JUAN OF THE DEAD (2011, Alejandro Brugués)
Juan of the Dead (aka Juan de los Muertos) has been gaining
some buzz on the film fest circuit, and I was lucky to get a chance to see it
during a midnight screening at a local fest called Cinetopia, which has a focus on international
independent cinema. Seriously lucky, because we
rarely get screenings of new horror movies around here.
As reported in every pretty much every mention I’ve seen of
Juan over the last few months, it’s the first feature-length horror movie from
Cuba. I’m too much of a slack-ass to
look into whether that’s actually true, but I do know that I haven’t
seen a Cuban horror film before, so I'll believe it. Much has also been made of the political
bent of the movie, whose tagline is “50 years after the Cuban
Revolution, a new revolution is about to begin.” Of course, zombie movies have offered us
social critique since Romero introduced us to re-animated-but-not-through-voodoo
zombies in Night of the Living Dead. And of late, we’ve even had politically
satirical zombies in films like Homecoming, American Zombie, and Zombies of Mass Destruction. It’s not exactly a new
approach in horror, zombie or otherwise; however, surely the unique political
and cultural history of Cuba could lead to a fascinating recipe for a zombie allegory.
