The Devil's Backbone

[ER]

Like The Orphanage and Pan's Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro's 2001 The Devil's Backbone is "thinking person's horror." Set in the immediate aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, and taking place almost entirely within a creepy orphanage which has the singular feature of an unexploded bomb in its courtyard, this atmospheric tale of sadism, kindness, and postmortem revenge works very well on many levels. As was the case two years ago with Pan's Labyrinth I found myself every bit as interested in the real world goings on in this film as I was in the plot of the haunting of the orphanage by the spirit of a murdered, missing boy, and this duality of storytelling marks del Toro as every bit as talented a writer as he is creator of eerie movies. Not a lot of flash and special effects here, just a good old fashioned spooky ghost story.

[Rev. Powell]

I liked it quite a bit too.  I see it as a warmup for PAN'S LABYRINTH, which took a lot of the same ideas and made them into a masterpiece.

[Mofo Rising]

Guillermo del Toro is quite a good director, and with this movie has shown that he is as capable with introspective drama films as he is with over-the-top horror.

God bless him for being so good with the fantasy stuff, but he is firmly grounded in actual story-telling as well.

[Neville]

I enjoyed it a lot, but I thought the script tried to cram to many things into it, and that pretty-boy Eduardo Noriga was miscast as the villain of the piece.

Still, it makes a very interesting companion to "Pan's labyrinth", they are very similar in their mixture of reality and fantasy, and the background of war.

[Rev. Powell]

Did I hear wrong, or wasn't del Toro planning to put out a third Spanish Civil War film to make an informal trilogy?

[Neville]

Heard that too, but it was before he got attached to "The Hobbitt", so it will have to wait. I'll be a happy man if "The Hobbitt" gives him enough juice to film "At the mountains of madness" after that.

[Rat-Bat-Spider]

I actually felt that, spiritually, the movie had closer ties to Del Toro's friend's movie, Juan Antonio Bayona's The Orphange than to Del Toro's own Pan's Labyrinth. While all three movies explore the idea of childhood abandonment and the effects of adult indifference in a child's life, Pan's Labyrinth had one important difference to me. Nobody cared about Ofelia. In the two other aforementioned films, Simon had his mother Laura in The Orphanage, who was worried sick about him, and Carlos had Dr. Casares in The Devil's Backbone, who was his guardian and father-figure. But poor Ofelia was all alone, with no one to humor her strange tales of a labyrinth and the wicked faun who dwelt within. Nobody cared for her the way she needed to be, and that sets it apart from the other two movies. It doesn't necessarily make it better, but I felt it definitely changed the emotional tone.

[ToyMan]

i remember catching this and cronos on vhs from this indy-centric video store i rented from when i lived in chicago, and thinking that they were both very interesting films. i love how del toro is able to balance making films like these against keeping his name out there with attention-grabbing flicks like hellboy and blade II.