Espectro (2013) Reviews

• Unfinished Mexican J-horror

  TdSmth52014-12-28

  A woman named Marta is a in a mental institution. In flashbacks we learn what happened. She's tarot card reader and met a guy she found attractive and convinced him to let her read his cards. He agrees. Next thing you know, as she walk to her car in the garage, she's raped by this guy. As she's released from the facility she goes to live in an apartment provided by a friend. She got rid of her psychic store and everything in it. Except for one box that the friend kept and is now in the new place. Marta completely isolates herself there. Her friend has to bring her food. She watches a couple of violent lesbians across the window who see her. One of them gets angry and starts smashing Marta's door. One day she see a man standing at the corner so she becomes completely paranoid. She covers up all the windows and installs cameras everywhere. Unfortunately these are very low-res cameras and we get to see the images from the cameras. Marta does research and discovers that the rapist has been freed some time ago which causes her to flip out even more. Now she starts seeing a bloody creature. We've seen this creature repeatedly before in camera images crawling on the floor. Marta starts having vision of blood and a bloody woman. She discovers several holes in her apartment which lets someone from the lesbians' apartment spy on her. We also learn that when Marta was a teen, she already had psychic powers. She went out in the woods one night and ran into the soul of a woman looking for her hair accessory. But the girl complaints that she can't see some man she wants to have visions of, her dad perhaps, I'm not sure. Marta further discovers that in the apartment building a woman was killed previously. Finally she agrees to do a séance with her friend. But that's when the movie goes awry. There's a twist and a revelation but something else surprising happens out of the blue, but the movie ends suddenly without explaining itself at all. Espectro is a well-done movie. Direction is confident, cinematography is excellent. This movie avoids the typical cliché of setting it in complete darkness and lights going out, rain, and the like that every horror movie can't do without. At the same time it's a bit gimmicky too, with jarring editing, flashing lights, and loud sophisticated sounds and effects. Movies about a paranoid person going nuts are usually lousy, but Paz Vega makes it work. Even though she looks rather malnourished and uncharacteristically doesn't show any skin, she makes this movie watchable. The pace is just a tad bit too slow and there are too many repeated scenes of camera images showing nothing. While the twist and revelation is neat, the movie ends on such a lame note without bothering to bring things together and raising a bunch of questions that only it could have answered. I do want to rate this movie better, but I have a hard time given the disappointing ending.

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• Too much material not too much sense

  carlos_cortina20012013-11-08

  I went to watch this movie, not expecting too much, at first i thought it would be some scary story , guided by only the name. The beginning was good a very intense scene she the main character (Marta) is raped, then i thought OK!, maybe the man that raped her was possessed by some kind of demon, because Marta is a psychic. Then she secludes herself in an apartment hiding from the rapist, like any victim would normally do. After that, the movie makes no sense, it becomes some kind of paranormal activity combined with something like Disturbia , and a little bit of American horror Story Coven. I just felt like the movie tried to use too many sub-stories and at the end failed to give them coherence. The acting was good at least from Gala Montes, that its almost the only person you see on screen, the rape scene at the beginning of the movie was brutal, pretty strong and really good dramatization, i really liked the way it was presented, and overall the theme of the rape was pretty good, i think that maybe if the ghost part hadn't been added and they developed more the emotional states of the victim after the event, it would have been a terrific movie, then again it was boring.

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• Rather boring...

  paul_haakonsen2017-08-16

  I had no idea what this movie was about, and I had never heard about it prior to stumbling upon it in Netflix whilst browsing the horror catalogue. I read the short synopsis for the movie and decided to give it a go. "Espectro" (aka "Demon Inside") turned out to be a rather slow paced movie that was somewhat of a struggle for me to get through. And truth be told, then I did drift away and dozed off a couple of times throughout the course of the movie. It was a combination of the slow pace, the fact that very little of any interest happened throughout the entire movie, and also because the characters in the movie were one-dimensional and characters that very generic and rather pointless. I am familiar with Paz Vega by name, but I don't recall seeing any of her previous movies. So I didn't really know what to expect from her acting. It should be said that the cast in the movie were doing good enough jobs with their given roles and characters, but they had so very little to work with in terms of script and storyline. "Espectro" wasn't a particularly scary or disturbing movie as it was more of a boring snoozefest. And lots of the things that did happen throughout the movie didn't really make much sense or have much of any interest as it unfolded on the screen. I did manage to sit through the entire movie, although it was quite an ordeal. And from what I saw and managed to not sleep through, then I was not particularly impressed in any way. There was nothing scary about the movie, and the storyline actually didn't make much sense. "Espectro" is definitely not a movie that I will return to Watch a second time.

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• Punxsu says good movie if you like good ideas

  Punxsu2014-12-26

  This is a hard one to review without any kind of spoilers so let's talk about the reason i rated this movie higher than average. I like horror movies that give you something to think and not just jump-scare you over and over again. And this one has some really new ideas that go into this horror puzzle. There are many different aspects in the main story and the characters that are not that common. I like the kind of craziness and claustrophobic feelings that some scenes of this movie give you. Maybe the story is not enough for a long movie and could have been better for a short-movie, but for me it worked. It wasn't very scary, but it gave me this uncomfortable feeling of not getting the whole puzzle together even though the movie gives you enough clues. I would say don't expect a highly shocking film, but open your mind for a good story that basically takes place in one apartment.

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• "Deep Wanna-Be"

  Screaming_egg2018-07-07

  Slow, "deep wanna-be", pretentious, nonsensial, story is not explained properly. They were obviously bored to write a proper scenario. Jumps from scene to scene without any logic. Obviously another attempt to be "deep" failed massively.