Augusto Pinochet is a vampire, eh? All right, film, you have my attention. How does that work? How is the ruthless Chilean dictator a vampire? When did that happen?
Ask a silly question …
“Claude” Pinochet was a royalist French soldier during … and after the time of Marie Antoinette. -Geez, between this film and Napoleon, one could fall asleep to a lot of French history- And it turns out Claude is a vampire (we learn much later), so when discovered, he has to fake his death and skip continent, eventually ending up in Chile under the name Augusto Pinochet (Jaime Vadell), where he is still a soldier and still hates socialism. Eventually, he becomes the general who overthrows Salvador Allende and installs himself as dictator, which works for a while until he has to fake his death again.
This all is the good part and it takes about ten minutes to tell, maybe less. The problem is the film is two hours long. It focuses on Pinochet and family as -essentially- exiles in a remote part of Chile. Bottom line: Pinochet is bored of living and his family are -to a person- worthless leeches.
Do you know long it takes to go from “Augusto Pinochet is vampire” to “Good Lord, this is boring?” About 35 to 40 minutes by my clock. The film is shot black and white for whatever reason. It has the effect of making the gruesome less gruesome (there are indeed some ugly vampire-related deaths in the film) and the boring more boringer.
I don’t care if it’s not a word; it fits perfectly.
The dullness of an evil-but-now-toothless old man wondering whether or not he should be dead is
palpable. The film tries to mix things up a bit by having Pinochet’s butler Fyodor (Alfredo Castro) have an affair with Pinochet’s wife Lucia (Gloria Münchmeyer) and when that doesn’t work, it introduces scheming nun Carmen (Paula Luchsinger) as the only person on camera one can stand to look at for more than five minutes at a time. Distractions? Yes, but the boredom prevails.
El Conde (“The Count,” how Pinochet preferred to be addressed by his family) is a testament to the idea that a good premise does not a good picture make necessarily. The film is replete with dullards and listless scenes. You’ll be shocked wondering how a vampire movie can cover so little ground or how inert, limp, languid a horror movie can be. Was this the objective? Look, Pinochet, go f*** up Chile again, just get off my screen. There’s a huge reveal at the end, every bit as big as the one that starts the film, but by the time it arrives, the audience is done.
I do not -as a rule- go out of my way for promoting Hollywood, but I would love to see this premise in the hands of a major studio with an eye on audience. As is, I don’t think this plays to anyone but political historians with an eye for irony … and even they will be bored.
There once was a strongman from Chile
Who turned out to be a vampire, no really!
Eventually he left
We all were bereft
For his life was the ultimate in tranquilly
Rated R, 110 Minutes
Director: Pablo Larraín
Writer: Guillermo Calderón, Pablo Larraín
Genre: The one where you turn a good idea into a boring-ass movie
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Conspiracy theorists
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: The impatient
