Borderland

I have a problem with the new genre of "torture *" that has muscled its way into the horror movie limelight with such movies as Hostel and Touristas. It's sick, repugnant, and of virtually no redeeming value, and yet, like a moth to a flame, I can't bring myself to not watch it, even though I end up cursing myself for subjugating my mind to its imagery afterward. Such was the case when the 2007 edition of Montreal's Fantasia Film Festival scheduled a screening of Borderland. I found myself driving downtown muttering to myself how I was going to regret this. And truth be told, I almost did, except that the movie came packaged in a fully fleshed out story (pun intended) that had the added impact of having been based on a true story. In 1989, Mexican police unearthed 12 bodies in the town of Matamoros. Their brains and spinal cords had been removed. It was later determined that a gang of drug smugglers had been practicing their own form of Santeria, a religious hybrid of Catholicism and African religions, similar to Voodoo. The leader of the gang, Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo, was worshiped as a living god by his followers and practiced the ritual sacrifice of wayward individuals in the belief that the gods would make them invisible to the police as they went about their drug smuggling operation. This is the backdrop that Borderland sets itself against as it tells the tale of a trio of Americans from Texas who head for a short stay in Mexico to indulge in some fast women and cheap booze. Along the way they hook up with a stunning and resourcefully independent Mexican barmaid played by Martha Higareda (soon to be seen alongside Keanu Reeves and Hugh Laurie in The Night Watchmen) and, as fate would have it, cross paths with members of the gang. The movie also delivers some truly twisted casting as Sean Austin of Lord of the Rings renown takes a villainous turn as the lone American member of the Santeria drug gang. Director Zev Berman, for whom this movie marks only his third stint holding the directorial reigns, does a remarkably good job keeping the pacing tight and focused, blending a nice mix of story, action and (I hate to say it) gore, even though it's this latter part that I dearly wish could be toned down. The version I saw had not yet been rated by the MPAA so if there's any hope, the more unnecessarily gory parts of it will be excised before it gets given its cinematic release. While I'm no advocate of censorship, some of the gorier shots were just plain gratuitous. Berman would do well to re-cut the movie taking a cue from the original Saw (as opposed to the sequels), which illustrated just how gory you could make a movie while showing so little. Still, Borderland plays out to a satisfying pay off, and never let my interest flag along the way, even if it did have me watching large chunks (pun intended, again) through my fingers, which, I suppose, is a good thing for some folks.

source: Borderland

'Compact' is the word I'd use to describe Borderland. It doesn't offer anything revolutionary which will blow your mind, but, if you're a fan of the genre, you should find it satisfying. It follows the (familiar) story of X good-looking young Americans, travelling to X and running into trouble in the form of X. Sometimes these packs of good-looking young Americans are girls, sometimes boys, other time a mixed group. Sometimes they travel to a remote town in America, sometimes a remote town in Europe. Once they get to where they're going, they run into trouble in the form of zombie/vampires/ghosts/rednecks/cannibals - choose your 'nasty.' In this instance, three lads travel to Mexico and get mixed up with... well, you'll have to watch it to find out. Like I say, the story is pretty generic. I've seen plenty of these sorts of movies (you can probably tell by my cynical tone), but this one is pretty reasonable. The protagonists aren't (completely) unlikeable, don't do (too many) stupid things and you can basically root for their plight. If you like this sort of film, give it a go. Trust me, there are many worse than this (and I've sat through almost every last one of them).

