Don't Panic and the abject absurdity of the cultural disguise
You made it weird, Ruben Galindo, Junior!
I’d never heard of Ruben Galindo Junior until recently taking in the epic-length Shudder documentaries, In Search of Darkness. In the five-hours-long third installment, the doc finds itself scraping the barrel to find noteworthy 80’s horror movies to talk about and Galindo, also featured in the previous two parts, comes into play as a number of talking heads get nostalgic about his third feature, which goes by about a half dozen different names, even in its native Mexico. Sometimes known as Dimensiones Oculto, it’s probably best known in the English-speaking world as Don’t Panic, named after the theme song which rolls over the closing credits, written and awkwardly performed by the film’s equally awkward lead, Jon Michael Bischoff.
I’ve done a bit of reading on Galindo and having spoke to a few folks that are familiar with his movies, it seems like I chose the wrong one to start with. It took a couple features for him to get up to speed and from what I hear, his two other noteworthy horror movies, Grave Robbers and Cemetery of Terror are far superior pictures, but I’d gladly wager that neither of them have the balls-to-the-wall tonal frenzy that makes up Don’t Panic. You see, Don’t Panic was Galindo’s deliberate attempt to crack the international market and where his first two pictures were unapologetically Mexican features, with a Spanish-speaking Mexican cast, Don’t Panic bends over backwards to mask the fact that it was shot in Mexico City. Though, it’s never made clear where it’s supposedly taking place, there are hints here and there that suggest that it’s supposed to be somewhere around Los Angeles. Galindo cast young English-speaking actors who could reasonably pass for Anglo and those that didn’t were shoehorned into mall fashion of the mid-1980’s and dubbed over with more American-sounding voice actors.
Don’t Panic is a checklist of utterly weird, inexplicable qualities. It begins with the birthday party of seventeen year old, Michael, just your average American teenager who likes race cars and sleeping in his dinosaur pajamas, a pair of PJs so adored that he stays in them for, like more than half of the movie. He also has this gnarly amalgamation of the mullet and that weird perm that bussin teenagers on tiktok all seem to have. His friends surprise him with a ouija board and for reasons that are never once addressed, he seems genuinely pissed off about this gift. Maybe they left the explanation on the cutting room floor, but the introduction of the ouija board is a major bummer that, unbeknownst to everyone there, will kick off the rest of the movie. But if you thought this was going to be a ouija board horror movie like Witch Board, you’d be wrong. It goes away and is never mentioned again. I spent a lot of time thinking about it, actually, because Michael’s oversized response to the appearance of the ouija board seems to indicate something that was either left out of the movie or, more curiously, was left in as an implicit piece of contraband. Mexico is and always has been a socially conservative nation with Christianity playing a huge role in the lives of its citizens, so I wonder if the mere presence of the ouija board was meant to trigger some internal alarm that screams danger for the average Mexican citizen. Sort of like how the most terrifying monster that Jose Mojica Marins could conjure for the people of Brazil was an atheist in the form of Coffin Joe. To the rest of the world he’s just a menacing dude in a cape and top hat. I was also reminded of the Turkish Exorcist ripoff, Seytan, where Gul’s mother finds the ouija board in her daughter’s room, but because Islam doesn’t have the same preoccupation with evil and The Devil that Western Catholicism does, the device doesn’t translate and it’s presented as the demon’s entry vector with confusion. It’s as if the writer had no idea how to present it to the audience as this devious talisman of evil. It’s simply presented as that toy she was playing with, whatever that’s supposed to be.
What follows is actually a lot more like A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 than anything else. Michael, our awkward lead, becomes stricken with demonic red eyes and a psychic connection to the killer, wherein he can see through the killer’s eyes. Like Nightmare 2, there’s a brief love affair with a girl at school when he invites her out to breakfast and then the two of them do everything in Mexico City except eat breakfast before parting for the duration of the film, bringing it all back home toward the end. He falls into a strange bromance with a tough guy jock with a shotgun, rescues a friend who wears no pants and, for comedy’s sake, also has a drinking problem, and like Nightmare 2, there’s a quiet subtext of queerness running underneath it all. Like most horror movies of the era, the bulk of the killer’s victims are women but women also play very little role in the dramatic goings on. It’s quite curious. Instead, like Nightmare on Elm Street 2, Michael spends a lot of time with dudes. Most of that time is spent in those hilarious pajamas and some of those times, the dudes have no pants on. And this is to say nothing of the completely unresolved subplot concerning Michael’s mother and her alcoholism, occasionally blurting out, “There’s something I have to tell you. I have a drinking problem,” before the scene fades to black. Moving things along are some very silly special effects and a bit of gore and monster effects from genre underdog and Cinema Suicide favorite, Screaming Mad George.
The horror movies of Mexico are a woefully unexplored lot among the broader horror movie fandom and with specimens on the shelves like Don’t Panic, it’s not hard to see why that might be. From the moment it starts the film lurches to and fro, the tone shifting wildly every few minutes, utterly bizarre logical inconsistencies come at you at every turn, such as a high school student who also happens to be a third-shift phlebotomist at the local hospital? Or the foregone conclusion that using a ouija board is a one way ticket to possession land? Michael’s teenage friends all seem to live alone in filthy apartments with utterly bizarre decoration schemes that desperately wish to convey the notion of “average American Joe teenager”, such as strings of empty coke cans and boxes of Marlboro cigarettes hung like beaded curtains and Galindo’s idea of how American teenagers conduct their own private lives is at odds with a need to also convey youth, leaning a little too hard into bizarro-settings like Michael’s bedroom, walls covered in Italian supercars of the era, toys on the shelves, and those fucking pajamas! I’m told that a limited edition of the blu-ray was released by Vinegar Syndrome with a set of the PJs, an artifact that I’d kill a man to own.
Like a lot of the movies that I write about here, I don’t exactly know how to review them favorably since a lot of them suck in the conventional sense but like my Letterboxd blurb on the Taiwanese martial arts epic, Thrilling Bloody Sword, it can sound like I’m shitting on a movie that I actually enjoyed a great deal not for the qualities that people tend to consider good, but for being absolutely weird in a joyful way. Don’t Panic is a shit show but it’s a wonderful shit show that rolls along like an homage to 80’s horror movies made in the middle of the 1980’s. Galindo’s desperation to mask the Mexican locality of the movie gives it this stunted quality that definitely does not feel American but is also unlike the Italian movies of the era that definitely look and feel familiar while also feeling distinctly international. It’s as if Galindo had a friend who was always going on and on about visiting America, so he used him as a consultant to localize the movie more closely to Los Angeles, but it turns out that his friend was full of shit and just made everything up. The end-result is a curiosity worth satisfying.