El Alimento del miedo (lost Mexican horror film; 1994)
Juan López Moctezuma, director of the film.
Status: Lost
El alimento del miedo (The food of fear, translated from spanish) was a 1994 mexican horror film directed by Juan López Moctezuma, which he also directed crittically panned films such as Matar a un Extraño (1983) The Mansion of Madness (1973) Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary (1975) and Alucarda (1977), with this film being his last work before passing away one year later, in 1995.
The film was written by López Moctezuma himself and Jorge Victoria, and starring López Moctezuma, Isaura Espinoza and Jorge Russek. The film is based off a Mexican leyend named “La tamalera asesina”
Plot
The Plot takes place in an underclass neighborhood of Mexico City, when a troupe features a circus act, led by Don Ramón (López Moctezuma himself.) He and his wife Petra (Isaura Espinosa) have to take care of the daughter of a neighbor nicknamed "Flea"who has been jailed for drug trafficking.
Petra thinks that Flea must earn a living (dispite she is 5 years old), entrusting her several domestic tasks; the little girl later befriends Pepito, who works as a clown on the street.
Things get complicated when somone with satanic tendencies arrives to Ramon's house, and the visitor develops a love interest on Petra. A fight between the three adults causes that Flea suffers a fatal accident which c auses her death, so, to not get on problems with authorities, Petra uses her meat to make tamales that she sells on the street.
Status
The film has remained mostly obscure since its original screening on various Mexican cinemas, there are no available posters for the film, the film had a poor rating, and the fact that half of the cast (including Juan) passed away , makes the chances of finding a copy much harder.
The rest of the cast is still active, with Jorge Victoria making an appereance in the pilot of the TV series Queen of the South and Isaura Espinoza also appearing in a post-production series called Desvanecer, but contacting them is hard, since they seem to not have social media.
And the info available for the film is also really poor, since IMDb and the site of the Mexican Secretary of culture are the only sites with more reliable information on the film.