Review #341: Cinco De Mayo (2013)
October 2025 Holiday Horror Review #14 - Cinco De Mayo (2013)
When this movie started up (I watched it on Tubi, using the link above) my first thought was, "Oh, this seems like it might be fun." It had this neat 80s VHS aesthetic, and was clearly not taking itself too seriously. But then after like 30 seconds I realized the segment I was watching wasn't part of the movie itself, it was some kind of a TV bumper (much like when Svengoolie or Elvira would introduce a film on TV) advertising another, different movie. When the actual movie started up, I realized it was not nearly as fun as I had hoped. [Edit from after finishing this review: it appears that this TV bumper WAS actually part of Cinco De Mayo, intentionally made to bookend the movie? That just raises more questions than it answers. When the movie is only 70 minutes long, why spend ten of those minutes on a fictional movie that looks way more fun than the movie people presumably paid to see?]
Cinco De Mayo is a micro-budget movie about a Mexican man named Humberto, working as a college professor in a very racist small town in America. The university decides to cut his class from the curriculum, putting him out of a job, and the dean also sends him to see a psychiatrist for... some reason. The psychiatrist tries to convince him that as a Mexican, he is genetically predisposed to become incredibly violent, and tries to provoke Humberto into acting on this latent violent streak. Humberto resists, but after his protest against anti-hispanic attitudes falls flat, and one of his racist neighbors threatens him and tries to get him arrested, Humberto does eventually go on a rampage, killing people that wronged him. The local sheriff confronts the psychiatrist who reveals that he and the college dean conspired to manipulate Humberto into becoming violent for... some reason, and the movie ends with Humberto giving an impassioned speech and then committing suicide by cop. And that's the end... or is it?
According to IMDB, this movie was made with an estimated budget of $600. (To put that into perspective, Easter Casket had a budget of $3000, five times that of this movie. And that movie was filmed entirely in a hotel room.) That's such a low number, that you can know with 100% certainty that nobody was paid to be in this movie, no permits were gotten, and any props and equipment were likely stuff that the cast and crew already had on hand. (I don't even know if $600 is enough to cover the blanks and squibs used for the gunshots at the end of the movie.) Some people might think it's unfair to criticize a movie for looking and sounding bad when they clearly did their best with such a miniscule budget, but I would argue that if you make a movie without the requisite budget to make it look or sound passable, then the criticism is entirely valid.
Because this movie does in fact look and sound bad. The entire movie has this fake film grain effect added to it (constantly causing film artifacts like fake dust and scratches every few seconds, as if you're actually watching a film from the 40s) which would make it look bad even if the costumes, makeup, and locations weren't whatever the production could get for free. The audio is bad, being constantly out-of-balance and with the sound peaking any time someone so much as raises their voice. And it's edited terribly- there are constant shots that cut to the wrong scene for one or two frames, which makes me wonder if they even watched the finished product before releasing it to the public. The lighting is always bad, and the actors (especially the man playing Humberto, the main character, around whom the entire story revolves) are all terrible.
There's a scene in this movie where the sheriff comes to Humberto's house responding to his neighbor claiming Humberto made threats at him, and the dialogue is written in such a way that Humberto essentially admits to making threats and even tells the sheriff he's going to make good on those threats. But the character of the sheriff chooses to give Humberto another chance and leaves him to his devices- I don't know why the sheriff does this, but if I were in his shoes I would probably do the same because as Humberto is admitting to wanting to give in to his building rage and kill his neighbor, he says this with so little energy, so little enthusiasm, so little interest in anything he's saying, that I would probably assume this guy has nothing going for him too. The whole plot is supposed to be that the people of this town are scared of Humberto's role as a college professor because they think he's going to use his platform to incite a riot among his students, rallying them into an army to fight back against the injustices done to American immigrants. But the man playing this character has such an utter lack of charisma, it shouldn't be a surprise that his class only has five students and his protest only attracts two participants. Nobody should be afraid of this man, because he has no force of personality whatsoever, and he's on-screen for 90% of the movie.
Oh, and one more thing: I mentioned in the synopsis that Humberto's psychiatrist admits to the sheriff that he and the dean conspired to turn him into a murderer for some reason. Here's how the scene plays out: the sheriff knows two people have been killed, and it's likely that Humberto is the murderer. He approaches the psychiatrist, and asks him what he's been doing for Humberto. The psychiatrist (rightfully) tells the sheriff that he can't discuss patient matters without the patient's consent. The sheriff then asks him a second time, and not only does the psychiatrist immediately disclose everything he was keeping secret about Humberto, he outright admits to being behind the illegal dealing that led to these murders, with no coercion or convincing needed. In the same breath he breaks patient-doctor confidentiality and also incriminates himself and the dean in a conspiracy that led to ongoing murder. This is the WORST medical health professional I've seen in a movie, and I've seen Sleepaway Camp numerous times!
This movie sucks. I know it was made on essentially a negative budget but that's no excuse for releasing such a bad product to the public.
Overall Rating: 2/10 Dramatic Speeches from the Killer
Cinco De Mayo Trivia: I couldn't find anything interesting about the movie itself, but did you know that Mole Poblano is the "official" dish of the holiday? Also, there are more avocados purchased for Cinco de Mayo than any other time of the year- 87 million pounds of them on average!
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