The Curse Of La Llorona Is In Theaters Now But Don’t Go See It

La Llorona translates to “The Crying Woman” and the name refers to a person in an old folk tale who’s most commonly associated with Mexican history. Though the name is also ingrained in legends from some Central American countries I won’t be giving you any legit history lessons in this blog because we’re just talking about a dumbass horror movie called The Curse of La Llorona. It’s directed by a guy with the last name Chaves but nothing I saw online indicates he’s of brown descent so he was probably hired because that last name sounded “close enough.” Yes, the movie is produced by James Wan who was born in Malaysia, is of Chinese descent, and was raised in Australia which makes me pretty happy because his mere existence probably pissed off a lot of racist Aussie classmates.

But even that’s not enough for him to be producing this movie, as far as I’m concerned. Because the lead actress is Linda Cardellini who, despite being very talented, was hired due to the fact that Italians aren’t exactly fully white people so they figured she’d be “tan enough.”

…..Okay, fine, I’ll admit that I only saw this damn movie because every theater showing Avengers: Endgame was sold the fuck out and I needed another quiet, dark, mostly empty place to get drunk in after I got kicked out of that Catholic church confession booth I was caught sleeping in last Saturday. So I bought a 22oz pour of San Tan Brewing Hop Shock IPA and then came back ten minutes later disguised as Doctor Octopus so I could order seven more 22oz cups of Hop Shock IPA. Nobody batted an eye and I figured it was ‘cause Doc Ock shows up in the Avengers movie but don’t spoil it for me if he doesn’t.

And I figured that since Linda Cardellini played Hawkeye’s wife in Avengers: Age of Ultron this would be the closest I could get to actually experiencing that new Marvel movie. Also Linda Cardellini played Velma in the 2002 live action Scooby Doo movie and I remember being 16 years old at that time and being the perfect target audience of horny losers who watched cartoon Velma as a little kid then lost their shit when they saw her in a low-cut orange blouse in real life. Bee-Tee-Dubs, did you know James Gunn wrote the screenplay for that 2002 Scooby Doo movie with the major boobage-rockin’ Velma? Maybe he is a pervert…

Anyhoozle, this fucking La Llorona movie. So there’s a cold open set in 1673 Mexico. Don’t ask me to tell you what the hell was going on back then, I lost all my extensive Mexican history knowledge after years of extensive alcohol abuse. But there’s a woman in a white wedding dress with a veil across her face dancing in a circle with a man and, like, three kids in between them. Which, okay, already we’re off to a bad start because this chick wouldn’t have been able to just get married (in a white dress, no less!) if she had three kids all the way back then. She would’ve probably been stoned as a husbandless whore and also she seemed to be an adult which, in 1673 would’ve made her way past marrying age. Anyone over the age of 11 would’ve been considered past their baby making prime and this motherfucker lived long enough to give birth to THREE??? Fuck off.

So a little boy in the scene gives his mom a necklace that she puts around her neck and that he couldn’t have possibly afforded. It’s fucking 1673. Is that little boy who looked no older than 10 involved in the slave trade or some shit? ‘Cause how else could he buy that for his mom? But he did and he closes his eyes while everyone around him dances in circles. But then he opens his eyes and everyone has disappeared. So he runs into the woods and sees his mom drowning the other kids who are probably his sisters and then she runs after him and the movie motherfucking starts!

Then we cut to Los Angeles in 1973 and Linda Cardellini is rushing to get her two BROWN kids ready for school but then they miss the bus because Mexicans are always late for shit and that’s the best way to make Linda Cardellini sympathetic to me. She drops the kids off at school then arrives late to her job as a social worker where she is told by a truancy officer that some Mexican lady hasn’t taken her kids to school in a couple of weeks but instead of sending Linda Cardellini to investigate he wants to send her work rival who is in the movie for a total of twenty seconds and is only there because she’s younger than Cardellini and this highlights the fact that Cardellini is getting older but this comes to fucking absolutely nothing in the greater scheme of things.

So…this is a very difficult part of the movie to analyze for me because Linda Cardellini is 43 years old and of course she’s unbelievably attractive plus I personally think women aren’t even hot until they turn at least 38. But I also understand that in the 70’s she would’ve pretty much been considered a past-her-prime grandma because baby boomers are the stupidest fucking people in the world.

But she talks her way into going to the home of this Mexican lady named Patricia with a police escort. She knocks on the door and asks the Mexican lady to let her in. The young police officer actually, literally says, “Out of respect for your husband…Officer GARCIA…would he let you in there alone?” to make sure we know her husband is dead and fucking BROWN, which, thanks, movie. But Cardellini is still of Italian, Irish, German and Scottish descent so she would be the whitest lady on the goddamn planet if not for the fact that her Italian swarthiness is the only thing that prevents her from getting melanoma. 

