Directed by: Patricio Valladares
ABOUT THE FILM:
Aberración is a 22 minute Chilean film that was made in 2000, in the infancy of filmmaker Patricio Valladares's career. This is one of the earliest gore films, if not the earliest, to ever come out of the country, and was shot in 2000 with a budget of 15,000 Chilean pesos (roughly $18 in USD).
We follow a man living in a dorm with his roommates, who pours a bag of chopped mushrooms (?) into some water, and for some reason, his skin rapidly decays to a nauseating green and he attacks one of his dorm mates, who also transforms and begins to attack others.. Will anyone survive?
REVIEW:
The story is extremely straightforward and easy to follow, despite the lack of any English subtitles. However most people who watch this probably aren't in it for the story. If anything, they're in it for the gore. Aberración may be a very rough and cheap piece of amateur gory filth, but simply put, this little film does not fuck around. Within only a few minutes, our lead has already transformed into his demonic form and begins to feast on his misfortunate victims. He tears at his dorm mate's jugular with his razor sharp teeth, bites open his victim's stomach and disembowels them, all the while smearing the organs on their face. Eyeballs are also plucked out and eaten, and there are many stabbings and eviscerations.
Sounds pretty brutal, right? Well, the idea definitely is. But it would be better if it wasn't so badly executed.
The acting is mediocre at best; at some points, you can tell the actors are trying to keep in their laughter. Despite the occasionally interesting visual effects and edits, the camera work is quite shaky and very muddy looking (presumably shot with a cheap digital video camera). As I stated before, the story doesn't really matter that much. So let's touch on the gore, shall we? ..The unconvincing, butcher-shop gore effects look pretty silly, with very thick and bright red fake blood. The make-up in general seems very caked-on, with everything just laid on top of the actor, or with the guts just hiding underneath a shirt. Definitely not the best special effects, but they're far from being the worst. Also I gotta give credit to the actors; I don't know if I'd be able to stand having smelly animal guts and offal rubbed all over my face.
With everything I mentioned set in stone, just mix some metal music into the edit and you have Aberración, a rather bare-bones but amusing amateur splatter movie. Worth checking out at least once, if you've got 22 minutes to kill or if you just wanna watch some crappy Chilean shot-on-video demon madness!
RELEASES:
-Aberración was released on an extremely rare DVD sometime in the early 2000's, by Vallastudio. The exact date of its release is unknown, but the back of the cover has a blurb followed by "España, 2003"
-The short is officially available to watch on YouTube, courtesy of the director. You can watch it here.
