Legend of the Chupacabra

2000 **

It's Troma doing a Blair Witch ripoff. Can I go home now?

Okay, okay. This is decked out as a documentary trying to "find out the truth" about the legendary Chupacabra, which translates delightfully as "Goatsucker." It opens with all this choppily-edited footage that pushes the idea of -- say it with me now -- Secret Government Project. As you can see above, the government thought it would be useful to breed Eraserhead babies, but then later some dude in surgical mask is all bloody, so... actually, I'm not sure "so" what. This storyline is almost completely forgotten.

Next we see students at the University of Rio Grande's School of Cryptozoology check out some mutilated farm animals in rural Texas. They're a universally charisma-free bunch: the investigative frontwoman of the group (think Lois Lane without the sex appeal or even good posture), the whiny cameraman, the cameraman who looks like John Lovitz, and the big tough black guy whose voice is too high-pitched and lispy to sell the toughness. There's some other characters, some half-assed mentions of a cover-up, and eventually the Chupacabra jumps out and slashes somebody.

Now, this is a Troma movie, which means however cheap and lousy you might imagine a movie could be, this will top it. Of course, the filmmakers are completely aware of this and manage to keep things mildly interesting by making sure everyone's going "AHHHH!! THE CHUPACABRA!!" every few minutes or so, and there's ambitious-if-not-realistic gore. But the acting is bad, bad, bad, and quite hard to get through.

The weird thing is they spend all this time discussing this great mystery and then actually manage to bag the bastard and do an autopsy on it. Having the big corpse on a metal table under bright lights kind of diminishes the mystery.

However, as a maker of props, I have to say I liked this part. It's pretty clear that they spent the money on the costume so they're dang well going to get some footage out of it. Which means the costume makers must have been psyched as the autopsy footage keeps on fading into yet another detail. "Look doctor, these spines extend all the way to the ansplerior marfarlingus." "Why, yes. Yes they do."

At one point during the autopsy they find this bar code, but it never gets mentioned again. Probably because it was drawn on with a Sharpie. Or, more likely, the crew realized they had enough crummy videotape and they could go home.

Oh, I only watched this because it has the word "Chupacabra" in it. You'd be better off watching almost anything else.