Graduation night 1990: a group of six friends explore their newly found freedom, their bodies, and their threshold for alcohol and drugs. As their night of excess continues, truths come out, anger leads to spiteful lashings-out at one another, and the facade of happiness quickly unravels, culminating in the death of Angel, the awkward outcast of the group.

Ten years later, we catch up with one of the group, Gabriel (Alvaro Morales), who has abandoned his dreams of being a life-saving doctor in order to be a forensic pathologist. He is still grieving over the loss of his beloved Angel, torturing himself with the amateur videotape footage of that fateful night. Not only that, but his memories begin to bubble back up to the surface as the remaining four members of his secondary school group begin showing up on his slab, brutally murdered. Their killer? The allegedly dead Angel...

Hiding behind the bone-white mask of a typical slasher film, Angel Negro is a genuinely compelling watch. Characters are developed beyond the usually skeletal archetypes that are a staple of the genre. They have quirks, emotional problems, and a reason for existence outside of being gutted. Hell, even the victims have some fascinating character traits: one of the friends, a politician’s son, has a taste for videotaping his encounters with prostitutes and talking to his fish like children in order to "pump himself up." His wife tolerated the loveless sham of a relationship in order to help the campaign of her father-in-law.

Jorge Olguin also makes this an interesting film through hiding less-than-subtle metaphor to his native Chile’s despotic military government. The concept of the "different" member of the group "disappearing" for her refusal to follow the norm is an obvious allegory to the military regime’s methods of dealing with those who would speak against them. However, Olguin offers himself and his Chilean viewers catharsis in that the "faceless victim" strikes back against her attackers in truly brutal fashion.

Indeed, if one word were to describe Angel Negro, brutal would be it. The killings are bluntly shot, with no sly camera angles to hide the violence. There’s little comic about these killings, nor is there any titillation to be had through the chase of some buxom co-ed. Angel furiously dispatches her victims with blade, wire, and gun, and no remorse. Every killing simply oozes hatred, enhanced by a lack of typical slasher sound effects: a stabbing produces no sliding metal-on-metal wail, only dull thuds which made me squirm by how cruelly realistic it was. In the mortuary scenes the fully nude, mutilated corpses are slid onto the slab with all the care of a pizza pie: there’s no delicacy or crisp blue sheets so the dead can have their modesty. Olguin even went so far as to actually perform a real autopsy in pre-production in order to guarantee authenticity in his multitude of post-mortem surgery scenes. Hell, I was floored by the scene in which a police detective investigates a blood-caked bathroom, and he was greeted by a choir of buzzing flies. Little details truly make a movie like this something special, as it shows the near-rabid love of the filmmaker.

Unfortunately, I wish I could say the same about Troma’s DVD presentation of this South American gem. Troma’s questionable practice of stuffing as much information on a single-layered disc has really reared its ugly head this time. The movie was plagued with digital artifacts and giant pixels, and colors were sadly muted. Even worse, Troma opted for white, burned-in English subtitles, which mix with the black-and-white flashbacks and the sterile medical scenes horribly. It’s almost like that lame gag in Austin Powers in Goldmember come to hideous life. Not only that, but translation was awful as well, with terrible lines like "You are fool," and "How can you be in love with that stupid?" proving that the translation needed a little more editing before it was ready for prime time. Sound was fairly clean, although some of the dialogue was muffled. Extras, as per usual Troma standards, are plentiful. We’re given an audio commentary track featuring Jorge Olguin (and poorly translated as well), an interview between Olguin and Lloyd Kaufman (moderated again by a translator), an introduction to the film which was more a promotion of Kaufman than the actual film itself, a slew of trailers, and the ubiquitous (and extremely overused) Radiation March. I think it’s time to shelve it, guys.

It’s truly unfortunate that such a fascinating, stylishly directed film had to be saddled with such a mediocre DVD presentation. One of the trailers on the disc showed that the film spawned a soundtrack in Chile featuring some big-name American bands (including teen-angst poster boys Slipknot). It was a decent hit in Chile, so it’s a real disappointment to see it presented so poorly in America. Troma could have used this to raise the bar on their once excellent, now barely passable DVD presentation. Sorry guys, but you need to push yourselves a little harder.