Director: José Medina
Year: 2005
Country: Mexico
Alternate Titles: La Daga del diablo
Genre: Supernatural
Plot:
Told by a storyteller, a demonic dagger passed throughout a small village starts to disrupt the lives of those it comes into contact with and causes them to turn on their friends and loved ones before attempted to be destroyed.
Review:
This was quite a decent effort with a couple of problems in it overall. The film's biggest issue is the fact that this one is told as an anthology effort with three different stories intertwined about the deadly device which really causes this one to lose focus a lot during here. The stories here are so short anyway that it's really hard to get into them because they're so short and it really tends to amount to the same thing over-and-over again due to the inability to really get anything going throughout here in how the stories come off with the first two segments really needing a lot of work to get to anything good while the last one is easily the most straight-forward and determined of how to go about things.
Still, hardly anything here really amounts to how cheap and low-budget this one is, with the whole film's shot-on-video look coming across so well that there's barely anything here that really allows it to exhibit any kind of class or really any horror. The laughable special effects that show the demonic possession, the lack of blood or even graphic kills, the crude sets and even the work done on the dagger itself all come off as cheap and very low-brow which manages to make this feel all the cheaper and yet never manages to turn this into fun as everything comes off a little too serious for something of this caliber.
While all these flaws might lower it a lot there's still enough good points that this one does become quite good at times, and this is mainly centered on the supernatural properties of the dagger itself. Accompanied by flashing eyes, a tilted head and an utterly creepy low, droning voice chanting in Latin throughout its' scenes here this one does manage to make it somewhat fearful of a device at times, especially in the first segment when the couple are convinced there's something in the apartment with them as the shadowy keeper is briefly glimpsed in the background or the scenes in the bedroom with their friends in the second story. Likewise, the third story attempts to explain and destroy the dagger for much of the running time leading to a rather fine and action-packed sense of urgency that's missing from the other segments. While not enough to combat the flaws, it's enough to make it more than watchable for this type of effort.
Overview: **/5
A pretty cheap-looking but still worthwhile and average enough genre effort, you could do far worse than this effort even without anything really special involved here. Give it a shot if you're curious about this one or interesting in this style of low-budget, indie style efforts while those who are more discerning about this genre won't be interested in this one.
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