Mexico,
1992, 95 min
Shown in 1994
CREDITS
- dir
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Guillermo del Toro
- prod
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Bertha Navarro
- scr
-
Guillermo del Toro
- cam
-
Guillermo Navarro
- editor
-
Raul Davalos
- cast
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Federico Luppi, Ron Perlman, Claudio Brook, Margarita Isabel, Tamara Shanath
- source
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October Films, 65 Bleecker Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10012. FAX: 212-539-4099.
-
COMMENTS
Guillermo del Toro in person.
OTHER
Cronos is a vampire movie with a very Latin-American twist. This is no technologically overblown, smug misreading of Bram Stoker, nor an exploitation horror flick dishing out bloodsucking cheap thrills. Director/writer Guillermo del Toro gets to the heart of the eternal myth in Mexican style. The tale begins in 1536, when an alchemist, fleeing the Inquisition, arrives in Veracruz with a fantastic invention that prolongs and regenerates life. Almost 500 years later, the Cronos device turns up in an antique store. By accident, Jesus Gris (Federico Luppi) learns part of its secret and soon develops a longing for blood—any sort of blood will do, but human is the best. All of this is observed by Jesus’s small granddaughter, who alone seems to understand what is happening to him. The film treats its subject matter seriously, but there’s a delicious current of humor underlying the narrative. Del Toro’s elegant rhythm and style never deter him from mixing genres, so that humor may precede or follow bizarre, melodramatic events. The sets and art direction are superb; the actors walk that razor-thin line between the overwrought and the ridiculous, without missing a step. This intelligent film is one hell of a debut.
FACTOID #328
Saul Bass, the genius graphic designer behind the introductory sequences to Hitchcock’s Psycho, Vertigo and North by Northwest, designed the posters for the second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth installments of the San Francisco International Film Festival.
