The seemingly interminable opening credits of Maria Labo are intercut with interviews about the legend with a professor, a radio voice actress, and a broadcaster. They talk about the importance and the cultural impact of the story, setting the film up as a serious attempt to capture the spirit of a vital cultural artifact. This really bizarre bid at legitimacy is hilariously done against a cheesy horror movie backdrop. Maria Labo, as it turns out is a very trashy, deeply awful movie that lacks any sort of self-awareness. It is not good, but fans of bizarrely awful cinema would do good to seek this out.
Maria (Kate Brios) is struggling to keep her family fed on the salary of her policeman husband Ermin (Jestoni Alarcon). After she encounters an old friend that worked abroad, she decides that the best thing to do for her family is to become a caregiver in the Middle East. Her time abroad, however, isn't what she thought it would be. One day while out shopping, she is abducted and raped. And while in the hospital, something really strange happens to her. She returns home deeply changed, the woman now a danger to everyone close to her.
Let's get this out of the way: this a deeply awful movie. No one involved seems to have any clue how to tell a story. It takes too long to get anywhere, since the movie keeps wasting it time on mundane details that don't add anything to a narrative. We might watch Maria shop for groceries, for example. The film could have just jumped ahead to her walking out of the store, just to get to the meat of the story faster. But it doesn't. In another scene, Maria's husband consults a spiritista. The spiritista basically says that nothing can be done, so we never see him after that. The scene seems to have been designed specifically to waste everyone's time.
It's never able to really do anything with this story, since it gets caught up in all sorts of things that don't matter. And even if the story was solid, the filmmaking is clearly not up to par. Production values are hilariously low. There's a nice bit of makeup work in the last chunk of the movie, but the rest of is just painful to witness. The sound is particularly bad. There are scenes where is a noticeable hiss in the background. And the whole film suffers from comedically bad voice dubbing. It's often out of sync, and the levels are all over the place.
It's the kind of awfulness that kind of becomes fun to watch after a while. It's just so hard to believe that something like this got made. When it comes to projects like this, the sheer madness becomes compelling in a really weird way. It helps that the cast seems really committed to the awfulness, or at the very least, they match the awfulness of the rest of the movie. Kate Brios is suitably deranged in the lead role. Jestoni Alarcon hits all of the right B-Movie lunkhead beats. One the fringes, Mon Confiado and Baron Geisler just look like they're having fun with the sheer stupidity of what they're doing.
Maria Labo is uniquely, beautifully awful. It isn't the kind of film that really belongs in our cinemas, but it has a place in the future cult canon for truly terrible films. Some day, if it somehow remains available, this will be a classic of ironic viewing. Its clips ought to live a long life on YouTube, where random silliness reigns. Animated gifs of some of its scenes could fuel the meme machine for years to come. Because this film, complete with its pretensions of maintaining a legend and preserving a vital part of culture, is one of the funniest things to ever hit our cinemas.
My Rating:
