Cabeza De Vaca

We watched this movie recently in my Latin-American History class at college, and I was totally unprepared for how wild it was. Cabeza de Vaca (cow head?) is an actual historical figure, basically a Spanish Conquistador in the early 1500s who actually went on the expedition depicted in the movie, which is based on a book he wrote afterwards about his journey. A shipwreck off the coast of Florida leaves him with only a small party of survivors, who are mostly wiped out during a surprise attack by the natives. Vaca and a couple of other guys get captured and become slaves, Vaca himself is separated from the group and sold off to a witch doctor where he spends most of his days feeding and washing the doctor’s little armless dwarf buddy. At this point the movie gets a bit weird.

It was somewhat tough to follow as first of all I knew nothing of this guy or his historical background prior to viewing, and then the movie employs a highly visual style of storytelling with relatively little dialouge (someone over on Amazon compared it to Excalibur, which I thought was a good point of reference for us honkeys). But fortunately I had an instructor familiar with the movie there to clear up confusion, so I’ll try to relate some of what is going on in this one. At first the sorceror and the little dwarf guy (who is hilarious by the way, all grunting and talking shit in his native language and just totally giving Cow Head the business) basically just treat Vaca like some garbage, but in time apparently the sorceror sees that Vaca has some innate healing ability or something, so he starts teaching him and they all start to become buddies and have a peaceful little dynamic going on. There’s a confusing scene where the witch doctor makes a giant drawing of some random warrior dude and uses his voodoo style tactics to gouge the guy’s eye out, then brings Vaca along to heal the eye and restore the guy’s sight. At this point Vaca is a full fledged medicine man who can perform miracles such as bringing the dead back to life, etc., so they let him go to wander the West in Kwai Chang Kaine style. He rambles onward to Texas, having various other adventures such as getting captured by another tribe and nearly being killed by shrieking naked harpy women who are all painted up like Mystique from the X-Men movie. Eventually Vaca finds some of his old buddies who had also become slaves, and they are picked up by Spanish troops in Mexico.

The movie is obviously highly low budget, and the acting is pretty hammy, and that all can be a little distracting. However, the sometimes random and choppy cinematics actually work in the movie’s favor as it conveys the same sense of confusion that Vaca must have been experiencing in this land of the supernatural where he arrives not even speaking the language. The movie is also just packed with classic little moments. I’ve already mentioned the dwarf guy, whose taunting of the slaves and Vaca is enough to recommend the movie in it’s own right. It’s also packed with incredible scenes of random violence, and there’s a bevy of nekkid native girls running around for the gents out there. It also features a disgusting but classic line, when Vaca meets one of his old companions and he relates the story of how he had to eat one of their other former crewmembers to survive - “If you want to see him again, wait until I shit! Maybe you’ll find something you recognize!” Cold blooded, yo.

Anyway, it’s around for rent in the Latin sections of better video stores and it has English subtitles. I’ll have to get some screenshots from this one, they are highly necessary.

Links :

* Short montage