You might recall that we recently sang the praises of Marcello Avallone's Specters (1987). Now we will honor Mr. Avallone's next film Maya (1989), an exotic look at the dangers of small villages that hold ceremonies for the dead in the territory of the ancient Mayans.
Of course, some of your universe's esteemed critics misunderstand Maya. For example, reviewer paul_haakonsen writes, "Don't waste your time, money or effort on 'Maya'. It just simply isn't worth it." Reviewer bombersflyup writes, "It's incoherent drivel." And reviewer BandSAboutMovies writes, "this movie is an incoherent mess."
It goes without saying these reviewers are incorrect, and Maya might be of even higher quality than Specters. Please read on for an accurate appreciation of the film...
The film opens with a quote from Carlos Castaneda: “Twilight is the fracture between the worlds.” A man narrates the historical event of King Xibalba being exiled from his homeland at twilight, swearing to return one day to seek revenge. (The king failed to annihilate the Kaqchiwa people, so he vowed to return and tear all their hearts from their chests.) The narrator is a boat captain named Jose, steering his small craft along a South American river. He tells a young boy, Luis, that it is possible at twilight to cross the threshold between the land of the living and the land of the dead.
Elsewhere in the jungle, an old man named Salomon has a vision of being killed. Then he writes a letter to someone named Francisco, telling him that Salomon has crossed the border they have been searching for, and that he will never return from the mountain. So he walks outside and heads up a path toward a mountain. However, in the next scene we watch Salomon drive his car up the mountain (no doubt a much more efficient way of getting there).
Suddenly, fog appears and Salomon runs into a young girl with fluffy hair. She appears unharmed, but when Salomon attempts to pull her out from under his car she turns into a jaguar and roars.
He follows the girl through the misty jungle for a long time, finally discovering an old pyramid. Of course, he climbs to the top. Once there, however, his glasses fall and break a la Burgess Meredith, and Salomon is stabbed by a sword.
Later, a young man named Peter carries his lover Jahaira through a decrepit shack, telling her he will give her the amulet he wears but only after he leaves South America. He pushes the woman into the shower and then leaves the shack.
He goes outside to the fish market, where a vendor chases him because Peter owes him forty dollars. Then, as if our protagonist Peter were not likable enough, Peter attends a cockfight. In the same arena, Peter bets on a sport in which two large men attempt to rip each other fingers off.
In the next (somewhat unpleasant) scene, two young men from Texas (Chet and Larry) sexually assault Jahaira at her job as a gas station attendant.
She pays them back by spraying one of the harassers with gasoline, and then Peter arrives and lights his lighter, chasing the Americans away in their pickup truck. “God bless America,” Peter says sarcastically.
Meanwhile, Salomon’s daughter Lisa is required to identify his body, a process that involves the coroner unzipping a body bag and showing poor Lisa the stitched-up wounds where Salomon was sliced with the sword.
After identifying her dead father, Lisa sits at a hotel bar and has a drink with Peter. He explains a drink to her: “Rum, few drops of lime, and plenty of ice. You’ll like it.”
“Really? Instead of having to take the subway every day?” she replies. (Writer/director Marcelo Avallone’s dialogue is so intricate and advanced that the audience has no chance of understanding why she says this.)
“On holiday?” Peter asks her.
“No, it isn’t a holiday,” Lisa replies.
The film cuts immediately to Peter and Lisa speaking under a canopy on the beach. Peter tells Lisa the Mayans used to say, “At the edge of the world there was only water, and it’s here at the edge of the world and the sky meet.” (Again, Mr. Avallone’s dialogue is so high-level it is impossible to understand.)
Lisa tells Peter she came to find out who murdered her father. She asks him about the people her father used to hang out with — and she knows Peter was one of them. He tells her her father was a loner, then he leaves, telling her he has things to do.
Meanwhile, the Texan punks Chet and Larry get drunk at a bar. When the bartender decides they have had enough, Chet, logically, cuts his own palm with a knife.
“This is the reason why you can’t throw us out,” he tells the bartender. “Nobody can. Nobody.” (It has something to do with the Texans’ fearlessness.)
Amusingly, the bartender pours alcohol on the injury and Chet cries out.
After leaving the bar, Chet and Larry assault Jahaira, attempting to rape her. When they rip off her clothes, one of them tastefully calls her breasts “badonkers,” as any rapist would.
Fortunately for Jahaira (and the audience), she is able to knee Larry in the groin and escape the attempted rape.
Later, in an audience-pleasing moment, Chet and Larry are killed when they break into the gas station looking for Jahaira. Chet is killed when the hood of his truck falls on him, and Larry is killed when the truck mysteriously slams into him, a pole slicing through his head.
