One of the most famous “lost” films of our time, EL ALIMENTO DEL MIEDO (THE FOOD OF FEAR; 1994) was the final film made by Juan López Moctezuma (1931-1995), Mexico’s greatest horror director. Moctezuma’s previous films included Alejandro Jodorowski’s FANDO AND LIS (Fando y Lis; 1968) and EL TOPO (1970), both of which were produced by Moctezuma, as well as THE MANSION OF MADNESS (La mansión de la locura; 1973), MARY, MARY, BLOODY MARY (1975) and ALUCARDA (1977), all of which he directed. In his later years Moctezuma was hit by a spell of bad luck, and reduced to director-for-hire work on TO KILL A STRANGER (1983) and WELCOME MARIA (Bienvenido María; 1986).
EL ALIMENTO DEL MIEDO was supposed to be a comeback project for the Alzheimer’s afflicted Moctezuma. It was inspired by the case of Maria Trinidad Ramirez Poblano, a Mexico City resident who on June 17, 1971, murdered and dismembered her abusive husband. The case was greatly sensationalized by Mexico’s tabloid media, which added an especially morbid detail, involving the baking of the man’s remains into tamales, which has colored the case to this day.
Moctezuma centered EL ALIMENTO DEL MIEDO on that latter aspect. It was made with two major financial backers, only to have both those entities dissolve shortly after filming was completed, resulting in an orphaned film that was never released. Its “completion” occurred in 2006, when Franciso Cendejas, a lawyer, pieced the footage together and presented it at Mexico’s Macabre Festival (and credited himself as the film’s co-producer).
The film opens at a sleazy carnival run by Don Ramón (Moctezuma himself). An impotent sad sack, Don Ramón lives with his tamale street vendor wife Petra (Isaura Espinosa) in an especially scuzzy portion of Mexico City where drug dealing and police raids are constants. Zoyla (Andaluz Russel), one of Don Ramón and Petra’s neighbors, is hauled off to prison for marijuana possession, leaving her young daughter behind. Don Ramón and Petra end up taking the girl in, and making her an indentured servant.
Chicalada (Jorge Victoria), a questionable friend of Don Ramón, turns up one day to stay with him and Petra. Chicalada and Petra commence an affair, and when Zoyla’s daughter discovers them canoodling she’s knocked to the ground and killed. Their solution to this dilemma is to dismember the girl’s corpse (offscreen, of course) and bake the meat into the tamales Petra sells; inevitably, however, the meat runs out, resulting in Don Ramón hitting the streets and enticing more young girls into Petra and Chicalada’s deadly fold.
Things come to a head when Petra is contracted to make 250 tamales for a rich woman’s party. She, however, only has enough meat for 242; worse, one of the party guests finds a child’s severed finger in her tamale. Police are called, and Petra identified as the supplier of the offending morsel (with the partygoers more upset about the ensuing social upheaval than the murdered children whose remains were used in the tamales), just as Pepito (Alan Fernandez), a young boy with a skull painted on his face, alerts authorities to the disappearance of Zoyla’s daughter. It all leads to a very bloody, and not entirely edifying, finale.
I wish I could report that EL ALIMENTO DEL MIEDO is some kind of rediscovered masterpiece, but I’m afraid that’s just not the case. The film is, at best, an unrealized vision that could have been interesting had its director been allowed to properly complete it. That it was put together by hands other than those of Mr. Moctezuma is evident in the choppy editing that allows for run-on scenes, abrupt viewpoint shifts and the treatment of the core plot point as essentially a subplot.
Moctezuma himself must bear some of the blame, as his direction has a much looser, more improvisatory air than that of his painstakingly crafted earlier films. Scenes tend to be covered in wide shots, with the camera roving around people speaking what was clearly ad-libbed dialogue. Moctezuma in particular, in his role as Don Ramón, took to the ad-libbing quite enthusiastically, name-checking his major artistic influences (namely Fellini, Chaplin and Stan Laurel), mentioning his self-directed films THE MANSION OF MADNESS and ALUCARDA (made, apparently, by “a totally crazy director”) and revealing some autobiographical tidbits about his sojourn in America (whose residents apparently “treated me badly”).
Adding to the negatives are muddy and underexposed visuals (the film never having been color corrected), a downright horrendous score that’s so discordant it often sounds avant-garde, and copyright logos that blot the upper left and lower right portions of the frame. Amid all this distraction, judging the quality of the performances is all-but impossible, leaving us with a film whose true potential never was and, sadly, never will be realized.
Vital Statistics
EL ALIMENTO DEL MIEDO
Jorge Victoria Producciones
Director: Juan López Moctezuma
Producers: Juan López Moctezuma, Jorge Victoria
Screenplay: Alejandro Echenique, Juan López Moctezuma, Andaluz Russel, Jorge Victoria
Cinematography: Agustín Garnica
Editing: Maximino Sánchez Molina
Cast: Isaura Espinoza, Salvador Sánchez, Alan Fernandez, Jorge Victoria, Juan López Moctezuma, Andaluz Russel, Marta Zamora, Pedro Infante, Jr., Monserrat Suero Cortéz, Sergio Sánchez, Matilde Kalfon