The Films of Enrique Gómez Vadillo

Mexican director Enrique Gómez Vadillo is one of the country’s forgotten cult cinema notables. Responsible for a series of genre films, gritty melodramas, and erotic works throughout the ‘80s, ‘90s, and early ‘00s, Vadillo’s films have been largely unavailable for English language audiences until now. Notable as much for their beautiful landscapes as for their perverse subversion of Telenovela storytelling by wildly upping the volume of sexual debauchery, homoeroticism, and general sleaze, Vadillo’s films represent a rare transgressive subset of Mexican genre cinema. Vinegar Syndrome Labs is proud to present this collection of his key features.

VERANO SALVAGE aka Savage Summer (1980) is an erotic exploration of an illicit threesome at the beach besieged by violence, and is a notable representation of Vadillo’s typical blend of sexually confrontational storytelling and traditional melodrama. Ostensibly following a woman (Ana Martín) on her journey of sexual discovery, but rife with homoerotic imagery, VERANO SALVAGE is an outlier in hypersexualized Mexican genre filmmaking where men’s bodies are the focus of objectification. JOHNNY CHICANO (1981) updates the tropes of classical Hollywood melodrama to sweaty, working class, early ‘80s Mexico. Poor young land worker Johnny (Fernando Allende) falls in love with the daughter of his wealthy American employer (Verónica Castro), setting into play chaos in his family and community, which ultimately leads to violence. MUERTA EN EL PLAYA aka Death on the Beach (1991) returns to a sunny beach setting with this homoerotic tale of a serial killer. David, a disturbed young man who has been molested by his teacher, begins murdering all those around him who he sees as responsible for his trauma, while trying to overcome his own homosexual desires.