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22-year old
Arie has been in and out of the psychiatric
ward several times and his mother has decided that it
should be good for them to move away from Buenos Aires
and out to the country. Unfortunately, Arie seems to
be getting worse again and he's stopped taking his
medication. Meanwhile, Arie is sure that he's perfectly
sane and that his neighbour is indeed a demented
serial killer who kills children.
It's been a long time since an Argentinean horror movie
was released at the local cinemas and many people
were hoping that Winter Visitor would be the movie to
reincarnate the Argentinean horror movie industry.
Unfortunately it failed terribly at the box-office
due to the fact that the major studios have so much
power in Argentina. Did it deserve to fail as badly as
it did? No, but it's certainly not good enough to
compete with the big studios. Winter Visitor is not a
ghost story, like many of you probably think. It's
actually a slasher movie / psychological thriller,
and while I do appreciate the fact that it's not an
Americanized one at that (this one stays very true to
Latin American cinema), it's a bit too much of a slow
burner for my liking.
Winter Visitor revolves around a 22-year old man,
Ariel, who has a history of mental issues. His biggest
passion in life is astrology so it's only natural that
he finds himself sitting by his telescope one day.
But instead of looking at the sky, he sees a man
dressed in black killing a homeless boy. Due to his
history, no one believes him except for a Spanish
girl who he's started a relationship with. Together
they decide to investigate further into the matter,
but what they're about to find out is so terrifying
that they could never have imagined it. Or could they?
Is it just Arie's imagination playing tricks on him?
Is the killer real or just a figment of his imagination?
This is the question raised throughout the movie and
luckily we do get an answer in the end.
This isn't a bad movie at all, it's beautifully shot,
it's got a decent cast and some really suspenseful
moments. Unfortunately the movie drags a little for
the first forty minutes or so and even if it's
never boring, it's kind of difficult to get into it.
When the killings actually do start, the special
effects aren't very impressive and the death scenes
could have been better. Also, the soundtrack really
killed the more action-filled scenes. I'm sure that
they were limited by the budget and that it could've
been a great slasher flick but even though I appreciate
that it stayed true to Latin American cinema, maybe
they would've benefited from copying a little from
American slasher flicks. The first local horror productions
from a country do not need to be very original, they
just need to jump start the genre. Just look at what
Cold Prey did for Norway.
In the end, Winter Visitor is a decent chiller but
it should've been better. It's simply too slow for a
slasher flick but at least it's not yet another
mediocre Latin American ghost story so thank god for
that. If you have a good attention span, you may be
able to enjoy Winter Visitor as much as I did because
once you get past the slow part, it's actually quite
entertaining. It's a well-crafted horror movie, that's
for sure and it's certainly got a lot of class (more
so than any other Argentinean horror flick that I've
seen). It just should've been more of a slasher and
less of a psychological thriller if you ask me.
We do get some gore but most of it is pretty dry,
there was an obvious lack of fake blood in here. We
get severed limbs, a hand chopped off, an impalement,
a decapitation and some more. But everything is really
dry so it doesn't help.
Pretty bad, who puts organ music in a car chase scene
anyway? This was just odd and didn't fit the content
of the movie at all.
A decent chiller thriller with some okay kills in it
and a pretty creepy killer. It's a well-crafted horror
flick and you can tell that they really wanted this
to be a great horror movie. If they had only had more
money, I'm sure it would've been a lot better but
it was just too slow for my liking.
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