"Borderland" belongs in the category of the nowadays indescribably popular "torture-*" movies, along with titles such as "Hostel", "Saw", "Live Feed", "Blood Trails", etc… This basically means they are excessively gross but nonsensical and forgettable films without a plot or amiable characters. But for some reason this one left an aftertaste in my mouth that is far more sour than usual. It's not a particularly good film, but it implements a truly unsettling atmosphere as well as an almost unequaled nihilistic narrative style. Perhaps this has to do with the fact "Borderland" is inspired by true events, namely the discovery of a mass grave just across the Mexican border and filled with victims of a satanic cult who had their brains and spine columns removed. The wraparound story of the three American guys may be fictional, but the ritual sacrifices of the cult are supposedly truthful and that is more than enough reason to label this as one of the most disturbing movies of the past couple of years. The opening ten minutes are particularly grim, cold and distant, showing two Mexican cops busting into an abandoned house in search of the cult's fugitive leader. One of the cops is submitted to severe torture – including removal of the eyeballs – whilst the other one is forced to watch. It's definitely an intro that counts and grabs your attention, to say the least. The next few chapters are more typical and clichéd horror stuff, with a trio of hormone-driven guys crossing the Mexican border with only booze, drugs, parties and sexy women on their minds. One of them naturally gets kidnapped by members of the cult and his only remaining purpose is to serve as the next sacrifice to their bizarre God. The two remaining friends, and a randomly picked up Mexican hottie, combine forces with the survivor cop from the intro. The majority of the film is actually very mundane, simplistic and even on the verge of being really boring! There also isn't much suspense, background information or character development… There's nothing extraordinary going on here, except relentless and genuinely shocking brutality. But hey, the lack of creativity is at least widely compensated by the dark ambiance and the grueling scenery. And multiple moments of extremely graphical content, of course! There's one integrally shown sequence, for example, in which at least seven or eight cult members club someone to death using meat cleavers, baseball bats and large butcher's knives. It's definitely not a film intended for the squeamish and/or people with a sensitive stomach. Most curious aspect is perhaps that Sean Astin, who gained name-fame and glory since the Lords of the Rings trilogy, stars in a truly inglorious role of loathsome disciple in service of the Mexican cult. Bizarre career move, if you ask me...

In Mexico City, while chasing the leader of a cult, Detective Ulises (Damián Alcázar) is forced to watch his partner being tortured and murdered by the criminals. One year later, the teenage Americans Ed (Brian Presley), Phil (Rider Strong) and Henry (Jake Muxworthy) are in a summer camp in Galveston and they decide to travel to the borderland in Mexico to get laid with Mexican hookers. Ed has a crush on the bartender Valeria (Martha Higareda) and the virgin Phil feels attracted by a young prostitute with a baby and decides to give a teddy bear to the child. However, he is abducted by the followers of Palo Myombe that are preparing a human sacrifice to get the Power of Nganga to become invisible while smuggling drugs. "Borderland" is another flawed and brutal movie of torture. The story is very violent and graphic, and fans of this genre might like it. However, there are many holes and unreasonable situations in the screenplay like, for example, why Detective Ulises is in disgrace that is never well explained. Why Valeria joins Ulises and Ed when they break into the farm crowded of dangerous and fanatic drug-dealers is totally useless and unreasonable. My vote is six. Title (Brazil): "O Limite do Medo" ("The Limit of the Fear")

Borderland starts as three college buddies, Ed (Brian Presley), Phil (Rider Strong) & Henry (Jake Muxworthy) decide to head off to Mexico for a wild weekend of drink & women before going their separate ways as they leave school. The friends drive to a small Mexican border town where Ed meets a barmaid named Valeria (Martha Higareda) & Phil goes off with a prostitute. later that night they all meet again & Phil decides to go back to the hotel by himself but gets kidnapped on the street & driven off in a car. Waking up Phil finds himself tied up in a barn on a farm belonging to Mexican drug dealer Santillan (Beto Cuevas) & his cannibalistic cult of killers who worship him as some sort of God. Worried that Phil has gone missing Ed & Henry contact the Mexican police but they seem unwilling to help, together with Valeria & a old cop with a grudge against the cult they must go it alone in an attempt to save their friend... This Mexican & American co-production was written & directed by Zev Berman & according to the opening titles is 'Based on True Events' although I'd take that with a pinch of salt if I were you, available in an 'Unrated' version that is the one I will be basing my comments on. Just how much of Borderland is actually based on true events is anyone's guess, I personally have never heard of anything like this before & maybe the makers just say a tiny little piece in a newspaper with sketchy details & went from there making most of it up, who know's? Who cares? At almost an hour & fifty minutes long Borderland is easily thirty odd minutes too long, with a low body count & not much of a story Borderland drags badly & I can't really say I remember that much about it even though I only saw it a few hours ago. The character's are all unlikable, despite a few attempts at human drama the script is poor & the attempts to flesh the character's out go nowhere like the speech where Ed says he's not going to college when they get back, the cops warnings in the police station, the rambling speeches that the main bad guy has, the Mexican barmaid who serves no great purpose & just about everyone else barely make an impact. Despite being 'Unrated' the body count is low, just three good guy's & a few baddies right at the end & none of the kills are particularly memorable. Some of the dialogue is difficult to understand as various people speak in thick Mexican accents, I can't say the story grabbed me & as a whole it was fairly predictable as well with the now standard hero kills bad guy's & ends up with pretty girl routine at the climax. I must admit Borderland annoyed me, as well as being boring & not that gory the whole twitchy camera got on my nerves. While not as bad as some films where you can't see what's going on because of the excessive jerking of the camera Borderland features a camera that never stays still, it's always twitching & moving which just gets irritating. The film looks bland with bleached out colours, Borderland is just a unremarkable & colourless film. I was expecting a bit more gore here, there's a brief shot of a hand being sawn off, two plucked out eyeballs are seen (the eye's being taken out is not shown), there's a bit of blood splatter, a guy is stabbed with a machete in the shoulder, there are a few bullet wounds & a decapitated head but not much else. Actually filmed in Mexico on what was probably a low budget, the production values are alright but that twitchy moving camera got on my nerves as did the very washed out colour scheme used. The acting was alright, nothing to write home about or anything though. Borderland is another cheap horror film that thinks it's gorier & cleverer than it is, with little in the way of developed story or character's & an almost complete lack of gore along with the pedestrian pace means Borderland never gets going.

