★★½
“Better late than never”
Well, that only took… twenty-one years. Back in 2003, I watched and reviewed El Jardinero 2, with the help of Chris, because it came on a Mexican DVD with no English subtitles. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I booted up Tubi the other day, and found its predecessor streaming. No English subs – but there were Spanish ones. Nowadays, Google Translate offers a half-decent ability to convert into English, even if I ended up having to apply a lot of polish to the idiom. At least I didn’t have to bother Chris. Still, here we are, and… Well, it probably wasn’t worth all the effort, to be honest. It is another cheap slice of Mexploitation, with too much talk and not enough action, though like its successor is reasonably entertaining.
It turns out I misspoke in the sequel, when I described Pablo Moreno (L. Reynoso) as the husband of Lilia Gallardo (Herrera). It’s a bit more complex. Lilia returns from abroad to her home town in rural Mexico to discover her father has been murdered by drug dealers. Worse, her mother has taken up with the head of the clan, Adan Moreno. Lilia is unimpressed, and in the resulting fracas, shoots Moreno dead before fleeing. The family kinda blames their rivals, and Mom goes to her grave rather than implicate her daughter, despite brutal treatment at the hands of the gang’s enforcer, Mario Argumedo (Pineda). Dismissing the concern of her godfather, Lilia decides to infiltrate the family, do as much damage as possible and take her revenge.
Vengeance is a long time coming, shall we say. She has to befriend Pablo, posing as an out-of-towner (I guess she must have been abroad for a long time, since he doesn’t recognize her), and using her womanly charms to get an invite to stay on the ranch. She then uses this access to figure out where their poppy fields are located, and recruits her godfather to set them on fire one night. There’s also dissent in the ranks between Pablo and his brother Gabino (H. Reynoso – no clue if the actor is related to his on-screen brother), with the latter unhappy about the influence Lilia is having on his sibling. It doesn’t stop Pablo from inviting her to help out in the family business.
And this is how we eventually get back to where we came in for the sequel, with a gun-battle between the two sides, roughly eighty minutes after the first time we see Lilia shoot Adan. It feels more like a feature-length telenovela, with all that implies. I’d be hard-pushed to call this good, yet it did manage to keep my interest, with things like how the small country towns is basically run by the Moreno cartel, with the police chief utterly in their pocket. None of the locals seem bothered. It’s certainly a bit different, though much as with the sequel, I wish Lilia had been as much of a bad-ass as the cover again implies.
Dir: Enrique Murillo
Star: Lorena Herrera, Salvador Pineda, Luis Reynoso, Héctor Reynoso