Halloween Havoc: THE BLACK FOREST (2018)

Back in the salad days of 2008, which you may remember as the time lax American banking regulations caused a global financial collapse, a poverty-row Brazillian zombie movie arrived fresh on the scene. I can't say that I was really blown away by BLACK MANGROVE (2008), so much as frustrated by it's potential combined with many unforced errors. Even so, having someone, in this case Rodrigo Aragão, from Brazil turn out a feature-length, monster-based, gory horror movie is something to talk about. Sort of like how back in the '80s, German schlockster Andreas Schnaas grabbed the eyeballs of horror fans around the world with the now legendary SOV splatterfest VIOLENT SHIT (1989). The tag line for VIOLENT SHIT was "Expect the Worst." It did not lie. At the time shot on video horror movies were in their infancy and VIOLENT SHIT was spectacularly shoddy. To be fair, CANNIBAL CAMPOUT (1988) is debatably worse, but I digress. As bad as it was, VIOLENT SHIT had enough going for it to make some folks want to see what else Schnaas would come up with next time, presumably with more money and more experience. After a couple of decades, we realized that, unfortunately, money and experience were not going to help Schnaas make better movies. I mean, did you see VIOLENT SHIT 4.0 (2010)? Expect the worstest. As disappointed as I was with BLACK MANGROVE's short comings, it was far better than VIOLENT SHIT 4.0 and that alone gave me that same sense of anticipation for what Aragão's future might hold. Yep, that's my standard; if your backyard gore flick is better than VIOLENT SHIT, you have my rapt attention.

Aragão, born in a small fishing village in Espirito Santo, is never far from his roots, which is one of the things that makes his movies interesting. His second film NIGHT OF THE CHUPACABRAS (2011), maintains the same swampy setting, most of the cast and some of the themes from his first outing and he would continue this in his third film, BLACK SEA (2013, aka DARK SEA, aka BLOODBATH). He is obsessed with the EVIL DEAD series (1981-1992) without copying them outright, more so than even BRAINDEAD (1992), which was the basis for BLACK MANGROVE. These inspirations started out as training wheels, but each successive movie was a step up in production values and ideas. That said, Aragão's penchant for lots of uninteresting dialogue scenes simultaneously dragged down the proceedings and yet made the bursts of creativity (such as a mutant zombie with a sting ray for a head) so much more exciting. Unlike so many gore-teurs, it actually seemed like Aragão was progressing, not only in his ability to frame a shot and create some stunning low-rent make-up effects, but actually tell a story. In the world of budget-starved, amateur horror flicks, this is a rare achievement. 

Still obsessed with tiny fishing villages, tiny bars, tiny whorehouses and big gore, Aragão has linked his movies together in a way some call sequels, but are really just his personal Venn diagrams. His recurring cast of actors are frequently recurring characters, but he doesn't let that get in the way of telling a new story with characters who may have died messy deaths in a previous film returning with the same name and appearance, without acknowledging their past. He also sometimes features the same sets and set dressing from other outings, mostly shot on his family land where he grew up. It's kind of a typical low-budget movie maker approach (Nick Millard instantly springs to mind), though usually there aren't recurring characters. It's honestly kind of fun, if a but confusing, to see the threads laid down in one film, picked up and woven into a different tapestry in another without being bound to forcing your new project to conform to what has happened in previous movies. At first glance it may seem a bit lazy, because it's hard work to make a good sequel, but it's also engaging in a way that only indy cinema can be.

I'm going to try to keep the spoilers to a minimum, but there are going to be some. Fair warning.

A small village priest known as Papa Pedro (Markus Konká who played much the same character in Rodrigo's previous movies) finds an unconscious Clara (Carol Aragão), who escaped from the zombies and an undead whale in BLACK SEA. Also, she was Papa Pedro's daughter in BLACK SEA, even though Papa Pedro was turned into land-chum in that outing. Confused? You're just going to have to roll with it. Five years later Clara has to go to the market for Papa Pedro as he is suddenly stricken with some sort of seizure where he falls to the ground and starts screaming in his best death metal voice that Clara is cursed. Clara, slightly perturbed by this, heads off to the market where some laughing little girls throw shit on her and she has her money stolen by some bandits. A smooth talking guy, Jean (Elbert Merlin), tries to help her with the bandits, but comes back empty handed. Clara doesn't get out much, so she is instantly charmed by this goober and suspects absolutely nothing.

