Starring: Will Ferrell, Geal Garcia Bernal, Diego Luna

You may like this if you liked: Black Dynamite (Scott Sanders, 2009), Grind House (Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, 2007), anything with Will Ferrell being over the top.

Casa De Mi Padre tells the story of Armando Alvarez (Ferrell) a simple Mexican rancher. When his father’s ranch comes into financial trouble his older and successful brother, Raul comes to save it. However, Armando falls in love with Raul’s girlfriend and discovers that the reason why Raul is so wealthy is that his dealings are in selling drugs. This then leads to a war with a powerful gangster (Bernal) as Alvarez vows to defend his family and for once make his father proud.

This was a film that absolutely plummeted at the box office, and had a similar performance on DVD. This is unusual as Will Ferrell films are usually a guaranteed success, even if he does have a tendency just to play the same character, with the notable exception of Stranger than Fiction (Marc Forster, 2006). Will Ferrell’s character here is the same as all of his others; the only exception is that pretty much the entire film is in Spanish, this automatically alienates a huge part of his usual audience.

When I say it is in Spanish, it is some kind of overdubbed gibberish Spanish and this is one of the few jokes that last for the entire 88minutes. That is the major problem of this film; it should not be a feature length film. The concept of spoofing just how bad certain film genres of the 70s were is nothing new, and trying to keep that joke lasting that long just doesn’t work and gets very boring very quickly. Expect poor editing, terrible production values, appalling camera work and over dubbed dialogue. Unfortunately, this has been done before that now the joke that old films were rubbish is now itself an old joke. There are a couple of moments which did bring some laughs, notably the sex scene which was also very disturbing and still haunts me.

Casa De Mi Padre’s few jokes get very boring very quickly and this film is best avoided, for vastly superior genre parodies I would recommend Black Dynamite (Scott Sanders, 2009) or Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace (2004).