known fraud. This movie is so catastrophically moronic and staggeringly bad, is so bad indeed that any attempt to measure its true terribleness would create a black hole that would destroy the universe as we know it. The acting, the music, the filming, lighting, every single thing that you can imagine is bad with this movie. So please, turn around and run away from it as fast as you can and never look back. This is quite probably the lowest point of Mexican cinema, from this point forward it can only be better, they have effectively hit rock bottom.

Well I exaggerated a little. But to be honest, "Cañitas" is truly one of the worst Horror movies ever produced in México, and if I go further; in the history of Horror cinema.I'm a Horror enthusiastic and I can proudly say that I've watched most of Mexican Horror movies in order to generate a Horror-movie culture in my beautiful country, México.But "Cañitas" made fun of Horror fans with a lame plot, boring pace, horrible acting, laughable and mediocre f/x (a little effort wouldn't hurt), silly dialogs, and absolutely no sense of the word "fear" or even suspense.This is by far the worst Mexican production in cinema from the millennium. I'm not exaggerating. Please, avoid this movie and the novel! Everything's a hoax.

There are two kinds of opinions about Carlos Trejo's movie: he thinks it's the best movie in the world. The rest of Mexico believes it's not worth the time you spend watching it. In fact, it's not even a horror movie. It's a comedy. And it is also a bad comedy. It has bad acting, bad special effects (in fact, it has special defects), bad photograph, bad sound, bad everything. It has lots of continuity errors: you can look through the window and it's illuminated in a frame, but in the next scene it's dark, and the only change has been that the camera switched actors. It has more holes in the plot than a fisher's net. I believe that the argument was produced by the proverbial typing monkeys, but instead of typing "Hamlet" at random they typed "Cañitas" on purpose. The only good thing about the movie it's the end: it means that you can go home if you are still awake.Considering that the so-called book of the same name is bad written, you can imagine why this movie is so bad. Don't watch this movie. It makes "Plan 9 from Outer Space" look good.

This film reminds me the Mexican cinema of the 80's, "el cine de piojito" or "louse cinema", as we mexicans used to call it, and I don't think that's a good thing.The chaotic camera movement wants to be similar to 24, the series, or some Dogma wannabe, but just doesn't feel right to this particular story about a possessed house in the vein of Amytiville but completely surrounded, at least emotionally, by the virus of "el ahí se va-region 4". And well, compared with the Kiefer Sutherland's show or any film by the pupils of Lars Von Trier, results bad executed.The acting is awful and the screenplay is full of black holes and absurdities (the deaf kid provokes laughs because he always seems to hear the voices of the rest of the actors).In the cinema that I attended, some people were shouting at the end: "Give us back our money!". And, in general, I've only heard bad comments of the film. Nonetheless, the film has had some good box office -at leas compared to recent Mexican releases like Jokel or Cuando las cosas suceden-, but for some extra-cinematographic reasons. I'll explain: a good friend of mine told me that he wanted to see the film because he had morbosity. And yes, that explains everything!: people go to see this film for pure morbosity, it's so bad and laughable and kitsch and mediocre, that people just can't avoid it.And that's a very frustrating and sad thing for Mexican cinema.