Cardellini goes into the house and realizes that the Mexican mom, who is fluent in English with only the slightest of accents and who occasionally yells full Spanish phrases in the name of faux authenticity, has locked her own kids in the closet. Cardellini tries to let them out but she can’t get through because she’s Italian so she’s using uncooked spaghetti noodles to try and pick the lock and those shits keep breaking the whole time. But the Patricia Mexican lady attacks Cardellini and Cardellini throws a handful of spicy marinara in Mexican lady’s face then steals the key that’s hanging around Mexican lady’s neck and lets those kids out.

But then, in the stupidest part of the movie, Cardellini goes home while her kids are watching a fucking SCOOBY-DOO CARTOON because hey, remember when Cardellini was in that movie?!?!?!? But while she’s there the two Mexican kids from that closet are in a hospital and they get stalked by a mysterious lady in a white wedding dress who jump-scares them to death. And in the middle of the night Cardellini gets a phone call informing her of what happened. So she puts her kids in the admittedly dope-looking 70’s station wagon and drives out to the place where they filmed Thunder Road from Grease to check out the bodies of the two dead Mexican kids.

Alright…so I’ve known a lot of social workers in my day because so many of them thought I needed an intervention and so many others of them thought I was the father of a bunch of abandoned brown babies with amazing hair. But I can’t possibly understand why someone would call a fucking CPS social worker to a goddamn MURDER SCENE in the middle of the night. Especially since Cardellini was called by someone who knew her and knew she had to put her two vaguely ethnic kids in the back of her mystery machine van at motherfucking 2AM or something. Patricia Mexican mom is there too and she yells at Cardellini and says that her kids died because of La Llorona.

Meanwhile in the 70s Station Wagon Mystery Machine, Cardellini’s boy sees a crying woman in an alley. And of course she freaks him out with her fucked up, CGI’d monster face. The boy who probably has a Latino name that I have no interest in looking up gets back in the car and then those window crank things start turning on their own from the outside and he’s desperately trying to keep all the windows up in order to keep La Llorona out. And that’s when I realized how this movie came to be. For those of you kids who are reading this blog and who have lived a life with automatic windows in your parents’ vehicles you should know that back in the day we didn’t push buttons to roll down the car windows. We used to have to manually spin those bitches up and down with our whole hands and triceps. And when I saw those things spinning from the outside (WHICH WAS NEVER POSSIBLE) I imagined some Hollywood producer asshole pitched this scene in order to terrify anyone who grew up riding in a station wagon with wood panels on the side and that’s why we’re now watching this shit movie.

Anyway, La Llorona grabs the boy’s wrist and leaves some burn marks with her touch. And a lot of the rest of this movie is bullshit designed to kill time. Cardellini goes to the funeral for the sons of Patricia the Mexican Lady and meets a priest played by some guy named Tony Amendola who is a cheap, shitty version of F. Murray Abraham but this guy also doesn’t seem to have any Latino heritage that I could find online and he fakes being Latino because his last name was probably also “close enough.”

He tells Cardellini that La Llorona was a Mexican woman in the 1600s who married a Mexican cowboy but found out he was cheating on her and decided to take away what he valued most and drowned their children. But there’s no evidence that the real life women the “La Llorona” tale was based on actually killed their own children so this is likely some sexist, racist bullshit that has endured over time because everyone wants to believe that Mexican ladies be crazy PSYCHO bitches, right bro? And now we have that myth perpetuated in a movie starring mostly white people playing brown. Cool, I guess?

Cardellini also sees Raymond Cruz, AKA Tuco from Breaking Bad from afar engaging in some witchcraft type shit and Fake Murray Abraham tells Cardellini that Tuco is a “curandero” which is the term for a Latin American witch doctor. This probably won’t be important later.

Cardellini’s brown daughter sees La Llorona in the pool and she’s pretty traumatized. Cardellini, completely oblivious to that shit, is then having dinner with Sean Patrick Thomas, a police detective who was last seen banging Julia Styles in Save the Last Dance in 2001. Some ultra religious people said their interracial relationship was the cause of 9/11. Not me though. I know Bush did that shit.

They’re sharing a bottle of wine and Sean Patrick Thomas, instead of trying to bang a newly single, stupidly attractive Linda Cardellini, prefers to ask her to interview that Mexican Patricia Lady who is currently in jail. In a way I appreciate the fact that Sean Patrick Thomas was a friend of Cardellini’s husband and that, out of respect for him, he isn’t solely motivated by horniness but I can’t help but think that he’s keeping his distance because a 43 year old Cardellini in the 70’s would’ve been considered past due for hospice care.

So for some reason a police detective asks a fucking social worker to interview his jailed suspect. And Patricia Mexican Lady is pissed at Cardellini. Patricia blames Cardellini for her kids’ death because Cardellini is the one who took them out of that closet. And Patricia says she prayed…not to god…but to La Llorona so that she would take Cardellini’s kids. Because Mexican chicks be crazy and vengeful, right bro?

