Epitafios: The Complete First Season – DVD Review

DVD Reviews, Reviews

Directed by:
Alberto Lecchi
Jorge Nisco

Starring:
Julio Chávez …. Renzo Márquez
Antonio Birabent …. Bruno Costas
Paola Krum …. Laura Santini
Luis Luque …. Comisario Jiménez
Villanueva Cosse …. Marcos Márquez
Cecilia Roth …. Marina Segal
Lito Cruz …. Benítez
Carlos Portaluppi …. Dr. Morini

Studio: HBO Home Video.
Release Date: August 29, 2006.
Number of Discs: 5.
Number of Episodes: 13.
Running Time: 780 minutes.
MSRP: $59.98.

The Show


There are many words you could use to describe HBO but unoriginal certainly isn’t one of them. With epic series like Rome and Carnivale, to other modern tales like Sopranos, The Wire, and Curb Your Enthusiasm, HBO is anything but conventional. So when they picked up the 2004 Argentinean miniseries Epitafios (Epitaphs) to broadcast on their HBO Latino channel, many – including myself – were curious as to what they had up their sleeves.

Epitafios is about revenge. Plain and simple.

The series starts five years after a tragic incident that happens at a school. Through a series of flashbacks in the pilot episode we discover that a chemistry professor by the name of Santiago Peñalver has been relieved of his duty, and denied his pension. This leads the mentally ill teacher to return to the school and hold four indicate students hostage that were merely trying to solve a class assignment after hours. He douses them in a flammable liquid and threatens to kill them if he isn’t given what is rightfully his.

From there the police are phoned in about the situation, along with Santiago’s psychiatrist Laura Santini, in hopes of taking him out of what he’s doing. Controlling the situation is Detective Benítez, he informs his partner, Renzo Márquez, to go up on the roof and check out the situation while Laura tries to talk down Santiago. Things go wrong when Renzo accidently looses his footing and crashes through he classrooms skylight, causing the professor to drop his blowtorch, burning all four students alive.

Now five years later Renzo has become a shell of his former self, trading in his gun and badge and taking up a career as a taxi driver. He has no reason to go on, no love in his life, a job he only has out of necessity, and still holding himself personally responsible for what happened at the school. Benítez is still working for the department. Now back in current day, he’s called about an anonymous tip and given an address, there he finds the mutilated remains of professor Peñalver, with the arms, legs, and head missing. That’s not all they discover, in the backyard are two marked graves, one for Benítez and another for both Renzo and Laura. Someone has a score to settle.

A crazed maniac has spent five years meticulously planning out the perfect plot of revenge. And now he’s going after everyone involved with the incident, everyone that could have kept that event from ever happening. Renzo finds himself pulled back in to the law, in hopes that he can stop the countless deaths that are to come due to the one mistake he’s still beating himself over five years later.

However, once a single wrench is thrown in to the killer’s plans, that’s things get interesting. It’s begins to develop into the god complex that tends to turn any antagonist in to a frenzy. It doesn’t take long for him to turn this in to a personal game of cat and mouse with Renzo, proving to him just how in control he truly is. How he’s planned everything down to the last detail and that there’s nothing Renzo can do to stop him from fulfilling his vendetta.

The show manages to keep suspense high and has you craving to watch the next episode immediately thanks to brilliant cliff hangers. While enjoyable during the first time watching it all unfold, on repeat viewings each episode begins to feel pretty much the same. After a while you begin to notice the routine reactions characters would have. Things like what they would say become repetitive, or how they would manage to muck up what they were trying to do almost the exact same way each episode. Blame it on lazy writing, or lazy story crafting, either way it quickly becomes the same story in each episode. It begins to feel like they’re running around in circles, and that’s no fun to watch.

Epitafios falls in to the trap of just about every other series of its kind, it builds up a masterful tale and a compelling premise but half way through it doesn’t know where to go. And from there they run through as many of the cliche plots imaginable, or make characters do out of character things in hopes of keeping the suspense high. But in doing so it hurts what the show was attempting to accomplish. What was first a plot to avenge the love that was taken away, quickly becomes another serial killer chase that boxes itself in with no place to go.

The DVD


Video:
(Presented in 1.78:1 Non-Anamorphic Widescreen)
Why they chose to make the menus for this show anamorphic but not the shows themselves is beyond me. The color palate for the series is very muted for most of the shows, which is I believe an intended effect. The transfer (aside from that whole non-anamorphic thing) is serviceable, the shows mediocre budget shows in the lack of much detail and definition where it matters. Considering the mood in which the creators are trying to create, it luckily works in the shows favor. But one would still expect better considering that HBO is behind this DVD set.

Audio:
(Spanish 2.0 Surround with English and Spanish subtitles)
The audio is perhaps the most unsatisfying thing in the whole set, the series has such a beautiful and perfect score yet is held back due to the restrictions of 2.0. Accompany that with the films occasional use of classical music and it’s hard to not imagine how much better this could have sounded had they included a 5.1 mix. The subtitles are clearly legible, yet occasional run right past you if you don’t keep on top of them.

Extras:

Behind the Scenes of Epitafios (11:10) – The only thing you’ll find is a boring puff piece designed specifically to sell you on the show. If you watch the series in order like it’s intended then by the time you get to this its pretty redundant.

The DVD Lounge’s Ratings for Epitafios
CATEGORY
RATING
(OUT OF 10)
THE SHOW

7.5
THE VIDEO

5
THE AUDIO

6
THE EXTRAS

2
REPLAY VALUE

5
OVERALL
6
(NOT AN AVERAGE)

The Inside Pulse
While the finale is satisfying, and in some ways justifies the means, there is just a lingering feeling that it could have been so much better. Had they put a little more thought in to the grand scheme of things, Epitafios could have been a must buy title. However, since things begin unraveling when the mid-point rolls around, perhaps the best way to go with this one is a rental.

Currently residing in Washington D.C., John Charles Thomas has been writing in the digital space since 2005. While he'd like to boast about the culture and scenery, he tends to be more of a procrastinating creative type with an ambitious recluse side. @NerdLmtd