The time has changed. And naivety has been killed in some alley at the hands of a social media gang. Narciso Ibáñez Serrador was never naive, but he did live in a very different time from 2021 and worked for a much more naive audience than the current one. Stories to not sleep, series in which he adapted literary classics of fantasy and horror to television in the manner of Alfred Hitchcock presents, It’s a good example. The nights during the Franco regime were very hard in the dungeons of the police stations and in the prisons, but before the small screen sat a middle class who did not know that darkness. And Chicho dominated like few others the vital pulse of that time and that place: his cinema was much wilder than his television. Today, when a journalist enters an embassy to carry out a small procedure and ends up being dismembered alive, and it is known in a notorious way without the murder having major consequences, some of those Stories to not sleep they are seen with a benevolent half smile. Others do not, because from the presentation the tone of terror is marked with a taste for the classic (the gothic letters, the scream, the door …) and in all of them you can see the hand of an exceptional audiovisual narrator.
For this reason, revisiting that series that jumped from Franco’s regime to democracy —its first season aired in 1966, the second in 1967-1968, and the third in 1982— becomes a risky exercise. And of which there is a preceding failure: the very irregular collection of Movies not to sleep 2006, led by Chicho himself. Now Amazon Prime Video releases a new installment of Stories to not sleep that come from the hand of the directors Paco Plaza, Paula Ortiz, Rodrigo Cortés and Rodrigo Sorogoyen in individual adaptations of four chapters of the original series: The joke (Cuts), The double (Sorogoyen), Asphalt (Ortiz) and Freddy (Square). They will be launched first on the digital platform and, after six months, on TVE. The risk is multiplied: it is not only to contribute work to a vademecum of terror, it is also that some of its paragraphs are rewritten. Not all trips have come to fruition.
Cortés has gone directly to the source, and has drunk it with pleasure. The joke pulses like the original, creating a set piece glorious supported both by his sharp style of camera placement and subsequent work on editing (signing the script, directing, editing, music production and even the song) as well as an extremely oiled cast. In Eduard Fernández he has found the XXI century Narciso Ibáñez Menta (devoured by his son’s fame, the father’s interpretive capacity to build the most radical characters entrusted to him by his offspring has been forgotten), and in Raúl Arévalo and Nathalie Poza the perfect accomplices – it only takes a second to believe that love triangle and plunge into its emotional rollercoaster – in a thriller of blackmail, half-truths and sinister laughter. Cortés puts his aesthetics before the thin narrative line (in reality, the story is minimal), and he succeeds by offering an enjoyable result.
Paco Plaza is the only one of the quartet who worked with Chicho. it was at Movies not to sleep and he lived love and heartbreak with the teacher filming one of his chapters, Christmas story, from whose cast he recovers a claw performer, Maru Valdivielso. But in his Freddy He has raised a monument to his work: he not only immerses himself in an episode that he drank by Darío Argento and Mario Bava, he has reviewed it since its filming. Life has been complicated for the better. Plaza takes the public to the studios on Madrid’s 1982 Havana promenade, when Chicho suffered from video shootings (he preferred the cinema), and Carlos Santos obtained honors in his recreation of Ibáñez Serrador. Now the ventriloquist (Miki Esparbé) not only suffers on screen the power of a killer doll as in the original installment, but, with the cameras turned off, the puppet maintains its ancestry. Beto Marini and Plaza have written a funny script, somewhat badass, that hits on his jokes, in the tone and in the terror, a little more gore than the chichista. It is the chapter with the most nods to Ibáñez Serrador’s work, including the change in the title of the original story and the appearance of his son, the filmmaker Alejandro Ibáñez, as Chicho-Santos’ assistant. Result: the best delivery.
Something weaker is Asphalt, by Paula Ortiz when we have the information. If the original episode was armed with sets built with drawings by Mingote, now on the streets of 2021 the aesthetic pays homage to 12 monkeys. The same social complaint remains, the sad praise to the nobody – here a married couple embodied by Dani Rovira and Inma Cuesta – who live poorly waiting for better times, people who have become a tiny part of the foundations on which fortunes are based. of others. Asphalt conformed with The cabin by Antonio Mercero a hidden cry against the dictatorship and social apathy, which needs one more turn in its current form.
Rodrigo Sorogoyen has covered The double throwing himself into the near future (the wink of the use of masks is great) in a fierce dystopia, whose libretto – signed by Daniel Remón – enjoys crushing the sentimental relationships of the characters to get away from the initial inspiration, a story by Ray Bradbury. The double behind his portrait of the rottenness of love in the David Verdaguer-Vicky Luengo couple (both impeccable) hides a latent suspense that permeates the plot while the audience builds the puzzle in their heads. Both Luengo and Iria del Río add mystery to their roles, Verdaguer humanizes the story, and with Sorogoyen the action is built at the necessary pace (it lasts the longest, 66 minutes). What would Chicho say about all of them? He, who always considered the pleasure of the public as the most precious good, would applaud happily.
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