Main cast: Linda Cardellini (Anna Tate-Garcia), Roman Christou (Chris Garcia), Jaynee-Lynne Kinchen (Samantha Garcia), Raymond Cruz (Rafael Olvera), Patricia Velásquez (Patricia Alvarez), Marisol Ramirez (La Llorona), Sean Patrick Thomas (Detective Cooper), and Tony Amendola (Father Perez)
Director: Michael Chaves
Released as The Curse of the Weeping Woman in this part of the world, The Curse of La Llorona features – what else? – the ghost featured in the folklore of several countries (predominantly Mexico) which has a woman drowning her two children out of spite when she was jilted by the father of those children, only to be overcome by remorse and died shortly after, also by drowning. For her sins, she was denied an afterlife and roamed as a ghost, often kidnapping children and drowning them in a cycle of tragic violence. This movie, however, turns that potentially terrifying legend into a harbinger of – that’s right – jump scares.
First, the plot. Social worker Anna Tate-Garcia inadvertently dooms the two sons of Patricia Alvarez when she mistakes the woman’s effort to protect the boys as some kind of abuse and has the boys placed under temporary police custody. The La Llorona turns up and bye bye, boys. Understandably consumed by a need for vengeance, Patricia prays to La Llorona to claim Anna’s own two children. So now Anna has to save her own children, and boom, jump scare, crash, jump scare…
This movie is part of what is called The Conjuring Universe only in that it features Father Perez, who was also in those dumb Annabelle movies, and it embodies the pointlessness of the whole thing. The plot is threadbare, and a frightening legend is reduced to being a woman in a hilariously awful and fake-looking costume sprinkled with cheesy and cheap CGI effects. The formula is dead obvious by now: slow camera pans in a scene contrived to be as dark as possible, increasingly loud music forecasting in advance the – CRASH! BOOM! – predictable jump scare; repeat and repeat.
So, so boring and predictable, and not at all scary aside from how tired and broken the whole failure that is modern horror has become. Who do I watch this thing again? Oh, right, I had free tickets. Hope you have a better excuse to be dragged into seeing this unnecessary waste of time.
