Vacation of Terror (1989)

Vacation of Terror (1989) Directed by Rene Cardona III

Nothing happens in this sort of Mexican Amityville Horror meets the conventions of creepy evil doll genre. An idle affair, produced and written by one of the major families in the Mexican film and TV industry, and helmed by another of the great names in Mexican genre cinema, Vacation of Terror should have been a thrilling slice of supernatural horror filmmaking, but it turned out to be the antonym of thrilling. René Cardona III’s film about an affluent Mexican family that inherits an old country house – where the execution of a witch, who before her death cursed the area, took place – Fernando (Julio Aleman) the personable patriarch decides to spend a vacation with his three young children, his wife and niece in their new, inherited rural home, unaware of the supernatural provenance of those haunted lands. Although this rustic and spooky setting is ideal for convincing us of paranormal phenomena, the tale is atrociously infantile in its staged credulity starring actors who can’t even hide their disbelief at the ridiculous ghostly shenanigans. In this kind of unstable filmmaking, lousy acting can be functional or dysfunctional, but here it’s too awful even in the parts where the camp factor is mildly enjoyable. Gabriela Hassel playing the teenage niece is sheer eye-candy charm, and Pedro Fernandez as her boyfriend playing a superstitious chatterbox is more comic relief than the ultimate hero the movie suggests he is. Cute horror I guess, but cute, not quite the experience I’m looking for when watching a horror flick – employing extreme close-ups of a doll’s eyes darting around ad nauseam, I’d bet they’re reused shots, is not what I expect from a vacation of horror, just ennui. Also, this “horror” film has the rare, erroneous temerity to have a body count of zero.