Welcome to TBO.com. Skip directly to: our Keyword Search, Section Navigation, Content.

TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

TBO.com - Tampa Bay Online

John Allman

If you’ve ever wandered the aisles at the video store or surfed the DVR pay-per-view options and seen a bunch of movies that you’ve never heard of, chances are John has watched them. Why? He loves movies. All kinds of movies. Good, bad, so-bad-they’re good, even the truly unwatchable ones. He mostly loves horror and science-fiction and drive-in exploitation movies that most upstanding model citizens wouldn’t dare watch. Then he writes up his thoughts so you can decide - watch, don’t watch or avoid at all costs. Sometimes he even gets to talk to the cool folks who make some of your favorite films.

Blood, Violence and Babes
John Allman

Most Recent Entries

Monthly Archives

A Conversation With: Adrián García Bogliano

Posted Jan 21, 2012 by John Allman

Updated Jan 21, 2012 at 03:54 PM

For a director with a penchant for raw violence and disturbing imagery, Adrián García Bogliano decided to go in a totally different direction for his latest film, “Cold Sweat,” an unpredictable and often surprising exercise in mounting tension that flips traditional movie conventions and plays against expectations.

“Cold Sweat” tells the story of Roman and Ali, two friends with a blossoming affection who set out to find Roman’s ex-girlfriend Jackie, who went missing shortly after meeting a young man during an online chat.

The two young adults use modern technology to track Jackie to an unassuming two-story house in a non-descript neighborhood. What they find inside is a veritable house of horrors where every room holds a new, shocking surprise.

Bogliano, with his eighth feature film, masterfully ratchets up the tension, offering two elderly, villainous foes who like to play with liquid nitroglycerine to torture their victims. Several scenes play out like a Master’s Thesis in Filmmaking, deliberately drawing out the action until every movement, every breath, every drip of sweat and drop of liquid nitro could spell certain doom.

In between these long stretches of mounting dread, the director inserts well-placed humor and unexpected gore, keeping both his cast and his audience off balance and unsure what might happen next.

Bogliano, 31, of Spain drew inspiration from two films by two directors that couldn’t be further apart in style and execution.

He looked first to Steven Spielberg’s “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” the largely underrated second adventure in the ongoing franchise, which portrayed a darker, almost sadistic streak that divided fans expecting a fun thrill ride like “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

And he turned to his all-time favorite film, “Sorcerer,” by William Friedkin, a 1977 thriller made after “The French Connection” and “The Exorcist” that never achieved the same level of success or acclaim.

“Sorcerer” is about a group of men in South America who are hired to drive six crates of volatile dynamite across miles of insanely rugged terrain, including sheer mountain roads, stretches of dense jungle, a rotting suspended rope bridge and finally a surreal stretch of desert.

With this month’s release of “Cold Sweat,” as well as the upcoming release of “I’ll Never Die Alone,” a brutal rape and revenge thriller that looks even more malicious than the exploitation classic “I Spit On Your Grave,” and “Penumbra,” 2012 could well be the year that launches Bogliano into the upper echelon of today’s hottest genre directors.

Bogliano, who now lives in Mexico, took time from filming his next feature, “Here Comes the Devil,” to speak with BVB: Blood, Violence and Babes by phone.

BVB: First off, I loved “Cold Sweat.” I thought it did so many things right, and different, from your typical horror film, that it felt really fresh and exciting. Is that what you were going for – to play against expectations?

AGB: Exactly. That was exactly, to play against expectations is a perfect way to say it because we were thinking with this film the villains have to be the opposite of what you’re expecting, the big guy, the strong guy with a mask. Having these two old men was a way to do that, and also having them not use knives or something like that, instead drops of something you don’t know what it is in the beginning of the film. That was exactly the effect we wanted to cause.

BVB: I really thought in addition to having villains who were completely unexpected, I felt like your movie, and I watch a lot of horror movies. I watch some really good ones and some really awful ones. And I felt like your characters felt very real. They felt like young adults. I loved how they were constantly referencing Facebook. I loved when Roman posted his status as, Help, we’re trapped in a house with two maniacs…

AGB: I saw the news the other day that something like that actually happened. I felt like when I was writing this, if you only had the Internet and not like in the United States, the system of 911, if somebody is going to know exactly who to ask for help through the Internet.

BVB: Were you just trying to show this is kind of the world we live in now. If you’re in your mid-20s, that’s probably something you think to do instead of call 911, if I can’t get an outside line, I’ll go to Facebook or I’ll go to social media.

AGB: Absolutely. I’m pretty sure that probably in a few years, that joke is going to be so 2011, right? A joke of a certain moment of time. It doesn’t matter to me. It’s a movie made in a certain time and a certain place. I don’t feel afraid to make movies that look like the place they were made and the moment they were made.

BVB: I felt like your film really did that. Not to give away anything, I try very hard not to spoil the films for my readers, but I’m hoping by the time this posts later in the week, with the movie releasing today, they will have had time to check it out. I loved that you made a horror film where the main characters all actually survived. You definitely went against the Final Girl pattern where there’s always just one survivor battling the bad guys. I thought that was really cool. Was that something you wanted to do to set yourself apart?

