American Carnage review: Exploitation cinema is now about US immigrants

American Carnage wants to make one thing clear right away, so there’s no room for doubt: This is a film about the United States of America and its horrid treatment of immigrants. Opening with a montage of real-world news clips of detention camps and right-wing pundits’ dehumanizing invectives, American Carnage’s opening minutes swell in a crescendo of Latin misery. It all climaxes with an excerpt from Donald Trump’s inauguration speech, from which the film takes its name. Once Fox News Greek has taken the lead, the story moves to a fast-food burger joint. Here all the hatred is turned into a scary comedy metaphor.

Diego Hallivis directs the movie with a script written by Hallivis (and his brother Julio) American Carnage takes place after an unspecified state’s governor enacts an extreme enforcement of immigration law that declares family members of undocumented immigrants — even their U.S.-born children — are aiding and abetting a felon and should be incarcerated in detainment centers.

This is how first-generation American teen JP (Jorge Lendeborg Jr.) has his life upended when ICE raids his family’s home during a party for his sister, Lily (Yumarie Morales), who’s just been accepted to Columbia University. JP, Lily and a few other youth prisoners are now being held at a detention center. They have the choice of getting released or be taken into custody with many others. You have two options: either they wait out your detention and attempt to rebuild their lives through the long and tedious legal system or you can choose to volunteer in a government-run senior care facility to live closer to home.

Photo: Saban Films

It all started from the beginning American Carnage The nursing home wants the public to be aware that there is something wrong. JP is kept in seclusion, the residents warn JP during terrifying lucidity to leave, and it seems that they are suffering from an illness which causes their bodies to spiral out of control. (Kind of like in Junji Ito’s UzumakiThis is a little less gross. With the help of new friends Big Mac (Allen Maldonado), Camila (Jenna Ortega), Chris (Jorge Diaz) and Micah (Bella Ortiz), JP races to figure out what’s going on before whatever secret the home is hiding consumes them.

As an individual, American CarnageThis is a good comedy-thriller, direct to video. It has some funny jokes but also a blunt genre metaphor delivered by young Latin American actors. The Hallivis Brothers have their sights so squarely set on one problem — the casual depravity of the United States’ immigration policy — but that approach inadvertently elides others to make its point (like the elderly that it notes the U.S. similarly neglects, while never bothering to make them more than a prop in its satire).

But in conjunction with recent films, like last year’s The Forever Purge, or low-budget thrillers like 2019’s Beneath Us and last year’s Netflix release There is no one who gets out alive, American Carnage fits into a new wave of immigrant-sploitation, a subset of films rooted in the injustices of being an immigrant in America, where the American Dream is always inverted to be a nightmare. These films make it clear that the horrors of American immigrants are so obvious, and they argue that genre farce is the best way to portray this systemic cruelty.

Rarely are these films good, but perhaps they serve a function as a vital corrective to the cloyingly inspirational “good immigrant” narrative that ignores sociopolitical realities in order to make viewers feel good. Maybe instead, the cheap B-movie thrills of immigrant-spolitation are closer to the truth: stories about homegrown horror so depraved, there is no polishing them up.

American Carnage can be rented or purchased digitally. iTunes, Google PlayYou can also access other online services.