Our Last Weekend (2011)
Plot: idyllic weekend getaway turns into nightmare for thirty-somethings.
El último fin de semana (or The Last Weekend, for some reason released internationally on streaming services as Our Last Weekend) is an early fantaterror exercise from Spanish one-man bilge basher Norberto Ramos del Val that mixes up a whole lot in hopes of conjuring up something but ends up with pretty much nothing instead. It’s redeemed (insofar such a thing is possible) in part by an attractive cast but for something bursting at the seams with ideas very little of interest actually materializes. If nothing else, Our Last Weekend is a Frankenstein-ian abomination of disparate elements grafted from about three decades’ worth of Meditterranean pulp horror barely held together by a gratuitous amount of mild situational nudity and directionless profanity. There’s only so much you can do with nothing and in case of Our Last Weekend nothing is at least something. Something as nothing is better than anything.
Where do you place somebody like Norberto Ramos del Val in the hallowed pantheon of Spanish horror now that contemporaries like Álex de la Iglesia and Jaume Balagueró have in fact become elder statesmen of the form? We hesitate to label Ramos del Val the Spanish Rene Perez but in truth the two are renaissance men within their realms, the both of which aren’t that radically different from another. Perez is undeniably the pulp and exploitation specialist that has firmly entrenched himself in action – and horror when he’s not filming his right-wing political manifestos. Norberto Ramos del Val casts his net slightly wider. Both men operate their own production companies with iDiC Entertainment and Norberfilms, respectively. Like Perez he too is in the habit of working with ordinary-looking people, publicly available locations and getting most out of what, by all accounts, is very little. His closest contemporary is probably César del Álamo, he of the giallo adjacent Good Night, Said Miss Bird (2012). A recurring theme in Ramos del Val’s work is the exploration of relations between men and women (psychological, sexual and otherwise) and his penchant for old school horror.
Summertime (2012) was a meta horror deconstruction (allegedly shot in just four days with no budget to speak of!) that was either too smart for its own good or the biggest extended in-joke ever. Ramos del Val had the good fortune of working with Ana de Armas on Faraday (2013) before her meteoric rise to international superstardom. The rom com Toxic Love (2015) is, by far, his most compelling work by a country mile thanks to a clever script and electrifying performances from Ann Perelló and Eduardo Ferrés. Call TV (2017) seemed like a response to the infinitely superior My Big Night (2015) and shifted the focus from laughs and slapstick to psychological terror. Then there was Lucero (2019) or a single-location character study with Claudia Molina. We're prepared to suffer for miss Molina. While we’re not familiar with the entirety of his repertoire in our experience Ramos del Val either is able to hit the right notes with his features or miss them flagrantly. Believe it or not, Our Last Weekend actually gets most things right but can’t hold a candle to the macabre and timeless Spanish horror of old that it was no doubt inspired by.
Diana (Irene Rubio) is a neurotic, high-strung office manager excited about the prospect of a potential promotion that might be coming her way. To celebrate the joyous occassion she invites her assistant Lisi (Alba Messa) and perennially depressed office junior Leo (Silma López) for a relaxing weekend getaway at her grandmother’s estate in the hinterlands. Diana’s sister Sandra (Marián Aguilera) doesn’t think her sister is mentally stable enough to venture out in the world just 12 months after the fatal accident that claimed the lives of their parents. Extravert and assertive sparkplug Lisi has taken Diana’s invitation as a preamble to invite fellow office drone Roque (Nacho Rubio) to tag along. She expresses her romantic interest in him and openly announces her plans to extensively bed him over the coming three-day weekend where an abundance of food and alcohol will provide the necessary social lubricant. Diana is initially annoyed by Lisi’s shallow antics but figures that a man might come in handy over the weekend. In an apparently abandoned coastal village Leo has a deeply unsettling encounter with a strange handiman (Javier Albalá) rendering her semi-mute and has her regressing into complete withdrawal and reclusion. On the last day of the weekend Diana spontaneously engages in an alcohol-fueled tryst with surfer-philosopher hangabout Tommy (Jorge Anegón). On the way home the group are involved in a road collision. They retreat back to Diana’s house where her sister is still residing. The four friends bitterly argue on what to do with the lifeless body of the man (Javier Albalá) who bears a striking resemblance to Leo’s assailant. As tensions mount and paranoia rises the friends all turn on each other in bloody ways. Was this a mere accident, or have they stumbled upon something far scarier?
