Puerto Rico, 2012
Review:
JA Kerswell
UNKNOWNS is a middling Spanish-language thriller that employs a slasher narrative for much of its running time. An aspiring actress joins a small group of unknown hopefuls at a remote mansion. On arrival, they are told that they have been cast in a horror movie, and the producer and director want to make it the most convincing ‘película de horror’ of all time. However, someone in a mask is lurking nearby to turn reel screams into real ones. This shot-in-LA Puerto Rican effort isn’t without slight merits but is too pedestrian to scare up much interest—and features a killer who is more Mr Blobby than Jason Voorhees.
Detective Ramirez (Gabriel Porras) is the only one convinced that his niece—an aspiring actress—is innocent of a series of bloody murders that have seen her sent to the insane asylum. His ex-wife, District Attorney Riley (Sonya Smith), has pulled some strings to keep her off death row but refuses to reopen the case without fresh evidence.
Meanwhile, another young woman who has a passing resemblance to Ramirez’s neice films an audition where she plays the part of someone admitting a brutal crime. The director Franco (Mauricio Mendoza) and producer Roberto (Manolo Travieso) tell a delighted Sonya (Yeniffer Behrens) that they think they have found “… the perfect victim.” Later, Sonya meets a group of other young hopefuls who have also been cast in the movie at what one of them calls a “mystery mansion”. On finding out that they have been cast in a horror movie, Pablo (Steve Bakken), one of the other actors, says he loves terror pictures but believes that death scenes have to look super realistic (somewhat of an irony given what will transpire). Franco agrees and tells them he wants to shoot “The most realistic horror film of all time.”
As the night drags on, the group splinters off to practice their (non-existent) lines, lather up their breasts in a foam bath or smoke a doobie. Only for someone in an ill-fitting cloth mask to slowly waddle up and kill them in a series of largely uninteresting ways …
You don’t have to be Miss Marple to guess what’s going on here. The film largely squanders what could have been a halfway decent mystery. It sets itself up as a whodunnit, but only the seriously mystery challenged will have problems identifying the culprit or culprits. However, the cast of young hopefuls has zip largely missing from the rest of the picture—with the peppy Behrens standing out as the designated victim. Although the motive and mechanics of the killer or killers are suitably ludicrous, the film suffers from flat direction and visuals. The closest the director gets to being adventurous is tilting the camera angle (which is so overused it could kill you from alcohol poisoning if you turned it into a drinking game). UNKNOWNS has a made-for-streaming flatness to it, with some soap opera touches that could have benefited from going full telenovela nutzoid. You have to wonder where the reported $2 million budget went. It also doesn’t help that the film casually throws out a couple of ugly gay slurs.
It appears that UNKNOWNS was filmed in LA in the Spring of 2011 and debuted in Puerto Rico the following year. Actress Maria Elena Laas, who plays an interrogating cop in the movie, says the location where they shot the police station scenes was infamously one of the most haunted locations in the USA. It used to be an asylum, and some of the cast and crew regularly heard strange noises and disembodied voices. She even said that the producer would shut down production by 3am to avoid hearing the wailing of a ghost of a boy who died in a lift shaft. Seemingly, the most interesting things about UNKNOWNS happened off camera.
BODY COUNT 7:
Female 4 / Male 3
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UNKNOWNS trailer