FILM REVIEW A creepy folk tale becomes banal film

‘THE CURSE OF LA LLORONA’

Grade: 2 stars (out of 4)

Rating: R

Running time: 1:33

By LINDSEY BAHR

AP Film Writer

La Llorona, a woman who according to Mexican legend murdered her own children and now wanders the earth looking for them, snatching other unsuspecting tots and drowning them, gets her close-up in a major Hollywood film, Warner Bros.’ “The Curse of La Llorona.” It’s a pretty terrifying bedtime story popular in the Latino community, used to scare children into behaving with the threat that La Llorona will come and take them if they don’t. Seems like decent enough fodder for a jumpy 93 minutes at the movies.

But the so-called “weeping woman” may have another reason to wail once her big North American debut hits theaters. The movie, from director Michael Chaves and producer James Wan, who made “The Conjuring” so good and stylish that it inspired a whole “universe” of films, including this one, just isn’t that great. In fact, it makes La Llorona pretty ordinary – a demonic bride who terrorizes two single-moms and their families in Los Angeles in the late 1970s by running at them screaming and crying oily black tears.

The screenplay is mainly about Anna Tate-Garcia (Linda Cardellini), a widowed child-services worker and mom to two, Chris (Roman Christou) and Samantha (Jaynee-Lynne Kinchen). One of her cases, Patricia Alvarez (Patricia Velasquez), a mother of two, is being haunted by La Llorona and when Anna intervenes, suspecting that it was mom who burned marks into her sons’ arms, both boys end up dead, drowned in the shallow LA River.

So La Llorona turns her attentions to Anna’s kids, and things start to get quite stressful and scary in their big home, in part because although Anna, Chris and Samantha eventually encounter this very formal demon, none talk to each other about it. Even more frustrating: When Anna sees burn marks on her daughter’s arm, after very recently having seen the same marks on the two now dead Alavarez boys, she doesn’t pry further when Samantha says she merely fell.

The film feels both long and rushed, which is something of an accomplishment as Chaves speeds through scenes. Plotlines are abandoned at will, there are set ups for things that never come back and some suspiciously malleable “monster-logic” that makes the whole endeavor seem a little lazy and half-baked.

The legend of La Llorona could inspire a whole universe of films on its own, but not with a kick-off like this.