The Curse of La Llorona came out back in 2019 and I remember hearing all this noise about it been part of the Conjuring universe because James Wan was producing it, they even threw in Father Perez from the Annabelle movies to make that connection feel more real but after watching it I can tell you none of that matters when the actual movie is this boring and lazy. This thing made like 123 million dollars worldwide which is insane to me because it really did not deserve any of that success, the whole thing feels like they were just trying to cash in on people who wanted to see something about Mexican folklore and instead gave them this forgettable mess that does not do anything interesting with the legend at all, its just another jump scare fest that you will probably not remember a week from now. Linda Cardellini plays this social worker named Anna whose husband died and she is raising two kids on her own, she works for Child Protective Services and gets involved with this case where a mom is trying to protect her kids from La Llorona by locking them up in a closet but of course Anna thinks the mom is crazy and takes the kids away which ends up getting them killed. The mom warns her that she just made a huge mistake and that La Llorona is gonna come after her own kids now, then boom the ghost starts showing up at her house and you already know where this is heading because every single haunting movie does the exact same thing, there is no originality here at all.
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What really pisses me off about this movie is that they had all the pieces to actually make something good, the legend of La Llorona is genuinely creepy and has been scaring kids for generations in Mexican culture, its about this woman who drowns her own children in a river after she finds her husband cheating on her with someone younger and then she kills herself out of guilt, now she is cursed to wander around looking for kids to replace the ones she murdered. That is dark as hell and there is so much you could do with that story but instead they just made another generic jump scare movie where the ghost pops out from behind corners and screams really loud to make you jump, I am not saying jump scares are always bad but when that is literally all you got going for you then your movie sucks. The scares are so predictable that you see them coming from a mile away, its always the same setup where someone hears a noise and walks slowly towards it and then La Llorona jumps out and screams, they do this like twenty times throughout the entire movie and it gets old real fast after the third or fourth time.
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There are a couple moments that were neat, this is why I dont completely trash this movie and at least gave it a 5 although I wouldnt recommend it, like when the little girl opens that see through umbrela by the pool and you can see the ghost standing there for a second, that was actually pretty cool because it did not rely on a loud noise to scare you, it was just this creepy flash that gets you, but most of the scares are just loud and annoying and they do not actually make you feel scared, they just make you jump for a second and then you move on and forget about it five minutes later because there is like no real horror in them, its like they were not even trying to build any real tension or atmosphere. The movie also tries to throw in some random humor that does not fit at all with the rest of the tone, like there is this character played by Raymond Cruz who shows up in the third part and he is supposed to be this ex priest who uses science and religion to fight ghosts or whatever, he has some funny lines but it feels so out of place in a movie that is trying to be a serious horror story, its like they could not decide if they wanted to make a scary movie or a comedy.
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I would say that the worst part of the movie is that the characters itself felt kinda lame and stupid, its like the girl in Annabelle Comes Home that actually kick on the movie by doing dumb stuff, same here they make so many dumb decisions just so the plot can keep moving forward and its frustrating to watch people been this idiotic. There is this one scene where they set up all these protections around the house to keep La Llorona out, they use these special seeds from a tree or something and it creates a barier that she can not cross, but then the little girl sees her doll outside the barrier and she reaches for it and breaks the line and lets the ghost in, like come on where the fuck is the adult looking for this children. Your mom just told you that this ghost is trying to kill you and you are gonna risk everyones life for a stupid toy, it makes no sense and its just lazy writting to create drama. After I think about, her mom is just the same sht, she notice burn marks on her kids arms that look exactly like the ones from the other kids who died and she does not even ask about it and just ignores it until the detective shows up and accused her ass for been abusive to her own kids, this is another clear example of either they high, crazy or stupid and the movie feeds from this stupidity so they could have that scene where she almost gets arrested and you are sitting there thinking how can she not see whats going on.
The whole movie just felt lazy to me like they were not even trying to do something diferent or interesting, they were just checking boxes and rushing through everything to get to the next jump scare without caring about building any real story or characters that you actually care about. The pacing is weird too because nothing really happens for the first half of the movie and then in the third part they try to cram in all this stuff about the legend and how to stop La Llorona but its too late by then because you already stopped caring about what happens to these people. They have this whole thing where they rub eggs all over the house to detect evil spirits and it looks so dumb, I know its supposed to be a real Mexican tradition or whatever but the way they did it just felt forced and cheesy like they were trying too hard to make it feel authentic. At the end they defeat La Llorona by showing her one of the necklaces that belonged to her dead children and she just gives up and leaves, no big climax or anything just oh here is your dead kids necklace now go away, it was such a weak ending that left me feeling like I wasted my time watching this garbage. The Curse of La Llorona is rated R for some reason even though there is nothing in it that would make it deserve that rating, they could have easily made it PG 13 and probably made more money off of it, there is no real violence or gore or anything disturbing its just a watered down horror movie that tries to act like its scarier than it actually is. This is one of those movies that makes me mad because it had potential and they completely wasted it, they took a genuinely scary legend and turned it into another forgettable mess, if you want to see a good horror movie go watch something like Hereditary or The Conjuring or even Sinister, do not waste your time with this one unless you just want to see some predictable jump scares and bad acting, I would give this thing a 5 out of 10 and that is been very very generous.
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