Almohadón de plumas (1988)

... aka: Feather Cushion

... aka: Feather Pillow

Directed by:

Ricardo Islas

This was made by the same fella who'd just done the ultra low-budget shot-on-video vampire film CROWLEY (1987). Since I already wrote a bit about him on that review, I'll give you the Cliffs Notes version here: Islas was a horror-movie-loving teenager living in Uruguay, a low population country (around 3 million when this was made) that didn't have much of a film industry to speak of. Still, he didn't let that stop him from making his own camcorder-shot features, which appear to have only been shown on TV in his home country. Islas churned out quite a few of these in the late 80s into the mid 90s (including a Crowley sequel) before relocating to the U.S., where he continues to make ultra low budget horror films to this day. This one is an adaptation of a short story (a very short one) of the same name by Horacio Quiroga, who's sometimes referred to as "The Edgar Allan Poe of Latin America" and was born in Uruguay but spent most of his professional career working in Argentina. El almohadón de plumas was first published back in 1917 in a collection of eighteen short stories from the author titled Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte ("Tales of Love, Madness and Death"). Though he's mostly unknown here in America, apparently his work is frequently praised in Spanish-speaking countries.

The cheap-looking title screen and opening wobbly shots around a curio shop looking at dolls, masks and the titular pillow set to synth music is oddly charming, but we're also immediately slapped right in the face that this is an amateur home movie. The camerawork is shaky, the videography is sometimes blurry, everything is blindingly bright in the day yet too dark at night and there's almost no attention whatsoever paid to making sure we can actually hear what the actors are saying in the first scene. As our protagonist is discussing some kind of construction deal with his colleague Antonio (Richard Perlas) the audio is muffled and voices are drowned out by passing cars. Cars can even sometimes be heard in some of the scenes taking place indoors and a faint hissing sound is present over most of the dialogue from relying on the camcorder's built-in mic.

The story centers around Jordan (played by the director) and Alicia (Norma Morgan), former college sweethearts who have just gotten married, yet sleep in separate bedrooms. He's so preoccupied with work that he usually brings it home with him and it seems like it's all he can ever talk about. She doesn't seem to have a career or much to do aside from sleeping a lot. Alicia has recently purchased a fancy red feather pillow with a curious, hand-painted design on it (a six-pointed star with an eyeball in the middle) that she seems to be pleased with.

Alicia starts getting headaches and passing out. A doctor is called in and recommends she change her diet. However, her issues continue and she starts getting even worse. Woken up by a noise, she thinks she sees a black-clad figure lurking around their home and follows it into the cellar, where a ping pong ball eyed woman with rotten teeth charges at her. After hearing his wife screaming, Jordan rushes down to the cellar to find her unconscious. Back to the doctors they go. This time they run some more tests and question whether she's on drugs, vomiting blood and / or suffering from "nasal or vaginal discharge" (?!) They finally come to the conclusion she's having hallucinations brought on from anemia and recommend she get more rest. No problem there. All this chick ever seems to do is lie around in bed! Nevertheless, Jordan has his sister Nancy (Beatriz Rossi) come stay with them to help around the house so Alicia has even less to do.

Further encounters with the mysterious lady follow, which leads to more screaming and more passing out, plus dramatic physical changes like dark under eye circles, paleness, rapid loss of weight, rapid loss of blood and small sores on her face that resemble bug bites. After the doctors assure Jordan there's nothing to worry about, Alicia suddenly passes away in her sleep, just five days after first becoming sick. The doctors complete their analysis postmortem and reveal that she had been drained of her blood by something of a parasitic nature.

Considering what medium was used to make this, the unavoidable pratfalls of using said medium and the fact very little money was spent here, this showcases enough care, talent and ambition to keep it enjoyable if you can tolerate zero budget videotaped horror. Though there are awkward, bland and / or technically inept moments sprinkled throughout, a surprising number of scenes are professionally staged, paced and edited, to the point where you sometimes actually forget about this being a home movie. It's almost as if scenes were (gasp!) planned out by the director in advance to the point he may have actually (double gasp!) storyboarded them. Faults and all, I genuinely appreciated the effort that went into this, especially when compared directly to most other SOV horrors from this same time period.

This is also one of those instances where I don't recommend reading the source material before seeing the movie. You can breeze through that in just a couple of minutes afterward like I did, but watching the movie version play out with no knowledge of what's going to happen offers up some surprises you won't be getting if you familiarize with it beforehand. The film does a pretty nice job respectfully staying faithful to the story while also elaborating upon it, especially adding an ambiguous element about the source of the pillow that sends it into faintly supernatural territory.

