Every other scene begins with a door on the opposite side of the house creaking open, followed by five minutes of a character walking through a hallway and ending with La Llorona jumping out at them. The film’s scares are cheap and completely unearned. “The Curse of La Llorona” is a tired, boring film that doesn’t even hide that it has nothing to offer to the horror movie industry. Save for the demon’s unique name and like so many other imitators of “The Exorcist” or “The Conjuring,” the film follows a predictable, generic plot. The film follows widowed mother Anna Tate-Garcia (Linda Cardellini) and her two children, Chris (Roman Christou) and Samantha (Jaynee-Lynne Kinchen), who find themselves tormented by a historical demon named “La Llorona” (Marisol Ramirez), or “The Wailing Lady.” The family seeks help from the church to break the curse.
Otherwise "La Llorona" is another lame trip down a long, darkened hallway where the anticipation of the scare is always more frightening than the scare itself.The latest entry in the growing “Conjuring” franchise, “The Curse of La Llorona,” directed by Michael Chaves, proves that spin-off films of this universe simply try to sell themselves off franchise fame, rather than quality of content. Things pick up with the arrival of Rafael Olvera ("Breaking Bad's" Raymond Cruz), a faith healer who at least brings some humor to the proceedings.
Linda Cardellini, who really deserves better, is Anna Tate-Garcia, a social worker trying to protect her kids from the wrath of Double L. But her presence is always signaled by the aforementioned screech-bang-boom. The rules of La Llorona are never really established: she appears, disappears and reappears at will, and it's not clear how she travels or where she comes from or how she manifests herself in the physical realm. Here it's La Llorona, a 300-year-old mythic creature who wears a filthy white dress and runny "Exorcist" makeup and attacks children and sometimes parents by grabbing their wrists and leaving burn marks. And that moment is usually accompanied by the fright face - mouth agape, eyes wide - of whichever supernatural being is haunting that particular movie. The formula for the scares is always the same: there's an anticipated beat, followed by a pause, followed by the actual scare, which is usually accompanied by a soundtrack cue that's like a hissing screech, a piercing scream, a slamming door, a whistling tea kettle and a derailed train smashing into a warehouse full of scrap metal, all at once. These films - the three "Conjuring" movies, the "Annabelle" films (there's a third one due out this summer), and "The Nun" - are baseline horror outings built on cheap scares involving families in peril. There's a curse, alright, in "The Curse of La Llorona," and it has to do with the larger "Conjuring" universe from which it spawns.
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