the curse of la llorona [2019]

when the going gets tough the tough watches horror movies.  or so i like to tease myself.  our present day problems are depressing the hell out of me.  so when i saw this flick on HBO a couple nights ago i thought, what the hell, let's give it a shot.

the theme of this pic is the weeping woman [la llorona] who lost her children in a tragic way & is cursed to wander the land stealing other parents' kids along the way.  she is a figure out of folklore & bad dreams.  but what if she is real?  well, it is the early 1970s, the wonderful actor linda cardellini is anna, a social worker who must take the case of a troubled mother who lost her children.  anna herself is the mother of two small children.  little does she know that la llorona took this troubled mother's children.  this tortured woman leads la llorona to anna's kids in the belief that if she gives these kids over to the vengeful spirit the weeping woman would return her own children to her.

does it work out that way?  what the hell.  this is a horror movie & nearly all horror movies are filled with characters who make the stupidest choices.  anna enlists the help of a defrocked, disillusioned, priest to battle la llorona before her own kids are snatched by the evil presence.  the ex priest, rafael, played by a solemn & monotone raymond cruz, practices a kind of mysticism that can cause damage to la llorona.

all the jump scares & scary tropes are present, somewhat effectively.  the director, michael chaves, knows the horror movie traditions of the past 40-50 years well enough.  the make-up & design & antics of la llorona are deeply indebted to early 2000s asian horror movie monsters.  these are not bad things.  la llorona does look like a myth come to life.  but there were a couple of set pieces where i thought chaves & co. borrowed too heavily on well-known tropes like being attacked while taking a bath & fabrics like window curtains blowing into the shape of the creature.

& yet i watched this flick all the way thru.  maybe that is more in line with my own love of cheap horror movies, or is it a kind of celluloid masochism.  did i mention linda cardellini stars in this flick?  i'll watch nearly anything that she is in.  back in the video store days i remember seeing the box art of strangeland [1998] starring & written by twisted sister rocker dee snider.  it freaked me out it did.  it was linda cardellini's face with her mouth sewn shut.  yuck.  it wasn't until many years later that i did see that flick.  i have the same opinion of snider's effort as i do have of chaves' finished film.  watch at your own risk.