There are a number of other filmed versions of the same story. It was adapted by Mexican filmmaker Alicia Violante in 1990 (which appears to have been a student film), was the subject of Cuban and Chilean shorts in, respectively, 2000 and 2007, was an episode of the Argentinian TV series Fantasmagorias in 2018 and an episode of the Paraguayan TV series Relatos Clásicos de Misterio y Terror in 2020. There's also Japanese TV movie version from 2022 and it's been featured on several Spanish-language podcasts. To my knowledge, this particular version has never been given an official home video release, nor has it ever been released with English subtitles.

★★1/2

Films by country: Uruguay

URUGUAYAN HORROR [1950-1990]

Uruguay was just the second Latin American country (behind only Mexico) to get involved in film production with the 1898 release of Félix Oliver's short Carrera de ciclismo en el velodrome de Arroyo Seco, which was simply the filming of a bicycle race. Their first fictional film wouldn't be made until 1919 while their first feature-length fictional film didn't come until 1923. There'd be very few others made there in the coming decades in comparison to neighboring countries but that really shouldn't be of much surprise considering that, at 3.47 million, it's the 20th most populated of the 33 Latin American countries. War, repressive government, political corruption (including widespread financial fraud) and several socioeconomic crises (starting with fallout from the Great Depression) have all plagued the country and thus its attempts at a lucrative film industry. However, it's said that the fact the country has imported in most of its entertainment from other countries (namely Argentina) over the years has had even more of an effect. At most points, Uruguay simply didn't have the financial means to compete and early attempts at creating film studios failed.

Seeing how there was very little film production period over the years it's no surprise there were very few horror films. It wouldn't be until the late 1980s that a teenager named Ricardo Islas ▼ emerged on the scene with a series of shot-on-video genre films. At the time, he worked for television station Canal 3 Colonia and that's exactly where his homemade films would air. His vampire film Crowley (1987), made when he was just 16-years-old, appears to be the very first genre feature from the country. He followed that with a sequel and continued to make low budget horror films in Uruguay until the late 90s. These went unseen in most of the world until the internet and, even now with the internet, are still seldom viewed. Islas eventually moved to the U.S. and relocated to Chicago to continue making low budget movies like Headcrusher (1999), Night Fangs (2001) and Lookout (2006).

To date, Gustavo Hernández's 2010 feature La casa muda (The Silent House) is the most viewed / famous entirely-Uruguayan horror film that's been made. Nowadays, the country only produces on average five films per year and more actively participates in co-productions.

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1950s

😒

1960s

😒

1970s

😒

1980s

- Possession (Posesión) (1986; Ricardo Islas) [short]

- Crowley (1987; Ricardo Islas)

- Feather Pillow (Almohadón de plumas) (1988; Ricardo Islas)

- Crowley's Ashes (Las cenizas de Crowley) (1990; Ricardo Islas) ▼

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TOTAL:

4

NOTES:

- Islas also made a short called Gag (1987) but I'm not sure whether it's horror or not.

- The plot synopsis of Acto de violencia en una joven periodista / "Act of Violence Against a Young Journalist" (1988) suggests it's also a possibility for inclusion: "A brilliant young journalist is writing a thesis on violence, unaware that a psychopathic murderer is following in her footsteps with a furious thirst for revenge." The shot-on-video film apparently is a SBIG minor cult item in Uruguay.

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Anything to add? Drop me a note down below.

Latin American Horror

LATIN AMERICAN HORROR [1950 - 1990]

This section will be covering most of Central and South America as well as the island nations in the Caribbean and for a grand total of thirty-three countries. Note: The countries listed below are ones who produced some pre-1990 genre films but not in excess of fifty so this is essentially the "Latin American (Other)" category for the less prolific countries. I'm also throwing in Puerto Rico. Though it's technically a U.S. dependency and not a country, it's the only one of the fourteen U.S., UK, French or Dutch dependencies in this region to have any horror productions prior to 1990 and even that was very minor. Film production was either completely nonexistent or at least next to nonexistent in most of these countries until the advent of easier and more affordable digital video technology here in recent years.

Many of these countries will be discounted right away. For starters, three managed to hit our 50 film threshold for their own sidebar button: Mexico (the most prolific film and TV production country in all of Latin America), Brazil (by far the highest-populated country at a population of 212+ million) and Argentina (thanks mainly to TV productions). Of the thirteen Caribbean countries, only one - Cuba - had their hand in pre-1990 genre films, so we can scratch twelve of the others off the list. What's mostly left are countries whose genre presence was limited to perhaps just a few or, in some cases, just one filmmaker carrying the torch for the entire country.

It's worth noting that many regions in Latin America were popular shooting locations for outside film crews. Various production companies, namely British, Italian and American ones, would often go to Jamaica, Haiti and other countries to film and take advantage of the scenery. Often local talent was tapped to work on these films. Italian Joe D'Amato even filmed an entire series of sleazy horror films in Dominican Republic, but these aren't technically Dominican productions even though they're sometimes falsely listed as such online.

