If you're a committed movie obsessive and have been on this earth long enough, you've probably seen way too many otherwise hard-to-find films in less-than-ideal presentations. Pan-and-scan VHS, washed-out and faded film prints, b&w foreign-language films with white subtitles that are impossible to read, foreign-language films with no subtitles at all, truncated versions missing scenes, cheap DVD transfers of poor-quality videotapes, ancient tapes dubbed from degraded prints shown on local TV, edited-for-television versions, MPAA-censored versions, phony "director's cuts," and the list goes on.
One of the most frustrating of these examples in our modern digital/cloud/AI era is the half-assed subtitle created using some kind of program lacking the human touch. These programs sometimes translate each word literally, losing the idiosyncrasies and nuances of how a particular language is actually spoken and/or wrecking the grammatical construction. They sometimes extract only the basics of the dialogue's meaning, taking out all the spice and flavor and converting it into a bland literalness. Sometimes, they do a speech-to-text thing that misunderstands half the words, which can be amusing when those misunderstandings create accidental absurdist art. Most egregiously, these programs sometimes miss entire chunks of dialogue, giving incomplete translations, particularly when several characters are talking at once.
All of these subtitle problems were an issue in my unofficial DVD copy of A Macabre Legacy, a movie otherwise impossible for me to track down. I purchased it from a trusted source of these movies who conveniently lives in a nearby city, but this one got past her otherwise excellent quality control. Sounds like these issues made watching this movie a real chore, right? Surprisingly, no. The movie, a Mexican melodrama that turns into a mad scientist/psycho husband horror film in its final third, has a mostly straightforward plot that was relatively easy to piece together from the subtitle scraps, but the accidental absurdism was off the charts. I got a good laugh at least once every three minutes from the insane shit the subtitles had the characters saying. The final four pictures in this post are screenshot examples of some of the wild times the subtitles brought to this party.
So, what is A Macabre Legacy actually about, to the best of my knowledge? Unless I missed some important context, A Macabre Legacy is about a brilliant doctor and medical school teacher, Dr. Ernesto Duarte (Miguel Arenas), who is not only an insanely gifted plastic surgeon but also a researcher close to discovering a cure for various tropical diseases (or maybe just one) and who has one of those silly-looking 1930s mad scientist labs. The movie opens on the doc's wedding day to the beautiful but immature Rosa (Consuelo Frank), who is mad that the doctor is spending time with sick and injured people instead of giving her all his attention. The doctor seems more sympathetic than his wife at this point in the movie, but several of his students have to remind him that it is in fact his wedding day, so these sympathies seem ripe for flipping.
The movie jumps ahead in chronology. Rosa becomes a less selfish, more mature woman living a lonely life because dang old Dr. Duarte can't stop obsessing over his job and his research. She's neglected, and he can't take a damn hint. When the doctor misses most of their one-year anniversary, he sends one of his students, Eduardo (Ramón Armengod), to spend time with her until he can make it home. Sparks start to fly, but Duarte eventually, and cluelessly, shows up with the rest of the fellas. Bonehead play, doc.
You can guess where this is going. Rosa and Eduardo fall in love. It's the worst-kept secret in town. All Duarte's students and household servants know about it, but the doc is so career- and research-focused that he's the last to know. When he accidentally discovers the truth at a dinner party, it flips his wig. The altruistic and religious doc becomes a deranged madman hellbent on revenge against Eduardo. He plans to win Rosa back, but when that plan fails, he decides to enact revenge on her, too.
This is all mildly enjoyable and predictably routine. Director José Bohr gives the film a competent but perfunctory look that's closer to the future medium of television than cinema, except for one elegantly gliding shot over the dinner table. There's nothing particularly special or uniquely terrible about this movie. A solid, mediocre effort.
Here's where the subtitle fun comes in. What was once a run-of-the-mill melodrama with horror elements is transformed into absurdist comedy gold by some of the most inadvertently deranged subtitling I've ever witnessed. If these subtitles are accurate, the movie also predicted the Internet, uploads, and the careers of Shakira and the Bee Gees decades before the fact. Remarkable. A man tells a woman he can't relieve her penis. A medical student walks into surgery prep and says, "Playing guitar." A phone call ends with this dialogue: "He didn't want to taste a snack today. Communism." This kind of shit happens every few minutes. Delightful!
I don't know what happened to make these subtitles display such wondrous text. Frankly, I don't want to know. I choose to live in the mystery. I embrace this mystery. The answers are never as fulfilling as the questions. The Bee Gees.
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