Tuesday, May 5, 2020

Yako!

Like with any other Ruben Galindo movie, Yako: Cazador De Malditos (the German title translates "Yako: The Lone Avenger") begins with some deep melodrama about relationships and starting a family. After the melodrama is over, the real fun begins! And by fun I mean the sleaze & the violence! Before calling a (dumbass) reporter an asshole & slapping him, Eduardo Yáñez harmed a lot of assholes in this movie and he does more than just slap them!


 UCLA student Diana (Diana Ferreti) is a dancer who hopes to make it big. She majorly succeeds in an audition and her loving boyfriend Yako (Eduardo Yañez) is very proud of her. When Diana finds out she’s pregnant; Yako is stoked on becoming a father but Diana does not want to keep the baby since she refuses to end her dancing career to become a mom—thus deciding on having an abortion and separate from Yako. Diana then realizes she wants a future with Yako, so they get back together and head out to the woods for a nice little vacation & “fresh air” for their baby. According to Yako that is. All seems well in the woods until a group of backwoods men stalk Yako & Diana and ultimately attack them and brutally assault & kill the pregnant Diana. Yako is left for dead, but rather than leave & report to the authorities; Yako takes matter into his own hands and brutally kills off the backwoods men one by one!


It seems Ruben Galindo watched Deliverance and The Deer Hunter and thought he could make something like that of his own and with the help of Carlos Valdemar (whom of course has written so many amazing, Wild & sleazy movies beforehand) conceived Yako: Cazador De Malditos. Yako as I mentioned before begins with the usual Galindo melodrama and it quickly ends with the brutal assault & murder of Yako’s girlfriend. Yako wastes no time and decides to avenge her death by killing each sleazy & dirty backwoods men in various ways. One guy simply gets forced into quicksand, the other gets a tree branch jammed into their torso and my favorite kill of the movie is when Yako & a backwoods men play Russian Roulette and Yako simply shoots the guy after it was his turn to pull the trigger on himself. The violence in the movie is quite brutal but it’s not gross out brutal & super bloody. It’s just the right amount of violence to get you to say "ouch" and the ever so obvious "Ooo!". Right before Yako heads out to kill everyone; Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake Op.20 plays to set the mood. Quiet & calm before the storm of rage. In the final battle, “Ride of Valkyries” plays and it’s so god damn perfect. I almost cry watching that final battle.

 I also must mention how almost every character in the movie is truly peculiar. Minus Diana of course. What’s peculiar about everyone else? Well for one, Yako is kind of a jerk honestly. He seems quite selfish and you kind of don’t like him at the beginning since he says & does certain things that are just very irritable. I wish I knew what the intention was exactly for Yako’s behavior, but maybe this horrible attitude is what makes Yako the hunter that he becomes later? And of course every backwoods men in the movie are grimy & evil fools. Their leader “El Tejas” (The Texan) seems to be the sort of normal one out of all of them, but he’s clearly grimy as well since he makes it clear he gets first dibs on their victim Diana. I wish there were an explanation on these guys exactly since they seem to just live in the woods. Perhaps they were psycho war veterans hiding from the outside world? Lumber workers? Whatever they are, they’re all weird & disgusting for sure and El Tejas is one sick evil fuck of a leader. Gregorio Casal of course always plays a wonderful bad guy. The other peculiar character is the kidnapped girl Gabriela (Gabriela Goldsmith) that’s considered to be El Tejas’ woman and while we get an explanation about her kidnapping; she somehow falls for Yako right away and Yako too takes a liking to her. Like I said before, Yako is a real jerk. All that brutality only to get over Diana right away? Very puzzling, but I guess everyone in the movie is just completely out of their minds after all that has happened...


Yako is a must see for sure. It’s a fun movie with plenty of violence & sleaze that’ll excite you and have you begging for more. Yako was once a movie that was easily acquirable, but these days a DVD is scarce and the VHS just as well. Be like Yako and hunt for this movie brutally. Just don’t cheat on Russian Roulette or even take a trip to the woods cause you know how that’ll probably end up like. Ruben Galindo once again impresses me with such a violent & sleazy movie within his styles of filmmaking. God Bless that man.