Review of Paco

Paco (1975)
4/10
"Boy, you got a lot to learn."
14 October 2012
Warning: Spoilers
Well this seems to be a rambling mess that doesn't tie anything together by the end of the story. Nominally it's the tale of an orphaned Colombian boy (Panchito Gomez) who leaves his country environs to locate his Uncle Fermin (Joes Ferrer) in Bogota. Though Fermin looks outwardly successful, he actually heads up a schoolboy street gang that engages in petty thefts and then turns the loot over to Fermin in exchange for token amounts of cash. I guess the idea here is that Paco eventually realizes that this isn't the kind of life he wants to live, but the story veers off in rather questionable directions. For example, a notable Colombian movie star (Andre Marquis) who was once part of the 'camines' himself, is pressured into returning a favor to his benefactors by engaging in the theft of a ten million dollar emerald. Then, all of a sudden in the middle of all this, Pernell Roberts pops up as one of the masterminds of the jewel heist. Pernell Roberts!?!?

I'd like to think I was paying pretty close attention to this flick, but I have a few questions. What ever became of that Boyacayamel - the flashy giant emerald? How is it no one ever noticed a resemblance between one of the jewel thieves and the nation's biggest movie star? OK, he wore dark glasses and rubbed some hair dye into his beard, but come on. And at what point did Paco reconcile with Uncle Fermin after the elder relative basically told him to get lost?

Ordinarily I would never get get involved in a picture like this but I'm winding down to the last few flicks in my Mill Creek Mystery box set of two hundred fifty movies on sixty DVD's. There WAS one redeeming feature here though. Three years following the release of "The Exorcist" in the U.S., it looks like that horror flick made it to South America, as a prominent movie marquee in the film was displaying "El Exorcista".
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