On the way back from the market Clara stumbles across Albino (Walderrama Dos Santos), who managed to escape the zombie hoard at the end of BLACK SEA, with the help of Rodrigo Aragão's version of The Necronomicon, The Lost Book of Cipriani. Here he tells Clara that he is about to die, but if she sets up a ritual circle and reads a "prayer" from The Book all night, he will give her a sack of gold. He also tells her to burn the book when she's done before promptly keeling over dead. Instead of just taking the gold and hoofing it back to the house to see whether Papa Pedro has recovered from his potentially fatal affliction, she buries Albino and conducts the ritual. Papa, who got better, stumbles across her ritual in the middle of the swamp, but zombies decide that they need a snack and jump out of the mud to (surprisingly) tamely kill him. Clara is upset for a few seconds, but quickly gets back to finishing the ritual causing the zombies to disappear with the rising sun. You have to admire her integrity. Dude gave her a job to do she didn't let him down, even though he was dead and buried. Just try to find someone to complete a ritual for your dead ass in America. Never happen.

Clara, by, uhhh, miracle of chance, then runs into Jean again. Since Papa is dead and she has a sackful of gold, they decide to head off to the city to find their fortune, or rather, spend it. What could go wrong? This intricate plan is suddenly ruined by the same damn bandits popping up again, shooting Clara and as Jean pretends to protest, they shoot him too. Fortunately for Clara, and the rest of the movie, since she is the lead, she returns to consciousness to find that The Book caught the bullet and she's actually fine. Clara, following ancient tradition, preserves Jean's corpse with lard and spices and buries his corpse in her dirt floor living room. Determined to bring Jean back from the dead, Clara does the only sensible thing and kidnaps one of the shit-throwing little brats to use as a sacrifice in one of The Book's rituals. It's a lot of work to bring her morally ambiguous, Tiger Beat coverboy back to life, but Clara decides that this guy is still the best catch in the village (girls, amirite?). After drawing the magic circle and preparing the incantation, she finds that she can't bring herself to complete the ritual by slitting the kid's throat and reluctantly sets her free.

Proving that no good deed (following an unconscionably evil deed) goes unpunished, the little shit rats Clara out to the travelling evangelist, Francisco Das Gracas (Jackson Antunes), who descends down on Clara's hovel with his hoard of rabid followers and shouts "these walls are anointed with the sperm of evil!" Damn man, how do you become an expert on the morality of sperm? But never mind, all of this is just the set up for the chaos to come with demonic hallucinations, a severed head that causes a slaughter in a whorehouse, more incantations, a live burial, more zombies, an evil evangelist (redundant?) and a giant minion of Big Lou himself! I swear, this girl buries and digs up so many corpses (and non-corpses) that she should be going around the swamps with some serious Schwarzenegger guns poking out of that little white dress.

In BLACK SEA, Rodrigo introduced The Lost Book of Cipriani, but only really hinted about what it was and what it can do. Here he lets his imagination run wild with the details of different arcane rituals, which most movies tend to glaze over. Usually, in movies with occult rituals, someone reads aloud from an evil book, raises their hands dramatically and a PA turns on the wind machines. Maybe throw in some animation or CGI swirling mist and you're done. Not here. In one scene a ritual is performed by painting a chicken egg with cryptic symbols and inserting an incantation in through a hole in the top. The only snag being that the soon-to-be-a-father farmer (Francisco Gaspar), who is helping her with this ritual, accidentally gets his blood on the incantation leading to the violent deaths of his chickens and his pregnant wife. Distraught and enraged, things actually get worse for him as the baby is still moving and he demands that Clara cut the baby out of his wife's corpse. She does the horrible deed, only to find out that the baby is a mutant chicken/human hybrid and the insanity doesn't stop there.

This may seem like a lot of random things being thrown at the viewer and that is definitely Rodrigo Aragão's MO. In previous movies, this chaotic jumble does little more than play out until the end of the movie, with the pay-off being a big splattery set-piece. Here he actually is focused enough to have Mr. Toad's Wild Ride lead somewhere in exponentially crazy scenes that culminate with a literally apocalyptic finale that feels like it was planned, rather than just a good stopping point.