Elsewhere, Lisa finds her father’s notes, helpfully aided by her late father’s voice reading them: “Xibalba’s shadow spreads over this valley like a curse. The menace of his revenge is not mere superstition cultivated by the people over the centuries. It is a hidden fear that the Kaqchiwa have always exorcised by any means from generation to generation. It is the devil, death, the darkness of the night, the evil that reflects in each one of us.” Lisa stands in front of a mirror, and her reflection changes to a slightly less attractive woman.
The next day, we see how Peter makes his modest living — as a diver salvaging wrecks while wearing a diving suit from the early twentieth century.
Meanwhile, Lisa visits the local pyramid. In a clever storytelling innovation, the filmmakers have the young boy, Luis, tell Lisa the history of the pyramid. “This is the pyramid that King Xibalba built,” the boy tells her, “here in the volcano’s crater because fire keeps courage warm.” He goes on to say that Xibalba started a war against the Kaqchiwa people, but when they overtook his armies he disappeared, but he will be back one day, protected by Yum Simil, the god of death. Xibalba will then tear out the hearts of all the Kaqchiwa tribe.
Then, for unknown reasons, Peter takes Lisa to a local ceremony in which a man vomits up small green snakes.
The mystery deepens when Lisa visits the morgue for unknown reasons and sees the bodies of Chet and Larry with wounds similar to her father’s.
In another display of excellent storytelling, the filmmakers have the captain of Peter’s boat explain to several children that the seventh full moon of the year is coming up, marking a ceremony in which people climb to the top of the local pyramid to celebrate the dead.
At this point, the filmmakers realize they have not included sufficient female nudity in their film, so they include a scene in which a jealous Jahaira stabs Peter (mildly) with a small knife during sex, and then Jahaira takes a bath and is attacked by an invisible force, finally dying when her nose is cracked against the side of the bathtub (in one of the most frightening nose-splitting scenes in cinema history).
After Jahaira’s body is found in the tub, Peter says to the local doctor (perhaps unwisely), “I was the last person to see her alive.”
Peter gets angry when the doctor is unmoved by the death, but the doctor simply says, “Peter, they’ve killed people this way for thousands of years. And tonight the people will be going to the pyramid to celebrate a feast that was a massacre.”
In the next very creative scene, a local woman is killed by supernatural fishhooks and fishing lines.
Meanwhile, Lisa confronts Peter, who is planning to leave the village for either New York or Australia. He tells her, “Your father was right about this place. He said you either accept it as it is or you leave, simple as that.”
“Yeah,” Lisa replies, somewhat redundantly, “and you’re leaving.”
Before he leaves, however, he explains more of the plot, particularly about the border between life and death Lisa’s father obsessed over. He tells her to look at a shard of mirror. “The local shaman says there are two ways of looking in a mirror. There’s a superficial way and there’s another way, one that goes beyond the reflected image. It’s able to cross over that line beyond which life exists, just as death exists.”
Time for more sexual assault! As the film moves toward its final act, Laura, who works at Peter’s bar, attempts to break up with her lover on top of a lighthouse (as one does), but her lover forces himself on her. Again, supernatural forces intervene, killing the lover and slamming him against the wall.
At the same time, another of Laura’s love interests, an older man, waits for her to arrive for a date they have set up in the bar.
Her older lover is frightened when the lights go off and inadvertently attacks Laura, who drove back to the bar, with a large knife.
At the pyramid, Luis, dressed in a ceremonial costume, climbs the steps, followed by the rest of the village. At the top, several masked men appear. They place Luis on what appears to be a sacrificial slab and paint his face.
Meanwhile, Peter convinces the local doctor to perform another ceremony with a circular mirror. Lots of things in the doctor’s house explode due to Peter and the doctor looking into the mirror. Then…something happens. The filmmakers intercut Luis’s sacrifice and the ceremony at the house until there is another explosion and a creature in ceremonial garb fails to kill Luis.
There is also some first-class blue lightning.
In the end, Peter and Lisa go to the airport for a flight to New York. Peter sees the young girl who led Lisa’s father astray. Peter, unwisely, follows the girl. She turns to him, revealing her eyes are milky white.
The End
It is an age-old question: Which of Marcello Avallone's horror films is better, Specters or Maya? While both are classics, Specters features Donald Pleasence, while Maya features lesser known though prolific actors like William Berger and Peter Phelps. Both films have their share of unusual supernatural deaths, and both have slick cinematography typical of Italian horror movies in the late 1980s. Additionally, both films have titles that are somewhat misleading. There are no specters, of course, in Specters. Is anybody named Maya in Maya? No. However, the film is about the descendants of the Mayan culture, so perhaps it is a somewhat more appropriate title.
Therefore, though both films are nearly perfect, I must give the edge to Maya due to its more accurate title.
And its nose-splitting scene.
And its fishhook scene.
And also the cake that says "To Laura."