Review: Victor and Valentino “Lonely Haunts Club 3: La Llorona”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Victor starts his quest to make a prank show and tags along with Charlene and Pineapple to see another spirit, La Llorona, the ghost of a mother who has lost her children and now kidnaps other children to keep for herself. The prank show soon goes awry, with the spirit nabbing all of the kids until only Victor is left to stew in his fear. Only this turns out to be Valentino who wanted Victor to be piss his pants scared as revenge for his pranks.

OUR TAKE

We’re down to the last week and last four episodes of this month long marathon of Victor and Valentino. And we kick this last batch off with the third part of the Lonely Haunts Club episodes, which seem to be an ongoing recurring thing, even if there’s two in one season, so I guess we can expect one more before this second season is done. And this might be the best so far, even if the idea isn’t super original. La Llorona has actually been pretty popular in horror material lately, so it’s not exactly out of nowhere to have her included in these sorts of things. Still, what brings this episode over the top for me would probably be the extra effort they put into crafting her origins and explanation, complete with Claymation demonstrations! It also managed to act legitimately horrifying in the lead up to the reveal, though not without some rather shameless references to Blair With Project, or at least any found footage movie that’s been made between then which would probably be at least 500. My point is that this is not without reverence to the horror movies that influenced it, and not in a super blatant way either.

It’s also legitimately disturbing as we get closer and closer to the twist, though the pay off is a bit of a let down. It’s nice to see Val being able to call Victor on when he’s being such a tool, though it was also appreciated that it came back to that detail by the end of it. Still, one wonders if they could have had a more haunting and spooky way to end on things. Having the ghost be friendly in the end is fine and all, but it obviously loses some of the more potentially interesting routes they could have taken with it. Though with that all said, having the ghost portrayed in this way probably made it work in its favor, as the design remains sufficiently creepy while the actions of relentless pursuit are very alarming, making the arrival of something like this showing in the real world helps to underscore how poorly both students and teachers could handle such an event. But yeah, definitely the best Lonely Haunts Club so far, hopefully a sign of good things to come for this show in any time of the year. Tomorrow we focus on deadlines and stuff!