Friday, July 12, 2024

Moctezuma's tamales.

Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s “lost” and just because someone has seen it doesn’t mean they’re lying about it. 

 “Lost media” is a term that’s thrown around a lot these days and I often wonder why can’t people just say “obscure media” or just say that it is “hard to find”. “Lost” is something that cannot be found ever again and in the case of Alimento Del Miedo, the movie isn’t even lost at all—it is just not readily available for public viewing. The film has been theatrically screened several times before, but just barely. 



A screener of Alimento Del Miedo came into my possession a while back under bizarre circumstances from a bizarre Yucatán-based individual who claims a producer of the film passed them the screener to view it.


In a rundown neighborhood in Mexico City, a poor man named Don Ramon (Mexican filmmaking legend Juan Lopez Moctezuma) is a drunken street performer who’s close to everyone that performs alongside him & other locals around. Don Ramon & his wife Petra (Isaura Espinoza) take in their neighbor’s daughter Leandre after she is taken to jail and while everything seems to be going normally (sort of), Don Ramon befriends a weird devil-worshipping man called “Chicelada” who brings total madness into his & Petra’s lives, but mostly he just starts fucking Petra on the low. When Leandre is accidentally killed, her body is chopped up & her flesh is put in Petra’s tamales that she sells on the streets. The tamales are a success and with the entire stock of “meat” running out, Chicelada convinces Don Ramon to bring in another child to kill for their flesh.


Alimento Del Miedo (roughly translated as "Food of Fear") is a very messy & incoherent film with an obvious low budget. While Alimento seems to have a great plot going for it, it ends up being quite a bore & often very incoherent. I’d like to think maybe the editing is what made it so incoherent & perhaps scenes are missing from the film as well. Whatever the case may be, Alimento is hard to follow at times and the only reason I say that it’s a bore is because the film often drags with pointless dialogue scenes & not a whole a lot of “horror” and very little “surrealism” is to be seen as you would in other of Moctezuma’s films. There are some brutal scenes and mostly consisting of live beatings (the finale is wild) & real slaughterhouse scenes.


While Alimento does have its issues, the film is still a rather intriguing watch since it feels like a “goodbye” of sorts from Juan Lopez Moctezuma himself (he passed away a year later after making this film). Moctezuma plays the lead of the film and it’s a character you feel so much sympathy for and he even goes as far as to give nods to the films he’s made & worked on and calling the director of said films “a very crazy cool guy”. And while there’s very little bit of it, there are some familiar-looking Moctezuma surrealism scenes through out the film and an obvious one is when Chicelada is fully nude, covered in slaughterhouse blood and performing a “satanic ritual” which then leads up to his beating by everyone in the slaughterhouse. There’s also a small nod to his most famous film Alucarda where a piss-poor slaughterhouse worker is dressed similarly to the nuns of the film—all white attire with crimson-colored smears around. And while we never really see anyone get chopped up into tamale meat, it is interesting that Moctezuma got to adapt the legend of “La Tamalera De Los Portales” into a film. I also want to say he was the first to do so as well. Maybe even the only one? 


Personally, I didn’t get into Alimento Del Miedo at all and that’s because I had expectations that weren’t met at all. I’d honestly feel others might feel the same way since die-hard Moctezuma fans are the ones longing to see the film & not just the annoying “lost media”/Letterboxd Gen-Z crowd who only want to see it for bragging rights. 


So while you wait for the chance to see Alimento Del Miedo & harassing folks for a copy, focus on doing these things instead: 


  • Delete your Letterboxd account.
  • Watch Alucarda again. You were already going to anyway. 
  • Go outside for a walk.
  • Delete your Letterboxd account.
  • Message that girl you only stalk on social media.
  • Delete your Letterboxd account.
  • Break up with your boyfriend.
  • Talk to that guy you see often at that one cheap & over-priced cafe in downtown LA.
  • Delete your Letterboxd account.
  • Donate to your local thrift charity. 
  • Make some lemonade. 
  • Delete your Letterboxd account. 
  • Update your health insurance benefits. 
  • Actually do some gardening. Not pretend to for instagram. 
  • Delete your Letterboxd account. 
  • Read "Black Hole" by Charles Burns. 
  • Read "Shyness & Love: Causes, Consequences, and Treatment" by Brian G. Gilmartin. 
  • Delete your Letterboxd account.