Then Cardellini’s daughter gets almost drowned in the bathtub by La Llorona and gets her arm burned by La Llorona’s touch too. Cardellini saves her but the kids’ school sees the marks on their arm and they send a social worker which, holy shit, turns out to be the younger woman from earlier in the movie who almost took Cardellini’s place at the home visit and also Sean Patrick Thomas but neither of them believe Cardellini did anything wrong so this whole goddamn scene adds up to FUCKING NOTHING. We’re really trying to run out the clock here, aren’t we? 

After a few Llorona sightings at night the whole family goes to see Father Murray Abraham the next morning and this motherfucker seriously takes a second to mention how he believes in supernatural shit after his previous experience with a haunted porcelain doll and we have to watch a two second flashback to that fucker walking around with the GODDAMN FUCKING ANNABELLE DOLL because this is part of the The Conjuring Cinematic Universe and I realized why Cardellini’s house looked familiar and it was because I’m pretty sure it’s the house that appeared in the movie The Conjuring and also maybe the Insidious franchise? Alright assholes, if you wanna give nods to your previous movies you can go right the fuck ahead but I don’t need a full on gratuitous shot of your stupid goddamn doll because I haven’t seen any of those movies…

Oh fuck. Wait. Is The Curse of La Llorona the horror version of Avengers: Endgame? A cinematic universe…interconnected franchises…insufferable references to other movies that we may not have seen? HOLY SHIT!

So Cardellini recruits Tuco to help her rid La Llorona from the house. Tuco uses eggs to try to cleanse the house of evil spirits because that’s some kind of dumb traditional Mexican thing. I say this as a Mexican who got eggs rubbed on his face as a kid so many fucking times, I can’t even begin to count. Sorry grandma, it doesn’t matter how many eggs you rub on my face, it’s not gonna cure a single one of my STDs.

Tuco lights candles and spreads some kind of salt or sand across the doorway to keep La Llorona out of Cardellini’s house. It works until her dumb little daughter tries to reach across the salt protecting the doorway to get her little doll that she cuddles with at night. And, sorry, but this little shitty baby is, like, 7 years old or 10 or 17, I don’t know how kid ages work. And while I understand security blankets better than anyone (I can’t sleep without cuddling a six pack of beer in case I wake up the middle of the night and need something to comfort me) this little turd is old enough to understand that breaking the barrier will allow a ghost murderer into the house and that that’s BAD.

And of course La Llorona kidnaps this dumb little girl and dumps her into the backyard pool to try to drown her. Cardellini jumps into the pool because despite the fact that she’s wearing tight, 70’s bell bottom jeans and a tight, long-sleeve sweater she could still stand to be soaking wet for all the grown up Scooby Doo pervs in the audience. Cardellini saves her kid and somehow also ends up with La Llorona’s necklace that has a little stone in the middle of it.

HOLY SHIT. Is that an Infinity Stone???

So this movie should’ve been over forever ago but while the entire Cardellini Italian Tan Clan is in the house stirring the gravy the fucking Patricia Mexican Lady sneaks in and has a gun. A GUN. She got released from jail because there wasn’t enough evidence to hold her for the murder of her children and she walks into this house with a gun and shoots Tuco in the shoulder. And she locks Cardellini in the basement while La Llorona gets back into the house and chases the two vaguely ethnic kids. And Cardellini is yelling for someone to let her out and pounding on the door. The kids run into the attic and La Llorona chases. After two minutes Patricia the Mexican Lady just straight up changes her mind and lets Cardellini out of that basement. Because the best way to get Mexican chicks to do what you want is to yell at them and constantly pound on the other side of the door, right dad?

Ughhhhh. So the boy pulls out the necklace with the Infinity Stone and gives it to La Llorona in the attic. There’s a mirror behind them that’s covered by a blanket and that shit falls off so La Llorona sees herself and freaks the fuck out and it seems to hurt her because somehow that was her weakness the whole time? I FUCKING GUESS????

Tuco and Cardellini go up to the attic and he slides Cardellini a crucifix across the floor and Cardellini straight up stabs La Llorona in the chest with the cross like Thor stabbing Thanos in the chest with his axe because this movie is still a fucking Marvel movie ripoff. And La Llorona explodes. And turns to ash. Because this is a fucking Marvel movie ripoff.

And it’s over. Tuco calls a cab. Cardellini asks how she could every repay him and he straight up checks out her boobs. But then her two kids give Tuco a big ol’ hug and he makes that face where you’re about to get a boner but you need to focus really hard so it doesn’t go full chub because there are children around you. So he leaves, successfully flaccid, while Cardellini and her family go back into the house. But not before Thanos shows up and tells La Llorona that he’ll kill half the universe in order to impress her. 

Damn. Why would I even wanna see Endgame when I can just watch The Curse of La Llorona?

Man, this movie is fucking stupid.