LATIN AMERICAN COUNTRIES

Click on one of the flags below to learn more (not all links are currently open but will be soon)...

Crowley (1987)

Directed by:
Ricardo Islas

How does a 1980s camcorder-shot vampire movie made by a 16-year-old from Uruguay sound? Well, whatever you're thinking, this is certainly bad but it's not nearly as bad as it could have been under the circumstances. In a small, coastal colonial town, a clawed, drooling, pasty-faced vampire rises from the ground near an old cemetery. He immediately gets to work dispatching a necking couple by tossing the guy over a wall and punching the girl in the face, sending a hilarious stuffed dummy flying across a field. He then punches her in the face some more until he crushes her skull and sucks out all her blood. The bodies are found and then taken to a coroner's office, where the doctor does a thorough examination, not only discovering the girl has been completely drained dry but also that there are puncture wounds and traces of human saliva on her neck. He takes his findings to his police inspector friend (Mario Fernández), who's already been to the crime scene and discovered a freshly-dug grave near where the bodies were found as well as muddy footprints leading from it up to the crime scene. After another girl is attacked and killed in the same manner, the two men ponder whether the killer is a human psycho who only fancies himself a vampire or the real thing. Even more bloodless corpses turning up all over town and a funeral home reporting a coffin being stolen fail to convince them one way or another.

Doing a much better job investigating the murders than all of the adults is a shy, geeky college student named Andres Gutierrez (Juan C. Lazzarini). Andres studies up on vampires and starts researching local history at both the library and a church where he learns that back in the late 17th Century a strange European man by the name of Adrian Crowley arrived in the area when it was still a tiny Portuguese colony. There, he took a maiden named Maria as his lover and, being a vampire, fed off the locals until he was caught by townspeople and hung. Before dying, he vowed to return 300 years later not only to get his revenge but also be reunited with his lost love, who has been reincarnated in the present day as a teen named, you guessed it, Maria (Fanny Bertinat). All it takes is one brief run-in with the vampire in an abandoned house to make Andres realize that the local legend is indeed true, though he doesn't have an easy time convincing everyone else of that.

It isn't until Crowley (who's played by director Islas) kills and drains another young girl and slaughters four punks in a park (including stabbing a guy on the top of his head with a switchblade and crushing a head in his bare hands) that the cops start taking Andres seriously. The Inspector, his assistant Martinez and another officer then go to check out the vampire's tomb. They end up encountering the vamp and only the Inspector gets out of there alive, though one of his officers does at least manage to shoot the vampire's eyeball out before being disemboweled. Crowley then heads out after Maria. After stabbing her best friend Marta (Sandra Casagna) through the throat with a kitchen knife and drowning her boyfriend Jorge (Daniel Lacoste) in a toilet (though he manages to survive the attack), Crowley finally gets his claws on her and whisks her off to some tunnels located underneath the school's campus. Can Andres and Jorge get to her in time?

Pretty much all of the technical aspects of this one are as bad as they get, from the horribly overdone lighting to the blurry and frequently out of focus videography to the poor continuity all the way up to the amateurish acting, cheap gore fx, ragged editing and opening credits drawn with markers set to stolen music from The Amityville Horror. However, this demonstrates a general competence when it comes to basic storytelling and a surprising maturity considering the director's age. The plot is easy to follow, the characters are adequately established and this never really crosses the line into being laughably incompetent regardless of how cheap it is. It's merely an ordinary, unoriginal story done about as well as it could have been done given the nonexistent budget, the shooting medium and the inexperienced cast and crew. Though far from good, it's still ambitious and oddly impressive given the director's age. There's a tendency for young filmmakers stuck working with little money to fall back on self-mocking dumb laughs as some built-in apology for making you sit through their dumb / cheap film. Islas, on the other hand, takes his film completely seriously and is at least sincerely trying to make something decent.

This is quite possibly the very first feature-length horror film ever made in Uruguay. If it's not, it's the first (and one of the only) to show up on an IMDb title search. Islas' crop of early work (which were all screened on, and partially financed by, Channel 3 TV, Colonia del Sacramento) includes the short Possession (1986) and the features Feather Pillow (1989) and Crowley's Ashes (1990); a follow-up to this one. He continued to make films in his home country until a trip to Chicago in the mid 90s, where a movie of his was being screened at a film festival, found him falling in love with the city and relocating there permanently. Since then he's made a good number of low budget horror films, including Headcrusher (1999), Night Fangs (2005), To Kill a Killer (2007) and Frankenstein: Day of the Beast (2011).

★1/2