2013’s Cinco De Mayo is unexpectedly solid stuff
Cinco De Mayo, as widely celebrated as it is, is also one of the most misunderstood and misinterpreted holidays in the United States. A lot of people think it’s Mexico’s Independence Day, which is actually September 16. What Cinco De Mayo actually commemorates is Ignacio Zaragoza and his troops defeating the French at the First Battle of Pueblo in 1862. And how and why that’s become a day for Americans to get white girl wasted on Dollaritas at Applebees is simply beyond me.
Considering the horror genre’s fetish with holiday exploitation in general, I suppose it was only a matter of time until somebody made a slasher movie centered around Cinco De Mayo. And sure enough, we got it in 2013 from director Paul Ragsdale.
Now, I’m not 100 percent certain that Cinco De Mayo is truly the first Cinco De Mayo-centric slasher flick. Who knows, maybe there’s a long-lost shot-on-video movie that hasn’t seen the light of day since 1987 or something. But it’s certainly the most high profile Cinco De Mayo slasher movie out there (at least as far as the Google ranking goes, anyway.)
Before we delve into the movie itself, I know what you’re thinking. You see a slasher movie called Cinco De Mayo from 2013 and you might think it’s an insensitive, stereotypical gag made by some ultra-Caucasian from Ohio or something. But no, Ragsdale is indeed a Hispanic filmmaker, and before you start giving me that “male gaze” lecture, keep in mind that Cinco De Mayo was co-written by Angelica de Alba, who just so happens to be a woman.
There are a lot of amazing things about Cinco De Mayo. Probably the most amazing of them all, however, is that it’s actually a GOOD slasher movie. We all remember how pathetic the genre was in the early 2010s, so you can’t really hassle a guy for thinking this movie would be more of the same. But against all odds, Ragsdale’s film succeeds as a tongue-in-cheek throwback homage where countless contemporaries failed spectacularly.
For starters, it’s a movie with some obvious sociopolitical subtext. But it’s not a preachy movie by any means. Indeed, it’s a pretty good satire on race relations in Obama’s America and a pretty good dissection of the post-Tea Party, America First contingent that would eventually turn into the MAGA crowd. You watch Cinco De Mayo today and it feels oddly prescient — intentionally or unintentionally, it forecast the prevailing headwinds a few years before the rest of Hollywood was even aware of it.
The other thing that makes Cinco De Mayo worth catching is the performance from lead actor Anthony Iava To’omata. It’s pretty rare to see an actor give this much effort in a movie a lot of performers would’ve just written off as pure camp comedy. He’s kind of doing a riff on the Edward James Olmos role in Stand and Deliver — which, naturally, is mentioned directly by the film itself a few times. I guess you just expect most slasher movies to get meta at some point, but at least this movie finds some fairly novel ways to do so. Case in point: the film opens with a pastiche of the old USA Network program Up All Night and the movie calls a timeout around the 60-minute mark for an extended trailer for a totally unrelated zombie flick. Call it “the Grindhouse effect,” I suppose.
The movie isn’t the “dead teenagers” formula spoof you might anticipate. Rather, it’s kind of a callback to the quasi-psychological character study slasher flicks of the 1980s — i.e., stuff like Christmas Evil and Silent Night, Deadly Night. It’s not just a movie about a knife-wielding psychopath, it’s a movie that goes to great lengths to explain how he become a mask-wearing murderer in the first place. To’omata’s character is basically the end product of unchecked racism, academic malfeasance and ignorance running wild; in some ways, it almost feels like a pure horror take on that old Michael Douglas movie Falling Down. Albeit, with WAY more people getting their faces pulped off with weed-whackers.
Yes, there are serious messages about anti-Hispanic sentiment and xenophobia in the film. But they’re delivered in a tone more reminiscent of South Park than anything you’d see in a Michael Moore movie. The villains of the movie might seem like stock one-dimensional characters, but then again, those kinds of people certainly exist. It’s a very intriguing film in that respect, as it posits the higher education elites and racist white trash as its dual antagonists — different limbs, maybe, but they’re all part of the same tree.
It’s one raw deal after another in the film until To’omata — gifted a hunting knife by his counselor and a Michael Myers-like mask by one of his former students — decides to put two and two together and become an avenging angel of the night. And since the grand finale involves a community college student kegger getting invaded by an anti-immigrant wannabe militia, there is NO shortage of deserving victims on the wrong end of his blade.
It’s a movie that feels like a cross between Maniac and Blazing Saddles at times. I’ve seen scores of slasher-comedy hybrids over the years and most of them have a hard time balancing the fundamentals of each genre. I mean, Saturday the 14th and Wacko aren’t exactly talked about in the most reverential tones these days, are they? The balance here, though, is pretty good — you get ample comedy (some of it quite acerbic), a lot of expected genre gore and best of all, a lot of character development to actually make you FEEL for the masked madman for a change. You could almost strip away the horror elements altogether and you’d still have a pretty solid melodrama about a professor trying to make sense of a community that just doesn’t want to understand him. But hey, we’re not here to be enlightened, we’re here to watch scum get what’s coming to them. And in Cinco De Mayo, boy, do they ever get it.
It’s not quite a revivalist ‘80s slasher in the traditional sense. Rather, it’s a movie that tackles a very hard-hitting and omnipresent topic in American life in a zany, unique way. Not every joke lands, of course, but enough of them do to keep you reeled in. And there are some downright tense scenes in the film, including the “final” confrontation between our halfway justified anti-hero and a small town sheriff who seems way more conflicted about things than everybody else in the community. Factor in a pre-credits jump scare that actually works and you’ve got all the makings of a lower-case “c” camp classic … if only its audience would finally find it.
We all have our moviegoing rites. Saint Patrick’s Day means it’s time to rewatch Leprechaun, Fourth of July means it’s time to rewatch Return of the Living Dead. Well, if you have to watch ANY horror movie this Cinco De Mayo, I think it’s pretty much a given which one. And if ANY slasher movie was just crying out for a sequel, this HAS to be it.
