HERENCIA DIABOLICA - Dolls, clowns and dummies, all flow with the lifeblood of horror. I'm more of a 'Tourist Trap' guy than a Chucky fan though; there are films that simply use automatons as convenient vessels of horror, and there are those that really get what's so uncanny about a frozen plastic grin. Where does early nineties Mexican SOV-adjacent horror 'Herencia Diabolica' sit? The inheritance spoken of by the title is a clown doll (two in one!) handed down to the scion of a wealthy industrialist after a family tragedy. It hangs around in the attic looking a bit sinister before doing the usual evil doll shit. There is nothing about its narrative that isn't simple or rote, and yet 'Herencia Diabolica' still feels as if it's transmitting from a place beyond human ken. It is both dull and bizarre, like the pilot for a discontinued soap opera half remembered through the haze of a years-ago drug fugue. It twists banality into nightmare with scenes that go nowhere, slowly, to the pulsation of syrupy vet's office synthesisers, all the while parading ghostly VHS variants of its decade's bad fashion. It has no idea how to place drama or tension but is perfectly OK with showing us two minutes of someone rolling down the stairs in slow motion whilst a small person dressed as a toy laughs hysterically. For me, the pinnacle was the bit where a maid is terrified in the attic by a sinister train set... flashing disco lights make the point that something deeply supernatural is going on. 'Herencia Diabolica' invites us all to reach beyond its veil of tedium and touch the beating heart of madness. Reader, I did it, and now I stand before you with eyes full of dread and tears ie. I liked it.
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