I was fairly entertained by this film, but it wasn't anything I would run out and tell my friends about. Very well written story, very believable acting including one VERY intense role by Jake Muxworthy. Borderland had its ups and downs when it came to the overall play out, but it was very well made none the less. The death scenes were gruesome, the reactions were emotional and well done and the little comedy that was there was actually quite witty. Over all I think it is very much worth the watch, but if you're looking to get blown away by a movie, I wouldn't recommend this one. I believe Muxworthy is an actor that is going to have a very bright future in this business, he absolutely has the skill to star in a mainline film.

This American/Mexican movie from the border between USA and Mexico is loosely based on a true story, which is hard to accept. But evil exists, and it's awful to get to know about it. And this is a story difficult to see and comprehend. Three young guys go down to Mexico one summer, where they experience that one of them disappears. One of them is kidnapped by humans believing in human sacrificing to the spirit Nganga. The cult leader is based upon The story of Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo! The so-called Godfather of Matamoros. They found more than fifty corpses where brains and spinal cords had been removed. Well, that's the true story, of a case which still isn't closed, as several members of the cult still is on the run. The film is technically good, and well done in all aspects. The colors are gritty, made with color filters, like many Latin American film has been lately. In this film it's very suitable. Sometimes maybe a bit too much, as it is sometimes difficult to see clearly, outdoors in the sun. Indoors it's better. The film is made terrifying, as it should be. many actors are doings terrific job. Maybe not so much Brian Presley and Jake MuxWorthy as Rudef Strong. But the Mexicans are doing great, and I always admire Damian Alcazar (amazing in 2004-film Chronicas/Chronicles). The crook Marco Bacuzzi is amazingly terrifying as a violent evil man. One of the scariest I've seen on film ever. The bad guys here are really disgusting all of them. Well played. I find this a very good film, Though I don't like this kind of violence. I hate watching it, and definitely more do when it is a true story. This is of course it's not everyone's porridge. If you trouble with graphic films, this is no film for you. It's no constellation "this is just film", 'cause it isn't just. It is based on a true happening, found in the insanity of some human's religion. Embrace yourself.