THE BLACK FOREST sat next to my TV for seven years before I finally decided to watch it. I had been planning on reviewing it for one of our Halloween binges, but between changing themes and real life interruptions, it hasn't happened till now. To be fair, I really wasn't looking forward to more long scenes of padding that push the running time to unnecessary lengths. Little did I know what a *ahem* grave mistake I was making. This was the Rodrigo Aragão movie that I had been waiting for. Sure, it's still shot on mid-range video equipment and his new leading lady, Carol Aragão (Rodrigo's daughter), definitely struggles with the whole "acting" thing. After stealing some eggs from the afore mentioned henpecked farmer at the beginning of the aforementioned scene, Clara tries to cook the eggs only to find bloody chick fetuses inside. After convincing the farmer to help her with a spell from the book involving an egg, he asks her why she needs him to do this. She simply tells him "everything I touch dies," which you'd think would be at least slightly upsetting to her, but she says it with the same matter-of-factness of explaining why she bought a different brand of yogurt at the store. In spite of that, Rodrigo still manages to pull off his best movie yet, complete with lots of stylish camera set-ups that make the whole thing feel much more entertaining than anything he has done before.

From what I understand from reading Brazilian reviews on line, most of the crazy occult stuff in Aragão's movies are drawn from actual Brazilian folklore, which is pretty exciting for Brazilian viewers and is interesting and fresh from a jaded, international horror fan perspective as well. Aragão doesn't paint a very flattering picture of Brazil. It's a far cry from the sexy playground that is featured in North American and European film and television. This side of Brazil is mired in abject poverty and superstition. And just like poverty-ridden areas everywhere, everyone is trying to grab whatever they can for themselves and looking for escape through alcohol, sex and/or religion. There really aren't any "good guys" in Aragão's movies. Even the characters who are better intentioned than others are easy prey to the allure of a dark shortcut to happiness. I'm not sure how accurate this portrayal is, but I give Aragão a lot of credit for using this backdrop as a way to make his movies stand out and show an unvarnished side of Brazil without pulling out a soapbox and preaching about it.

Amusingly, folks on-line refer to this as a more "restrained" outing from Aragão and it's true. The interesting thing is that focus and restraint came after his collaboration with the godfather of Brazilian horror, José Mojica Marins. THE BLACK FABLES (2015) is an anthology effort that like most modern anthologies consists of generally mediocre short films from different directors. Aragão's entry in the anthology is actually the worst of the lot, with a minimal narrative about a guy who has raw sewage running in front of his house, due to corrupt Brazilian bureaucracy, which causes him to turn into a zombie-like dude and attack some city officials. In spite of this, it seems he learned quite a bit from this experience.

Aragão stated in an interview, that the collab with Marins was a great moment in his career and life, and it shows in THE BLACK FOREST. With oblique angles and a narrative structure that actually works it's way toward a goal, you have a significant improvement in Aragão's skill level as a filmmaker and as a make-up artist. Even the acting has improved, for the most part, with Francisco Gaspar and several others turning in an excellent performances. I will throw out a caveat though. If this is to be your first Aragão flick, you may wonder just what the hell I'm smoking. This is still a low-rent indy movie. The cinematography is much improved from previous efforts, though for some reason the image transfer from distributor Darkside Releasing (no relation to the UK magazine) is extremely low-contrast, which is a real shame. Also the lead, Carol, is so flat that wallpaper gets jealous. You just can't get away from nepotism, not even in the swamps of Brazil, I guess. Even so, if you have seen Aragão's earlier films or are looking for something new and fresh in the world of low-budget horror, perhaps you will enjoy this one as much as I did.

Note: The screenshots here have been adjusted for contrast due to the the images being so washed out that it was nearly impossible to see detail at the size needed for this website. Adjust your TV / monitor or rip the disc and adjust the contrast with the program of your choice for best results.

Note 2: I know that Aragão has a new movie, CEMETERY OF LOST SOULS, but it doesn't seem to be out on video with English subtitles, and to be honest, I really wanted to talk about BLACK FOREST anyway.