Fantasia Roundup! KM 31!

Can you say 'exercise in frustration'?

Here's the thing. Taken as a series of individual moments, KM 31 is a fantastic picture, very well cast and very strong on the technical end. It's pretty to look at, moody as all hell, shocking in the right places, and loaded with some truly disturbing imagery sure to burrow its way deep into your skull. But somewhere - and I'm not quite sure where - something went wrong and that something keeps the moments from ever coming together into a truly coherent whole.

An adaptation of an ancient Mexican legend - La Llorona - the film revolves around a pair of identical twin sisters, Agata and Catalina, who have some sort of psychic link. While driving to meet Catalina one night Agata hits a young, nearly naked boy who rushes in front of her car and when she gets out to check on him is struck herself, horribly mutilated and left in coma in the hospital with both legs amputated while Catalina is plagued by horrible dreams and Agata's voice in her head begging her for help. The boy, meanwhile, has disappeared without a trace. The search for understanding turns up years of mysterious accidents at that precise location - mile marker 31 on a remote highway - and a series of ghostly occurences.

That the film is clearly derivative in some of its key elements - the ghostly boy can't help but bring Toshio from the Ju-On films to mind - isn't the issue as director Rigoberto Castañeda gives the proceedings a uniquely enough Mexican spin to keep them fresh, but what is the issue is the way the film makes odd leaps in its character relationships and plots that make little sense. If you can't connect with the characters, after all, little else matters. Whether this is a script issue - possible - or an editing issue - more likely as Filmax reportedly cut the film by roughly twenty minutes without the director's involvement or approval - is not entirely clear but with the technical chops this thing has it should have been much more than it was.

So, screening done it was off to the airport, where the lady-friend arrived safely, then off for dinner and a cheery walk back to the hotel on which a drunk native woman informed us that the lady-friend had "nice titties". True, but not the sort of thing you normally are informed of on the street by random people.

It's a much busier day today - I'll be introducing the screening of On Evil Grounds, so come on by and say hi - so off I go ...