Kooky spook on prowl
A MID-STRENGTH horror movie where the filler outranks the killer throughout, The Curse of the Weeping Woman is being touted in some quarters as a distant cousin of The Conjuring and Annabelle franchises.
Not sure this is the most attractive selling point after the similarly-pedigreed The Nun stank out cinemas last year.
To be fair, when the frights do come in The Curse of the Weeping Woman, they administer a junk-laden jolt to the senses that cannot be denied.
Most of the good work is handled by a sinister spectre infamous in Mexican folklore as a one-size-fits-all bogeywoman.
Known as La Llorona (played by Marisol Ramirez), this kooky spook gets around in a wedding dress and is always on the prowl for another kid to drown.
Centuries ago, she gave her own children a deadly dunk to teach her cheating husband a lesson.
Now La Llorona is telepathically turning door handles and recklessly rearranging furniture in 1973 Los Angeles, where she has designs on the offspring of single mum social worker Anna (Linda Cardellini).
That lake-sized swimming pool in Anna’s backyard hasn’t got a fence around it. Uh-oh.
And her young children, Chris (Roman Christou) and Samantha (Jaynee Lynne Kinchen), have an irreversible tendency to put themselves in dangerous places they have been explicitly instructed not to go near. Double uh-oh.
The movie hits its peaks when La Llorona suddenly bursts into the frame (usually accompanied by a sound akin to a symphony orchestra being rapidly fed into a woodchipper) and hits the snooze button whenever she leaves.
Performances run the gamut from just passable to simply deplorable. As the nominal lead, Cardellini’s effort shifts uncertainly between these two extremes.
Weirdly, she excels in the non-horror scenes, and underwhelms when the screenplay dials up the shocks and the shrieks.
It does not help that Cardellini’s way to register fear is making the face of someone who has just realised they may have left a hot appliance running before they left for work.
The late-breaking arrival of Raymond Cruz as Rafael, a cocky ex-priest-turned-ghostbuster, will extinguish the exasperation of many viewers.
This charismatic actor knows he has been given a pile of junk with which to ply his trade, and has a little fun with his dodgy role to make the time fly by that little bit faster.