I own "Perdita Durango" on DVD since more than two years already, but always felt a little reluctant to watch it because, somehow, I feared it wouldn't be as overwhelming as it looks. I'm a big fan of Alex De La Iglesia's bizarrely experimental occult-horror gem "The Day of the Beast", but this is more like an attempt to cash-in on the contemporary popular trend of 'likeable criminals on the run' road movies, inspired by "Wild at Heart" and "Natural Born Killers". And, let's face it, De La Iglesia may be a creative and talented filmmaker, but he definitely isn't on par with big shots like David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino. And there you immediately have Perdita Durango's main problem… It tries to be exactly like the two aforementioned films and MORE, as our overactive director also wants to implement an extra subplot about the sadistic sacrificing rites of a religious cult led by one of the two main characters. The titular character, adequately played by Rosie Perez, is a tough and foul-mouthed little Mexican thug who hangs around airports on the boarder of Texas. She only gets sucked into the criminal underworld for real when she falls for Romeo Dolorosa. Romeo is the bloodthirsty and trigger-happy leader of the insane Santeria-church as well as an employee of the feared Mexican mob boss Santos. When he's hired to transport a truckload of frigid human fetuses for the cosmetic industry to Las Vegas, Perdita accompanies him and the happy couple even finds the time to kidnap two young teenagers to sexually abuse and humiliate along the way. Perdita Durango isn't really the main character, Romeo is! He's the one who always gets in trouble and has to face mighty enemies like malevolent mob creditors and unstoppable FBI-agents. Perdita's main occupation involves saving Romeo's butt when he once again messes up things! The script is incredibly incoherent and implausible, because it's just too hard to amalgamate plot elements like kidnapping, virgin sacrifice and mafia business deals. How are you supposed to take Romeo serious as a relentless criminal, when he also performs crazy voodoo dances around the fire and prays to Satan? Perdita Durango's reputation of being a cruel and extremely violent thriller is also very exaggerated. The film contains a handful of memorable shootouts and an occasional sadistic killing, but it's overall rather tame and politically correct. I particularly appreciated Alex De La Iglesia's "Day of the Beast" because it spawned an incredibly pleasant sense of black humor and morbid situations. This film hardly features any black humor, unless you consider James Gandolfini's cop-character repeatedly getting hit by cars as humor. His character is supposed to be an obsessive cop, but he's more like a crash-test-dummy. The film also is at least half an hour too long.

Well done technically, well made, well acted, but an awful, awful, awful story. The scummiest, skankiest, nastiest, cruelest, vilest characters with not a sliver of redeeming likable quality are the heroes of this film. The violence and rape is graphic and I got the impression was being rubbed in the audience's face. These are people you wait for someone like Clint Eastwood, or El Mariachi to come and blow up, but no such person appears here, because these people are supposed to be the heroes - the ones we are supposed to cheer on. I felt more compassion for Hitler than these people. I liked Dr. Hannibal more than these people. Someone must have sat down and tried to think of all the worst characteristics you could create in human beings, with the worst possible circumstances in which they could be expressed. Ewwww.

Following the success of El Dia De Bestia and Accion mutante, once again the director pursues the nature of dark obsession. The two main leads are dysfunctional amoral sadists who re in some ways rediscovering a part of them that they miss - love. It's a story of trying to move on but the main characters are very amoral however there's darker circles than them, which pulls them further down the spiral. In essence this movie is an antithesis of a glamour Mafia movie and I believe represents Mafia dealings in a very dark fashion. In some ways I believe there's a nod to David Lynch with the actor playing the Mafia boss.The film is not a sick puppy nor is it banal. For those that have followed this director they will read between the lines to discover some salient points of US government intervention out of the states and human traffic - in this case embryos used for beauty products. Like 'clean Madrid' in El Dia de Bestia there were fascist movements in the capital at the time. Iglaisia puts this on the screen as a cultural reminder.Watching this movie at face value will seem very ultra violent and in some places extremely disturbing. Unlike other cult producers like Tarintino Iglasia uses a loot of cult cultural references to make his films extremely dark and funny (like La Communidad). If you're Latin or Spanish I feel there would be a lot more in this movie for you. Recommended viewing - but not for the faint hearted.

I saw six movies in three days at my first Toronto Film Festival -- this one last, after a slow-moving Japanese film, "Afterlife" (which I also enjoyed, and the pace of which set up this film wonderfully). I saw this uncut and on the big screen, and it shot right through my veins like an amphetamine from a slingshot. Javier Bardem is one of those rare actors who is so good, who disappears so far into his roles, that a lot of people still don't know him. Pity -- he's the pivot of this film, the steady-burning sun around which equally dazzling Rosie Perez throbs in her mad ecliptic orbit. The acting is, in fact -- in spite of what you're reading elsewhere here -- perfectly pitched in all quarters. I managed to get an uncut video copy online a few years back from ebay, and it IS true, the movie loses a bit in the translation from big-screen to small, but trust me, it's still a wild ride. I left the theater feeling like I'd been set on fire with gasoline and Vaseline.