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Doctor Infierno

"The youth of today are on drugs all the time."
Starring: Arturo De Bobadilla, Belinda Fernández, David Ransanz, Jorge Gallego
Rating: 8.5/10
Directed By: Paco Limòn
Runtime: 84 minutes

Every once and a while there comes along the kind of film that packs so many crazy ideas into such a small framework that you immediately take notice, such as Shinya Tsukamoto's Tetsuo the Iron Man, Takashi Miike's seminal Gozu, George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, Sam Rami's Evil Dead or Kevin Smith's Clerks. Paco Limòn's Doctor Infierno is one such film. The ideas, dialog and imagery fly by at such a rapid clip it's almost impossible to keep up. I had a chance to screen this a few days before FantasticFest and it blew me away and, due to a serendipitous walk-out of The Brothers Bloom, got to see it again on the big screen with much the same results. Blowing up a twenty minute short into a feature, director Paco Limòn overcomes the "handicap" of a low budget by great scripting, rapid-fire editing, clever visual tricks, drafting friends into scenes and a non-stop flow of bizarre ideas that just keep coming.

The story centers Horatio Hell (Arturo De Bobadilla) who, in a very Herbert West-ian manner, discovers a serum called X-1000 that will kill all the world's illness. Dr. Hell is gracious enough to bestow X-1000 to the world as a gesture of goodwill... but only if they declare him Emperor (a small request, I say). Standing in his way is his former right hand nurse, Enfermera Garcia (Belinda Fernández), who sees Hell's potential for abuse and has fled with a serum sample. Hell sends an assassin ( David Ransanz) to take care of the nurse but the killer cannot tell the difference between 4 and 9, gets the address wrong and kills the wrong girl. He calls Hell, whose verbal dressing down of the assassin is one of cinema's greatest moments. The assassin heads up to the right floor just as the girl's date for the evening arrives. The date (Jorge Gallego) is rather near-sighted and "completes" his date with the smiling corpse before discovering her dismemberment and flees.

Our assassin does indeed find the nurse but she's well prepared for this eventuality, injecting herself with X-1000 which has the unique side-effect of turning the user into a kung-fu supermachine! The subsequent fight is a stethoscope-wielding, French bread, microwave exploding hand, pissed-nurse stump-style, flower pot computer monitor to the head-fu extravaganza to behold. The editing is truly superb here and a lot of the violence is camera placement, like when the assassin has the nurse down in a Lou Thez press and starts wailing on her it's shot from a floor POV but you still feel he's whuppin the shit out of her. The fight continues to the roof where the assassin is taken out by the corpse fucker who, in turn, gets his eye chewed out by the revenge-driven nurse who continues on to find Hell. Seconds later, one of Hell's retrieval teams show up, injects the assassin and corpse-fucker with X-1000 and fly them back to Hell's compound for future experimentation.

One Hell of a movie, right? Well that's just the opening twenty minutes. Heavens, there's a lot of film left and a lot of it should be discovered on it's own. A quick glance sees the bizarre quotient pick up when we hit the lab. The nurse goes on a head-stomping rampage level by level on her quest for Hell (including an obviously Resident Evil-style section), the assassin comes to and attempts to process his whereabouts and the corpse-fucker comes to with no glasses and, cobbling together a set of two different spectacles, blurredly also attempts to navigate his new home. Thanks to the chaos of the nurse, all kinds of genetic experiments run amok, including a guy with his lip pulled over his face, a crazy crab-armed dude, post-op chicks and a retarded kid who turns into the Juggernaut. By amok I mean cannibalism, ball-sucking (no shit!), rolling through people (and walls!), punching people through the backs of their heads, 4-way dance action, giant robots, jets shooting missiles and 9/11-ing buildings and... you know, amok. Pay special attention during the post-op scene with the killer. The short scientist is good friend Javier Albarrán, who plays such a role (trust me, you'll understand what I mean) with an incredible smile of bemusement comes close to stealing the scene (however, the scene steals the scene). All the actors are superb for their roles and the assassin, Mr. Ransanz, was far and away my favorite character. By the time you get to the end you A: want it to continue and B: REALLY want part 2 (which Javier assures me is not on the way. Booooo.)

This movie, as typical, is not yet available in good old America nor have I found it on the internets, though I bet it's out there and it deserves to be sought out. Low-budget, high entertainment value and more ideas in 84 minutes than Hollywood produces in a year, Doctor Infierno is a destined-to-be cult classic that you are aware of now. Find a way to see this movie and you will be rewarded.