You know a movie is in trouble when most of the fun in watching is derived from figuring out where all the various components were stolen from rather than on the merits of the movie itself. Our Last Weekend starts out promising enough with that general feel of a 1970s pastoral horror with city folks getting lost out in the rural hinterlands. The whole set-up sort of reminds of late-stage Turksploitationer Girls Camp (1987) or the vaguely similar Méxican slasher Forest Of Death (1993). When it’s not doing that it revolves around beautiful people getting criminally drunk and the various permutations of trying to get into each other’s pants. Taken at face value it could be the plotline to one of those 1980s Cine-S sex comedies with Andrea Albani or Eva Lyberten. It almost makes you long it was that instead of this. And then there’s that ominous blink-and-you’ll-miss-it radio announcement that sounds like something straight out of Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (1974) or The Grapes Of Death (1978). The mountains and beaches sort of exude that The Witches Mountain (1972) vibe. The deserted coastal town echoes Joe D’Amato’s Anthropophagus (1980) while the car accident and attendant paranoia reek of I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997). And the humanoid aliens taking over the world from a sleepy village in the middle of nowhere? Well, that at heart is Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste (1987) albeit with none of the technical flair, slapstick comedy, or home-made splattery gore effects.
While Irene Rubio and Marián Aguilera are the prerequisite redheads and the reluctant leads. Rubio would return for Faraday (2013). Here Silma López and Alba Messa attract all the attention. López has that whole Eliza Dushku thing going on whereas these days she goes for that wildhaired look that Natasha Lyonne popularized in the mainstream. She’s the obligatory proxy goth wallflower and very much appears to be his muse of sorts as Ramos del Val can’t stop pointing his camera at her. The subdued goth is preferred type as he would later cast Claudia Molina in the character study Lucero (2019). López would later turn up in the giallo adjacent Good Night, Said Miss Bird (2012), the series Valeria (2020-2023) and 13 Exorcisms (2022). Messa is a low rent Blanca Suárez. She’s inevitably stuck in roles that in the most ancient of the days would be played by Helga Liné, Dagmar Lassander, Rosanna Yanni, or Betsabé Ruiz. Messa would return for Summertime (2012). Those hoping that that would inspire Ramos del Val to tackle his own 1980s Cine-S retro sex comedy revival will be sorely disappointed as such a feature never materialized. Regardless, Messa is an absolute force of nature that clearly is destined for bigger and better things if she ever graduated out of the low budget hell she seems perpetually stuck in. López – like Irene Rubio and the Anas, de Armas and Rujas – has managed to escape and now is a respectable A-lister. That de Armas has been engaged in a whirlwind 9-month courtship with avowed cultist, consummate madman, and all-around control freak Tom Cruise should have everybody’s alarm bells ringing in overtime.
At a merciful 88 minutes Our Last Weekend has the merit of brevity and it, thankfully, is over before you know it. While it certainly steals from the right places and its exploitation heart is definitely warm and pulsating what this most strongly resembles is the unnecessary 2015 remake of Vampyres (1974). Which is a really charitable way of saying that cheapness and much penny-pinching abounds. No amount of disrobed (or the promise of disrobement) girls can really sell (or redeem) that there isn’t much of a premise here and what little plot there is is terminally uninteresting at that. Certainly there’s a case to be made of meeting the movie, or director, or idea, halfway but Our Last Weekend really even doesn’t merit that. It’s always good seeing Alba Messa and Silma López wherever they appear but Ramos del Val obviously wasn’t able to make much of what by all accounts seems to have been next to nothing. Perhaps this would have functioned better as an embryonic prototype for investors rather than a finished product released to international audiences on the streaming services. From a technical standpoint Our Last Weekend is at the very least solid enough not to be distracting. However that being as it may, we can’t shake the impression that this could’ve been so much more than it ended up being.
