Cronos

1993 horror movie

Rating: 14/20

Plot: A guy finds some sort of trinket that does some stuff and another guy wants it.

This clearly should have been saved for Christmas as it is a heartwarming Christmas movie about a grandfather and his granddaughter.

I tried giving this a spin once before, maybe even during the holiday season, but I don't think I got through the talky opener. After that, there's enough style and intrigue to make anybody watching this in the early/mid-90's want to keep an eye on this del Toro fellow, though probably not thinking he'd ever create anything worthy of a Best Picture Oscar.

What I appreciate most is the humor. Ron Perlman's performance as a sort of henchman for this old guy craving immortality is a daffy one, probably a little too playful. He's craving something himself--a new schnauz. It's a recurring gag that doesn't really work all that well though there's something about the rest of Perlman's performance that keeps what is essentially a vampire yarn pretty light. Maybe it's Perlman's appearance that made his boss's lair seem like it was from The City of Lost Children, too.

Federico Luppi has the look of a serious actor, or at least one who wants to be taken seriously in soap operas or something, but he's given some pretty weird things to do here as a character tortured by immortality. Jesus--who gets the last line "I am Jesus. . .Gris," something that seemed like a pun--gets a pair of terrific mirror scenes, one where he's checking out his younger self ("Buenos dios.") and another where he's massaging his nipple while claps from a subsequent scene bleed over. I mean, I imagine people clapping when I'm feeling myself up, too, so I guess I can't make fun of that. By the end of the movie, he's sleeping in a toy box and wearing his suit backward.

There are other references to Jesus in this that I wondered about. One character compared him to a mosquito or an ant. I'm not sure what that was about.

This, of course, isn't all fluffy vampire fun. It's supposed to be a horror movie after all. There is one particularly indelible scene involving Jesus Gris and a public bathroom floor, and the effects to show the unintended consequences of immortality are nauseating. The coolest horror images involve the device this movie is named after, a piece of biological technology that I never quite understood, probably because I'm neither scientist or vampirologist. The introduction to the Cronos device is right after a cool scene where bugs are slipping out of a statue's eye with this screechy violin music that a friend was recently telling me has become a horror movie pet peeve of his. I'm an easy man to please, however, and kind of like the screechy strings. With the help of sound design and that music, the scenes with the Cronos device in action, almost horrifically sexual, work well. There are also some shots of its innards that I liked.

I'm giving this a bonus point for a shot of a metronome.