OFF: Curse of El Charro

[Doug Pearson]

Unlike the rest of the list (it seems!), I haven't been watching the new
Doctor Who (although my twelve-year-old self was extremely grateful to PBS
for bringing most of the Tom Baker and, uh, the next guy, the one with the
celery stalk, episodes over to the states).

Instead, I went to a bunch of films at San Francisco's "Fearless Tales
Genre Festival" this past week, including the one in the message
subject, 'The Curse Of El Charro', mostly because of the cameo appearance
by one "Lemmy Kilmeister" (that's how it's spelled in the credits).  The
bulk of the movie was really pretty boring, un-ironically (I didn't think
that was possible in the post-'Scream' era) following the standard
supernatural-slasher-kills-nubile-coeds plotline (which bores me, but it
looked like one genre afficianados would appreciate).  Of somewhat more
interest were midget bartenders, a "lounge" singer (in a wheelchair with
Cerebral Palsy) doing sort of a Tom Waits-meets-Laibach number, a couple
well-done flashbacks-to-the-19th-century, Tabitha Soren (apparently she's
the one who hooked up the director with Lemmy) in a lesbian shower scene
(sorry...), and, of course, Lemmy's bit.  He plays a priest (no indication
if he's a rockin' vicar) who expounds on a bunch of metaphysical nonsense
for a couple minutes in an insert scene (nothing to do with the rest of
the movie!).  The director explained that particular scene was inspired by
early German film (Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu), and he was trying to get
Lemmy to wear white face makeup for the scene.  Lemmy wasn't having any of
that, but did agree to wear dark makeup around the eyes to make him look
more sinister ... apparently at that point, he told the director, "yeah,
ok, we used to do that for shows back when I was in Hawkwind".

film website:
http://www.americanworldpictures.com/projects/elcharro.htm

    -Doug
     jasret at mindspring.com