Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on March 30, 2007, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
A trio of friends head to a foreign country in search of women, booze and assorted good times, only to run afoul of a shadowy organization that wants to torture and kill them. Here we go again, right? Not quite; Borderland (which recently premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival ahead of release later this year by Lionsgate) is played as more of a suspense drama than a horror film overall, despite starting with one of the hardest-to-watch scenes of violence in recent memory. As they explore a creepy, rundown house, a pair of Mexican cops are set upon by a group of vicious thugs, including a big bald guy (Marco Bacuzzi) who vaguely suggests a south-of-the-border Michael Berryman. One of the policias is strapped to a chair and has several portions of his anatomy forcibly removed, as his partner looks on in terror—and is told to take this as a warning not to mess with the villains’ activities.
Cut to our three recent-high-school-grad heroes getting ready to embark on their road trip, who receive no such advisement. We know that they’re headed for big trouble, but only one of them engenders much advance sympathy: For Eddie (Brian Presley), the jaunt is just a pit stop on the journey to a more meaningful future. His pals, on the other hand, step way over the line separating likable hedonists from unpleasant jerks: Henry (Jake Muxworthy) is a sexist cretin and Phil (Cabin Fever’s Rider Strong) is a horndog idiot. Thus it’s a foregone conclusion which of them will survive and which will be punished for their a-holery, and yet it’s to the credit of director Zev Berman (who wrote the script with Eric Poppen) that the film engenders the tension that it does.
Part of the reason is their storyline’s basis in fact; predecessors like Hostel and Turistas have been vaguely inspired by supposedly true events, but Borderland is ripped directly from the headlines about a college student on spring break in Mexico in the late ’80s who was kidnapped and murdered by a satanic cult. (Berman reports that, while on a trip through the area at the same time, he and two friends were stopped and their van searched by gun-toting border guards.) Here, the evil Santillan—who goes unseen until toward the end, where he’s played by Chilean singer Beto Cuevas—and his minions sacrifice innocent people in return for occult protection for their nefarious activities. Phil is snatched off the street while stumbling drunkenly back toward the guys’ hotel, and wakes up chained in a remote shack. In a nice twist, his principal captor is not an abusive brute but a chatty American, Randall (Sean Astin, effectively cast against type), who has thrown his lot in with the criminals. Randall doesn’t act like such a bad guy, even as he makes it clear that a horrible fate awaits Phil.
Pretty much everything else about and everyone else in Borderland behaves pretty much as you expect them to: Eddie and Henry discover Phil missing, they get no help from the local law but are assisted by a sexy bartender (Martha Higareda) who has taken a shine to Eddie, others who try to help them get gruesomely taken out, etc. The visual scheme is familiar too—high-contrast, low-color photography conveying a veneer of constant debauchery and/or threat—though Scott Kevan’s widescreen images are certainly accomplished and succeed in creating the proper atmosphere. Refreshingly, Berman doesn’t go in for too much of the distracting visual trickery currently indulged in by some filmmakers; he stages the violence bluntly and directly, showcasing KNB EFX’s unnervingly realistic gore FX.
The mayhem is largely confined to that prologue and a lengthy climactic showdown, as Berman and co. aim more for crime-thriller suspense for the bulk of the running time. In that they’re more successful in parts than as a whole, given the conventional narrative arc (though it’s in large part an unfortunate accident of timing that will have horror fans thinking they’ve seen this scenario before; Borderland was filmed nearly two years ago, around the same time as the aforementioned Hostel and Turistas). Berman’s got evident genre-filmmaking chops, though, and they shine through often enough to make Borderland worth the trip.
