What the Waters Left Behind: Scars

The Ravens are such a dumb hardcore band, they don’t get the Damon Knight (“To Serve Man”) joke when a fan promises “my folks are having barbecue—they would love to have you.” Unwisely, they drive her into the ruins of Epecuen, the flooded Argentine resort city that remains in complete ruins. Just like in the previous film, the Ravens fall prey to a grotesque Texas Chainsaw-like family of homicidal freaks in Nicolas Onetti’s What the Waters Left Behind: Scars, which releases tomorrow on VOD.

This film is a lot like the first film, unfortunately, but it was helmed by only one half of the Onetti Brothers. At least Luciano Onetti showed his support by scoring the sequel and serving as associate producer. It is just as sadistically brutal, but this time the Epecuen squatters are so violent and hostile, they also display a tendency to turn on themselves. That could theoretically open a window of opportunity for the Raven, but don’t get your hopes up.

Frankly, Scars might even be tougher to slog through the just plain What the Waters Left Behind. The first film maybe also made better use of the shockingly bleak and powerfully cinematic Epecuen backdrop. Still, there are some striking drone shots of the tour van crawling across the blighted landscape.

The Onetti Brothers’ What the Waters Left Behind

The devastation of Epecuen was even worse than the hardest hit wards during Hurricane Katrina. The former tourist city on Argentina’s coast was wiped out and it is never coming back. Of course, that makes it an intriguing shooting location for an irresponsible film crew. Their documentary is doomed and so are they in the Onetti Brothers’ What the Waters Left Behind, which releases today on DVD.

Vasco, his hired crew, and his faithless girlfriend Vicky are driving to Epecuen to make a documentary. Their star will be Carla, who is revisiting the site of the disaster she barely survived as a child. However, they should have turned right around when they got an eyeful of the rustic yokels at the last-chance gas station—and their sketchy Sweeney Todd-esque meat pies—but they don’t.

Naturally, the Texas Chainsaw-style freaks proceed to kill them off in brutal fashion. There is one outsider added to the mix: “Senor X,” who is looking for a missing loved on, but he doesn’t amount to much. There is maybe one surprise in store for horror fans, but The Waters still has little to offer that is new and absolutely nothing that is pleasant to watch.

The Onetti Brothers’ foray into the slasher sub-genre really only has three things going for it: location, location, and location. The Epecuen backdrops are truly haunting. They are also arguably exploitative. This is the scene of a massive tragedy, so the film’s depiction of knuckle-dragging survivors is really quite questionable.

BHFF ’19: A Night of Horror—Nightmare Radio

When it comes to horror movie radio personalities, Rod Wilson cannot compete with Adrienne Barbeau in The Fog, but who can? The important thing is he connects with his listeners and he can tell a spooky yarn with the best of them (maybe not John Houseman in The Fog, but he is still pretty good). In fact, his framing sequences are the best part of the Onetti Brothers’ anthology film, A Night of Horror: Nightmare Radio, which had its North American premiere at this year’s Brooklyn Horror Film Festival.

Wilson produces his own overnight show, so it is just him and a cup of coffee in his converted ranch house studio. Ordinarily, that suits him fine, but tonight he gets a little spooked by a series of crank calls. Obviously, the best way to settle his nerves will be telling his audience the scariest tales he can spin. However, there is very little consistency to his stories, both in terms of theme and quality.

Instead of commissioning new segments, the Onettis just parked pre-existing short films within their anthology framework, so it is not impossible horror fans could have seen some of these before. It starts with one of the more aesthetically challenging, Jason Bognacki’s In the Dark, Dark Woods, which is even less conventional than his head-spinning doppelganger feature, The Mark of the Witch. Arguably, Joshua Long’s Post Mortem Mary is the most traditional, but he wrings plenty of creepiness out of the macabre premise involving a young girl working as a post-mortem photography assistant in frontier Australia.

Probably the best shorts, A.J. Briones’ The Smiling Man and Oliver Park’s Vicious would be tricky for Wilson to actually relate over the air, because they are largely dependent on freaky things seen out of the corner of our eyes or in reflections. Regardless, they are easily the tensest, most effective constituent films in the anthology.