Filmmaker Jamie Grefe may have access to my wish journal. How else can you explain this title? Now, the movie… this may be something nobody wished for. A woman slowly scampers around a home that may be the vacation rental set of telenovela, suffering from severe constipation or maybe trying keep anything from noticing her. She quietly calls over a younger woman who is dressed like she should be on her way to a Stomp the Yard style competition. They’re both pretty frightened or constipated. A third young woman creeps behind a chair, looking around the room. The trio quietly join together and exit the dining room they were in. Well, two of them do. The Stomp the Yard girl joins them in returning to the room she was just in. This is not a great way to spend the first seven minutes of your sixty-one minute movie. But I’m an old fashioned sort that likes things to happen in his entertainment. All together now, they whisper and direct via hand movements while still slowly lumbering around the place. Slow motion sneaking, sitting and staring further drags things out. The reason for their inactive activeness and unsympathetic twelve minutes of inanity? Well, it seems to be there’s someone hanging around outside with a dirty burlap sack over their head. But please don’t take this revelation to mean we are done with watching the three women slowly move around their surroundings. No. There’s plenty more of that in store. The mother (I assume as she is rocking some mom jeans) hides her girls away in a room and continues to look around (or be constipated). One of the daughters leaves the other daughter to go find their mother after a few seconds of being separated. Why is this happening? Curtains are pulled back in slow motion, ol’ sack-head peeps through windows, deep breaths are taken (also in slow motion), Stomp the Yard girl (Lydia) claims to feel a presence, mom attempts to keep things under control (Man, those mom jeans are super tight. If she farts, she will blow her shoes off), sack-head (I think he’s supposed to be the chupacabra) creeps around the lovely backyard, in camera effects paint things with a layer of surrealism that feels a few decades out of place, Lydia (sometimes Lidia in the subtitles) calls on The Weeping Woman for assistance (it causes her to go cross-eyed… ACTING!), the director himself portrays the softly wailing La Llorona (realized by a face-covering black wig, sensible t-shirt/dress and shoulder strap (?) combo), the longest strangulation in film history happens and soon (well, not “soon” as we humans think of it) we’re left with the realization that the lackluster legends are never going to confront each other. No reason is given and no minute is not stretched out into oblivion. Jamie Grefe had a dream but sadly the most impressive part of that dream was a title because everything else was shoved through quickly drying wet cement and rendered through a misremembered filmmaking tutorial by Jean Rollin’s bored ghost. The truly sad thing about me, is that the rhythmic hum of the whole experience eventually entranced me much like even the most ass-numbing work of that French director. Three attractive women and two legends join together in a repetitive ramble of a film that I probably enjoyed a hell of a lot more than many people should. Is Jamie Grefe the new Jean Rollin? Probably but he’s working within the budgetary confines of an early Polonia flick without the sexual hangups and youthful obsession with splatter. So maybe Grefe is more like Wim Vink but with attractive friends and a better grasp on how to do nothing.
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