Since about 2001, when Troma first announced they had picked up Angel Negro, I started looking forward to the film. The word that was going around about the film was highly positive. Hell, I can remember hearing about it before I even got into Troma. It looked like Angel Negro was going to be a horror masterpiece. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of making my expectations way too high for the debut film of Chilean director Jorge Olguin.
In 1990, five high school students made a mistake on their graduation night that lead to the death of a young girl named Angel (which we're treated to via grainy video footage that one of the characters shot). Ten years later, her boyfriend Gabriel has become a forensic doctor who still feels guilty for the actions that took Angel from him. This guilt is increased when the other atendees at the graduation party begin showing up as corpses he has to work with. He meets up with Carolina, one of the other people who were there when Angel died and tells her the true story of what happened: he began dating Angel on a bet that he could score with the weirdest girl in their class and found himself falling in love with her and when his friends let the cat out of the bag (as well as attempt to rape her), she committed suicide by jumping off of a cliff. But now Gabriel believes that Angel might not be gone forever and he believes that he and Carolina are next.
Angel Negro has been one of the hardest Troma films for me to review. I had to watch it at least three times to gather my opinion on the film, possibly due to my high hopes for it. Unfortunately, Angel Negro does not live up to its expectations. The plot is painfully cliche, almost like a slasher version of She's All That. Jorge Olguin directs the film rather well, but there's not much originality in the script or in his style. It certainly doesn't make the film bad, but it also doesn't help make it more interesting. The flashback scenes with Angel and Gabriel are the film's best moments, as they do a great job helping the audience sympathize with Angel and her cruel demise.
Another very big problem with Angel Negro are the subtitles. I don't know who was responsible for them, but they certainly did a piss poor job at translating to english. They're filled with sentences that make very little sense and typing errors that make you have to work a little harder to make sense of everything. Troma's subtitles on other foreign releases, such as Suicide and Killer Condom have been practically flawless, with barely any noticable errors, which leads me to wonder why there's such a botch job on Angel Negro
Overall, Angel Negro is pretty hard to recommend to Troma fans. It's a pretty good film, but it just doesn't deliver much in originality. It's worth giving a chance, but I wouldn't invest too much money into it.
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
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