When a modern horror movie is only seventy minutes long, it needs some good ghastly moments so we know for sure that it hasn’t been cut. There’s always some dork in a tie somewhere who thinks that they know better than the director exactly how much red food coloring we can handle spraying across screen—and I’ll bet my vintage 1980s VHS copy of Dawn of the Dead that this movie is uncut. It goes to some harsh places. An hour and ten minutes is simply all the time that director Daniel de la Vega needs to take us to Hell. I’d give you a trigger warning or two, but I don’t want to spoil the movie.
The story is ridiculous, but so is every other film about human-sacrificing pagan cults. The twist here is that this cult kidnaps small children and then calls up their mothers on their cellphones to give them cryptic clues for how to rescue their babies, but at a horrible price. It doesn’t even matter if the mother is dead. They’ll bring her back to life and have her wander around dirt roads all marshmallow-faced and confused.
Vega’s secret weapon is that he’s a well-schooled horror fan. He borrows the right things from the right places. There’s a smart sprinkle of The Wicker Man here, a tangy little twist of The Vanishing and just a little dib-dab of The Evil Dead, all stirred into this bitter cocktail to good effect.
As of this writing, you’ll find this indie from Argentina way out in the murky swamps of Netflix, subtitled, and its name curiously not translated to White Coffin.