I saw this on the last night of our local Horrorfest 2007 and was both duly horrified and impressed. To me this is an outstanding horror film that could stand alongside Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, and Friday the 13th. The tale provides a really delightfully horrifying mix of quasi-religious/satanist cultishness, sadistic gore, fun-loving college students plunged into terror, and nightmarish cross-cultural confusion. The script was solidly scary; it delivers and delivers well. I really like the basic strategy: starting with a really nasty, brutal, scary torture scene, introducing the horrifyingly sadistic and creepy Gustavo; then for a fairly lengthy time we have this wonderful story full of indirection and feints and suggestiveness, including all kinds of cultural misdirection and confusion, during which I kept looking for a new horror along the lines of the initial scene of horror; and finally after this long fear-inducing build-up, we get an even more horrifying torture scene and a bloodbath to go along with it. To me this all works very, very well, and the script gets top props for this arrangement and for really solid scenes throughout. The script is even sprinkled with some really great lines: "The border has no memory." "I'll be back when I know what I'm doing." The script was executed very convincingly. The acting was consistently solid. Brian Presley's Ed was excellent and convincing, and Jake Muxworthy gave us an excellent rendition of party-loving Henry. Valeria is attractively portrayed by Martha Higareda. As for the cult and cult members, the script as executed gives the cult as such a strong "flavor" while giving us convincing portrayals of several very distinctively wicked members of the cult. The leader of the cult, Beto Cuevas' Santillan, was not for me nearly as salient as Marco Bacuzzi's Gustavo. Bacuzzi gives us a Gustavo who is to me so sadistic, so creepy, and so scene-dominating that I would really put him in the same pantheon of nasty horror characters as Jason and Michael Myers and Hannibal Lector. The cinematography is consistently outstanding, and there are some really great visuals. I especially liked the scenes in the amusement park, and some of the indoor scenes: such as the early scene of a policeman looking down a blue corridor with a statue of the Virgin Mary in a niche in the wall behind him; and then another in which one of the female characters is climbing an indoor circular staircase. But really almost all of the scenes were really composed very effectively; and the gory scenes were as gory and creepy and scary as one could wish. The only really big objection I had was to the sound, which was just horribly washed out, obscure, and sometimes almost non-existent, as in the case of several gunshots that sounded like pencils tapping on a table. I couldn't really believe that the movie's sound could be this bad, except that another audience member in my theater said he talked with theater staff, which did try to make adjustments of some kind, utterly unsuccessful. And I'll admit that I'd much rather see Gustavo as the top cult-creep. But all in all, this is a wonderful horror movie that deserves a lot wider recognition as such, IMHO.

Released in 2007, "Borderland" is a horror film about three college guys (Brian Presley, Jake Muxworthy & Rider Strong) on Spring Break in Galveston, Texas, who decide to skip over the border to party with the prostitutes. Their vacation goes awry when they run afoul of a brutal drug cult, led by a charismatic-but-diabolic occultist (Beto Cuevas). Damián Alcázar plays a Mexican detective while Martha Higareda appears as the potential girlfriend of one of the Americans. Marco Bacuzzi plays the top cult henchmen with Sean Astin an American enlistee. The opening epilogue involves a gory torture sequence, which is unpleasant to say the least, but the story soon switches to the three Americans and their trip to Mexican strip joints where a couple curvy señoritas are highlighted. I could tell this was shot on the West Coast of Mexico rather than the East Coast. The city scenes, for instance, were shot in Tijuana, substituting for Matamoros. The story is loosely based on the 1989 abduction of American pre-med student, Mark Kilroy, from outside a Mexican bar where he was taken to Adolfo de Jesús Constanzo's ranch in the desert, about an hour drive from Matamoros & the border. Fifteen mutilated corpses were discovered buried at the ranch, one of them Kilroy's, who was hacked to death by a machete. Constanzo's cult practiced sorcery in the form of Palo Mayombe, engaging in torture and human sacrifice for supernatural power, e.g. for their drug-runners to appear invisible to border guards. Constanzo was a known homosexual, but the movie surrounds the Constanzo-based character, Santillan, with Mexican babes. I doubt this was done to be politically correct; I'm sure the filmmakers simply wanted to give him cinematic appeal for the target audience, most of whom would run away screaming if Santillan was depicted with hunky dudes attending to his amorous needs. While the movie's sometimes unpleasant for obvious reasons, it's gritty, engaging and well-acted, particularly the first half. I'm sure the director, Zev Berman, is a fan of films like "Apocalypse Now" because you definitely see glimmerings of that kind of greatness. Unfortunately, this was the last movie by Berman as of this writing. He could've gone on to be a contenda, like Coppola. The picture runs 100 minutes and was shot entirely in Baja California, Mexico. It was written by Eric Poppen & director Zev Berman. GRADE: B+