[Once
again I'm going to attempt to do a horror(ish) movie review a day for
the entire month of October. I've done this the last few years on The
Cleveland Movie Blog. Most of the time I succeeded (usually with the
help of a few other writers). Other times I didn't. We'll see if I can
pull it off this year.]
No, Paul Urkijo Alijo's ERREMENTARI
isn’t a movie about Sherlock Holmes suffering with a speech impediment. Rather,
it’s a Basque language dark fairytale about a blacksmith who gets killed in the
war, makes a deal with the devil to come back and see his wife one last time,
and predictably has the bargain go bad. But rather than pay the agreed upon
price for this demonic con job, Paxti (Kandido Uranga) refuses to go to Hell.
Instead, he captures the demon (name of Sartael, played by Eneko Sagardoy) sent
to claim his soul, and imprisons it in a cage inside his old blacksmith forge. And
to ensure that no one sets it free, he walls off his property and sets traps
around it. If the villagers spread tall tales about him doing various evil
misdeeds, like capturing and killing children, all the better to keep them
away.
But the best laid plans, yada, yada. In the town near the
blacksmith’s forge, there is a little girl named Usue (Uma Bracaglia). The
local children taunt her because of her mother’s suicide, and one particularly
nasty little boy tears the head off Usue’s doll and throws it over Paxti’s
heavily fortified wall. When Usue ventures onto the blacksmith’s property to
retrieve her toy, she also discovers a little boy locked in a cage. Knowing the
stories about Paxti, Usue agrees to get the key to the cage and set the boy free.
But things are not exactly as they seem.
