Review: Don’t Panic (1988)

(aka Dimensiones Ocultas)
Directed by: Rubén Galindo Jr.
Starring: Jon Michael Bischof, Gabriela Hassel, Helena Rojo
Written by: Rubén Galindo Jr.
Music by: Pedro Plascencia, Jon Michael Bischof
Country: Mexico
Available on: Blu-ray (Vinegar Syndrome)
IMDb

I’ll start things off by saying I went a little out of order by watching Rubén Galindo Jr.’s third film, Grave Robbers (1989), before this, his second. Whereas Grave Robbers and Galindo’s debut, Cemetery of Terror (1985), definitely have commonality in tone and approach, Don’t Panic goes completely off the rails and feels like it was made by a different filmmaker. If you someone had said to me, “You gotta check it out this flick: all the actors are terrible, the main dude has a curly fluff-mullet, wears dinosaur pajamas half the movie, has a Hispanic accent that comes and goes; adorns his room with those sports car posters you used to buy at the Scholastic book fair as a 10-year-old, and wrote and performed the main theme song; the main actress has a prominent unibrow; and the same suspenseful music stinger you’ve heard in a hundred horror movies appears every 30 seconds or so, often for no reason at all,” I normally would have thought that sounded like a damn good time. But I spent most of this watch just astonished that the same guy who made Cemetery of Terror and Grave Robbers — two well-made horror films that, while perhaps derivative in concept, are imaginative in execution — also made this fucking odd bit of malarkey. This isn’t to say Don’t Panic isn’t a fun time; it is fairly entertaining, though Demon Wind, perhaps its most direct spiritual comparison, does everything with more charming zaniness. In an interview, Galindo speaks to the fact that this movie was intentionally made to appeal to American sensibilities, which explains its crazy approximation of ‘80s American horror movies, and also was filmed both in English and Spanish during alternating takes, which accounts for the peculiar tone. If I had watched this under the proper circumstances, either with no context at all or with more of it, I might have liked it more. As it is, it’s easily the weakest of Galindo’s three early attempts at horror.

Overall rating: 5 out of 10