AGB: Yeah, yeah, yeah – I discussed it a lot with my brother (co-writer, Ramiro García Bogliano) and the other co-writer (Hernán Moyano) of the film. They were more into killing some of them. At the moment where I wrote the script, my feeling was more optimistic, so I said it can be that way because we were making films before this one, my previous films were more pessimistic, more violent. The previous one to this was one called, “I’ll Never Die Alone,” that’s going to be released now in the U.S. It’s so violent and it’s pretty disturbing. You finish that film and you want to cut your veins. I said I don’t want to do that anymore, I don’t want to do that again. I wanted to make something different, something for a teenage audience, something more energetic and more fun.

BVB: How deliberate was it on your part to let certain scenes play out in an extended fashion, like the nitroglycerine disrobing scene with Roman and Jackie. It really seemed to be a direct homage to old-school filmmaking like Hitchcock and Kubrick, who took their time and let the action unfold organically.

AGB: You mean the sequence where she gets down from the table to the floor? To me, that’s the heart of the movie. I have a very good friend who I always show my films as soon as I make the first cut, I show the films to him, I trust a lot his opinion. He just told me that, that was the scene of the movie, and I felt so good when he said that because that’s exactly what I felt. Everything else can be or not be there, it doesn’t matter. But the moment I really wanted to have in the movie was that moment. Like the homage I wanted to make the most was to ‘Sorcerer” by William Friedkin. I love “Sorcerer.” And to me, this was like a big homage. I think one of the most brilliant sequences in film history is that sequence with the hanging bridge of “Sorcerer.” That’s probably my favorite sequence ever. I wanted to make a homage to that. The way he keeps the tension, he keeps building the tension. It’s like the scene is never going to end. That’s exactly what I wanted for this sequence. I actually wanted it to last longer.

BVB: I mentioned earlier to you the criticism. After I saw the film I went to see what other people thought and one of the things that really struck me, I read some reviews and I saw some people criticizing, there was another scene where Ali sneaks into the study and the old man is on the computer and she’s trying to find a weapon, or a pair of scissors to help free them, and I thought that scene was wonderfully tense, but it seemed like there were people criticizing it who thought that she should have just gone all Rambo and try to grab the knife, or grab the scissors, and kill the old man. I didn’t understand that.

AGB: I don’t understand that. Well, I do understand that. Let me tell you what I think about it. I think a lot of people believe that they would act in a violent situation, they think they would act like in the movies, that they would say something, they would fight him. I believe that most people would try to go quietly, try to save the girl and get out of there and call the police. I think they’re thinking, two old men, dealing with nitroglycerine and they just exploded the head of a girl. I won’t play Rambo. They are old and everything, but they still have nitroglycerine in their hands, they’re still…killers.

BVB: I have to ask you, I loved this, you had so many things in the film that were very much grounded in my mind in reality, like that scene with the girl, instead of trying to kill the guy, she got what she needed and snuck back off. Then we get into this moment in the film where they stumble upon this basement, this cellar with these blind, cannibal, mole-like women and the film just goes into a whole other place, which is just awesome. Where did you come up with that? What was the inspiration for that? I thought that was just wonderful.

AGB: It had a lot to do with the previous film, “I’ll Never Die Alone.” It’s a rape and revenge film, but it’s straight one way. A bunch of girls, they see a murder and then the murderers come after them. They rape them, they kill a couple of them and then they seek revenge. I didn’t want it to be anything other than a very straight story. For this film, I thought let’s do something different. After 35 minutes, 40 minutes of the film, you think you know exactly where it’s going, and you don’t. That was the idea. That kind of film you rarely see. You don’t know what the hell is going on, but you like it. I’m hooked. These characters were, in a way, they were something we used to add more excitement to the film. We were thinking of a film that didn’t have to have a very strong structure, very strong logic. We wanted a film where every five or 10 minutes, something strange, something you don’t know where it comes from, happens. We used a lot what we read about how they structured the second Indiana Jones film. This kind of thing where anything goes. We wanted to use this kind of idea for the structure and we wanted to create not a very serious horror film, but more of a roller coaster.

BVB: That’s funny, I don’t think I would have ever thought to hear you compare that sequence of the film to Indiana Jones, but I like it. I know exactly what you mean, where all of a sudden hearts are getting ripped out, monkey brains are getting eaten.

AGB: Absolutely. We used a couple of the classic Indiana Jones shots where a character is watching something off camera and he sees something before you do and you just see his reaction. Spielberg used to do that a lot and it’s an amazing kind of shot. It’s a really funny device. We didn’t have a lot of time to work with the actors, but they gave everything for the cameras.

BVB: Tell me a little about “Here Comes the Devil.” It’s set where a family is camping and two young children go missing and something happens.

AGB: Exactly. When they come back, they’re not the same. Something has changed in them. The parents try to realize what is it. I’m really excited about it. It’s a supernatural horror film, a genre I’m not so familiar with. I’ve worked with supernatural subjects, but not as much as this film. It’s really exciting.

BVB: Now did you write this one yourself, or did you collaborate with your brother?

AGB: No, this one I wrote it by myself. It was an idea I had in mind for a certain time. I think it’s going to be pretty, again, like my previous one, this is going to be pretty disturbing, violent and disturbing.

BVB: We like violent and disturbing.

AGB: Even when I work with comedy elements, I like it when the horror parts take place, I want it to be really strong and really violent.