El Chupacabra
(Screen Entertainment/Hard Gore Region 0 PAL DVD)
(2002)
review by Blackgloves

A dogcatcher (Eric Alegria) and the author of a cult book (Elina Madison) join forces to hunt down El Chupacabra: the semi- mythical Mexican creature which seems to be responsible for a series of grisly slayings in LA. A bounty hunter (Layton Matthews) is also on the trail of the monster, and the whole mystery has something to do with the enigmatic Dr. Goodspeed (Anthony Criss) and a secret breeding experiment which is taking place at a shadowy medical institute.

"El Chupacabra" is the latest low-budget American b-movie to be released in the UK by Hard Gore. A bizarre union between Crytozoology and Ufology first gave birth to the whole Chupacabra (or 'Mexican Goat Sucker') phenomena a few years ago, and there is probably an interesting movie to be made out of the subject; this one though, is strictly a low-grade creature feature with little imagination.

Director Paul Wynne and his assistant (also the writer) Brennon Jones, fail to inject much excitement into the piece: the direction is dull and the pacing of the film slack throughout with many pointless scenes dragging on interminably for no apparent reason. The cast is obviously made up of unknowns and the acting never escapes the level of b-movie ham; the weak and underdeveloped script only compounds the problem for the more capable actors among them. There may be some enjoyment to be gained for lovers of monster movies since the Chupacabra makeup is rather good in an eighties-rubber-monster-suit kind of way, but there is no getting away from the fact that this is a disappointing effort. There is not even much gore to assuage the general lack of thrills!

The disc from Hard Gore gives us a fairly decent 1.33:1 transfer and a nice Stereo audio track. Extras consist of a ten minute making of featurette which does not give away an awful lot of information but at least gives us a little glimpse behind the scenes -- particularly at the monster makeup process. A trailer for the film is also included, as well as a selection of trailers for other Hard Gore titles.

"El Chupacabra" is not terribly bad: it is just too dull and outdated to make much of an impression on the viewer.