I watched Desierto tonight. It’s not an uplifting film. It’s an action/horror film whose premise is that a group of illegal immigrants attempting to enter the U.S. are forced to abandon the truck in which they are being transported. Because the truck broke down, they must walk. A deranged man who patrols the border with his dog, looking for rabbits to kill, stumbles upon them and, with the help of Tracker, the dog, tracks them down and kills most of them, one by one. The entire film follows the murderer as he takes immigrants out with a high-powered rifle. The ending, even though it’s satisfying to the extent that the criminal bastard gets his (at least we think), is not satisfying. It’s a depressing film that ruins an evening. It did not help that, for the first 45 minutes, most of it was in Spanish that, try as I might, I could not understand because the voices were so low and my translation skills remain badly rusted, with some holes through the walls of my translation pipes. After 45 minutes, I discovered that my “display subtitles” had been turned off. The remainder of the film made more sense, but did nothing to improve my opinion of it. It wasn’t bad, really, but it was most assuredly not good in the sense I wish it had been.
