Pigeon Shrine Halloween Frightfest Film Review

Maria is a wild sexy killer robot flick from Argentina shares extremely unlikely connections with the 1927 classic Metropolis.

Maria Black is the brightest sex star on the planet until fooling around with her girlfriend while driving leaves her comatose in the hospital. Her body mysteriously disappears only for Maria to reappear in 2027 on the set of a new porn flick. Unfortunately, she dies mid-scene, and the drug-fuelled pornographers decide the best course of action is to monetise the necrophiliac debasement of her corpse on the dark web.

Is Maria really dead, or merely re- thigh-booting for a mission of dick-ripping and skull-pulping?

Argentinian genre cinema is building a tasty reputation for feisty ingenuity, budgetary wizardry, and a lack of moral filters. Check out the mad genius and ridiculous work ethic evident in the 2017 pseudo-giallo Crystal Eyes. Or the beyond-brutal revenge violence of Bogliano’s I’ll Never Die Alone. Maria is no exception in terms of creative freedom, all-hands-to-the-pump filmmaking, and demented narrative beats.

Of course, it is not exactly subtle but nor is it trying to be. Or is our anti-heroine scooping out beating organs as a stupidly clever reference to her namesake in Metropolis? After all, as Fritz Lang‘s final title card states – “The Mediator Between the Head and the Hands Must Be the Heart“. If so, then the trashy joke is on us.

Essentially, it’s messy Midnight movie madness in its purest form. Rocking a vintage video store vibe, complete with glitchy visuals and ropey continuity, it doesn’t care where it goes, or how it gets there. The plot, such as it is, is really just an excuse for robo-vaginas and cheesy one-liners. Indeed, the black-and-white prologue is even more confusing in retrospect after seeing the whole film. As for the insane epilogue, well good luck with that.

The practical effects are disgustingly well executed, and in some cases, you will wish they were not. For some bizarre reason the picture distorts before each gory killing and at first it seems the filmmakers wished to conceal fraying production values, but no, the picture clears before each jucy money shot of violence.

This is just one of many chaotic creative choices that give Maria its playful sense of anarchic fun and fast tracks its culty credentials. Its scant runtime appears to suggest they stopped filming when the money ran out and there must have been drinks in the editing suite. But it still manages to fashion a crazy world where having no pulse does not mean you can’t be exploited and secret government projects are hard-coded for rape-revenge.

There are also shameless namechecks for its neon-drenched lighting, the porn director is called Dario Georges, and an electro soundtrack that John Carpenter might have performed for houseguests after a three-day mescaline finger buffet.

Garish and gratuitous Maria is a great movie to crack some beers and enjoy the ride with a bunch of like-minded degenerate souls. There are much more polished killer robot flicks out there, but they seldom feature a bonkers training montage combined with an intimate deep dive into mechanised lady parts.