GORE IN THE STORE
REVIEWS BY FANS FOR FANS
5 STAR FAB - 1 STAR RUBBISH

Pet Shop of Horrors
Kaiji:
The Ultimate Gambler
No-Do
Shelter
Fullmetal Alchemist:
Brotherhood Part 1
The Final
Bubba Ho Tep - Blu-Ray
Picnic at Hanging Rock
Vampire
The Dead
Resurrecting
The Street Walker
The Haunting Of
Molly Hartley
Soul Eater: Part One
Rozen Maiden:
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Bikini Girls On Ice
Diary of a Bad Lad
Satan's Baby Doll
Feast 111
Phobia
A Lizzard in a Woman's Skin
Valhalla Rising
City of the Living Dead
Dorothy
Daybreakers
Daybreakers-Second opinion
Harpoon: The Reykjavik Whale
Watching Massacre
Harpoon:The Reykjavik Whale
Watching Massacre-Second opinion
Feast 3:The Happy Finnish
Raging Phoenix
His Name Was Jason
Left Bank
Ju-On: White Ghost/White Ghost
Spiral
Ghost Machine
Stag Night
Bitch Slap
The Descent 2
The Descent 2-Second opinion
Dance of The Dead
Henry Lee Lucas: Serial Killer
House Of The Devil
The Twilight Saga
New Moon
Salvage
Salvage-Second opinion
Dread
The Haunted World of
El Superbeasto
Saw VI
The Horseman
Triangle-Second opinion
Triangle
Cabin Fever 2-Third opinion
Cabin Fever 2-Second opinion
Cabin Fever 2
Stan Helsing
Pandorum
Pandorum-Second opinion
Open Graves
Paranormal Activity
Growth
Growth-Second opinion
Train
Antichrist
Wrong Turn 3
Coffin Rock
Orphan
Sorority Row
Drag Me to Hell
Staunton Hill
Summer Moon
Driftwood
Messengers 2

 

Directed by Elio Quiroga. Starring Ana Torrent, Francisco Boira, Héctor Colomé, Rocío Muñoz, Francisco Casares. Horror / Mystery, Spain, 94 mins.

From Spain, No-Do is a supernatural thriller in the vein of The Orphanage.
Francesca is a pediatrician suffering from what appears to be post-partum depression after the birth of her own child. Signed off from work and with baby on tow she and her husband move to a large house on top of a secluded hill. Francesca’s husband is concerned about her unhealthy attachment to the new baby and insists that she let the child sleep alone.

Of course no sooner has the couple settled in, than strange events begin to befall Francesca. Loud bangs in the night; a mysterious old woman appears and disappears; there are knocks at the door and yet when it is answered no one is there. If course the husband either sleeps through these events, or is at work, and so interprets Francesca’s distress as signs of mental instability. When mysterious messages in blood start appearing on the walls, he event goes so far as to have the baby taken to his parents.

A pre-credits sequence makes clear that the house has some kind of terrible secret, and in the background a parallel story runs about a priest task with investigating and debunking miracles for the Catholic Church. There are dark hints in this storyline of terrible events during the reign of Franco, events that involve a recently deceased Bishop and that the church would rather did not come to light.

I am being very careful in providing a synopsis of No-Do (the name comes from Noticiarios y Documentales, state controlled cinema newsreels produced during Franco’s reign and vehicles for propaganda). There are several other plot strands running through the film that to even hint at would give away too much of the films twists. However you can probably gather from what little I have given that this is extremely derivative stuff. The aforementioned The Orphanage seems to be the template, but where J.A. Bayona’s masterful film took the haunted house genre and used it to create a devastating, terrifying and ultimately very moving story, with one of the best third act twists in recent cinema history to boot; No-Do is workmanlike and too often feels like a compilation of favorite haunted house/exorcist tropes. In fact I was ticking them off:

A female lead somehow attuned to the supernatural
The investigating Psychiatrist/Priest
The unbelieving rational husband/boyfriend
The creepy old woman
Spooky children
Analog tape recordings capturing the sounds of ghosts
Mysterious banging in the night
Secret messages discovered by pencil rubbing
Bricked up rooms filled with rats and bones

The list goes on.

No-Do is competently made, and there are some chills to be had in the first half, but unfortunately just when the film should be ratcheting up the tension and scares, the Church conspiracy storyline comes to the fore and this supernatural soufflé deflates. The conspiracy storyline resolves itself in a way that is both contrived and ridiculous, bringing in miracles, demonic apparitions, and special cine-film able to capture images of apparitions.

Although a case could be made that the film’s subtext is the past crimes of fascism and the complicity of the church, this is all so much window dressing and fails to carry any real dramatic heft. The films’ running length when if played at the American Film Market was 120 minutes, it seems that a large chunk of material has been cut since then. While I doubt that this is a ruined masterpiece, I suspect that some of the more baffling plot developments and the truncated backstory may have made more sense in a longer cut.

This is still a reasonable rental for fans of the haunted house genre, just don’t expect it to measure up to the likes of The Orphanage, Del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone or my personal favorite, Robert Wise’s The Haunting (borrowing that title for this film is nothing short of sacrilegious). If the understated spookshow is not your thing, then No-Do is not going to change your mind.

Stuart Barr.

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