THE TOMB

Mexico, ancient city of Tehuantepec. The priest Tatamacky is performing a ceremony to bring back to life the goddess Coaltique and for this he must sacrifice seven virgins. While the last virgin is about to be thrown into the sacrificial well, the King's guards burst into the temple and kill the priest, thus interrupting the ritual. 2,000 years later, a group of American students arrive in Mexico to study the remains of the ancient Maya civilization, but their guide is killed and they hire in his place a mysterious woman who seems to have divinatory powers. The woman leads the students to the temple where centuries before the priest was performing the sacrifice. In that place strange events begin to occur and some young people disappear, perhaps because of the spirit of the priest determined to complete the sacrifice, even after 2,000 years! The late Bruno Mattei was a genius. The director, who died in 2007, managed to make films with extremely low budgets and made the most of the very few resources he had at his disposal, often working with "found footage" at the limits of legality. Mattei managed to make cannibal movies in the 21st century ("Mondo cannibale" and "Nella terra dei cannibali"), a genre now extinct and unrecoverable for any producer with a bit of common sense, and with "La Tomba" he created another exotic film, but with a more modern flavor. One could therefore recognize in Mattei a good dose of courage and impudence, even if his name was always replaced by pseudonyms ("La Tomba" is signed by David Hunt), but beyond the affection that one can feel for these impavid four-dollar productions, objectively "La Tomba", just like the two cannibal movies that preceded it, is a deeply bad film. The appeal that Mattei's cult films from the 1980s could convey (for example "Virus - Hell of the Living Dead" or "Rats - Night of Terror") is now totally extinct and these recent productions only convey a great sadness, due to an evident poverty and a rampant amateurism in every sequence. Not even the diverting hand of the director is noticed at all, not to mention the total incompetence of the cast, composed of ridiculous actors and actresses who seem to be on pause from the set of a porn film (duck lips, marble breasts, perpetually sweaty). What creates the most indignation in "La Tomba" is the air of seriousness and the underlying pretension that hovers over the entire film. The means to make the film were not there, and this is evident in every shot, and yet the film wants to appear rich and sumptuous, only eliciting the smile of the spectator: triumphant music, gilded titles and in huge characters even if made with Movie Maker, photography made with a couple of lamps that often poorly illuminate the face of the actors, showing only the shiny skin, repetitive polystyrene sets... in short, a lot of involuntary ridiculousness. It is curious to note that the film is full of STOLEN sequences from famous American films. Mattei was not new to this embarrassing operation of "artistic theft", since in his "Cruel Jaws" there were excerpts taken from "Jaws" and "The Last Shark" and in "Nella terra dei cannibali" scenes from "Predator" suddenly appeared. In the case of "La Tomba" it goes further and it is taken to the full from more films: some scenes are literally stolen from "Army of Darkness" and "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom", then dialogues recycled from "Predator" (once again!), "From Dusk Till Dawn" and "The Mummy", moreover from these last two, some scenes have been taken that Mattei has refilmed to adapt them to his film. The gratuitous scene of the bar before the guide's death is taken word for word from the entrance of Santanico Pandemonium in "From Dusk Till Dawn" and the prologue and epilogue of "La Tomba" come explicitly from "The Mummy" by Stephen Sommers. One is also disappointed by the most purely entertaining aspect of the film because the excessive length of the film (more than 100 minutes) and the underlying seriousness do not even manage to adequately entertain the spectator, now lost in a sad trash. The lack of splatter scenes, or at least bloody ones, as well as the total absence of sexy scenes, are a serious lack for this film, especially because they could have given it vigor and personality. Above all, the sexy element seems several times suggested by the prominence of the actresses and by some elements scattered in the film (the possible homosexual relationship between two students), but everything is systematically concealed by an inexplicable modesty of film for all. In short, "La Tomba" is really unsatisfactory in all respects: if one immediately renounces the possibility of having between one's hands a "real" quality horror film, one must soon renounce the possibility of attending a diverting exploitation film.