The Curse of La Llorona

The Curse of La Llorona is a 2019 American supernatural horror film directed by Michael Chaves in his directorial debut, and written by Mikki Daughtry and Tobias Iaconis. It is the sixth installment in the Conjuring Universe franchise. Based on the Mexican folklore of La Llorona, the film stars Linda Cardellini, Raymond Cruz and Patricia Velásquez, and follows a mother in Los Angeles 1973 who must save her children from a malevolent spirit who is trying to steal them away. The film was produced by James Wan through his Atomic Monster Productions banner.

The movie starts with the legend of La Llorona who in 1963 Mexico, while enjoying some family time with her sons is given a necklace by her younger son. The boy closes his eyes briefly, and when he opens them, his family is missing. The boy finds his mother drowning his brother in a stream. Horrified, he runs away but his mother catches him and seemingly drowns him too. 300 years later in Los Angeles, Mexican caseworker Anna Tate-Garcia investigates the disappearance of client Patricia Alvarez’s two children. Anna arrives at Patricia’s house for a welfare check. Inside, she finds the children locked behind a door, and Patricia attacks her and is taken away by the police. Patricia’s children, brothers Carlos and Tomas, tell Anna to keep them in the room so they are protected. Ignoring their warnings, she brings the boys to the police.

While in a shelter Tomas starts walking his his sleep and his brother Carlos follows him and he sees La Llorona in a mirror and she grabs the boys. They end up dead by drowning in the river and Anna is the suspect. Bringing her children Chris and Sam, she tells them to stay in the car while she investigates the murder scene. She hears Patricia, accused of her sons’ murders, screaming that it was Anna’s fault for taking her sons, and that Patricia had tried to stop the malevolent force of the woman in white, “La Llorona”. Curious, Chris comes out leaves the car to investigate himself and is seized by La Llorona, leaving burn marks on his arm. He rushes back to the car, but La Llorona appears again and frightens him into shock. The next day, Sam is also grabbed by the spirit, leaving identical burn marks on her arm. Anna interviews Patricia, who has an alibi for the time of her sons’ deaths and tells her about La Llorona.

Patricia reveals that in her anger against Anna, she prayed to La Llorrona to take Anna’s children and bring her own boys back. Anna encounters La Llorona when the spirit attempts to drown Sam in the bathtub. She saves Sam, and the ghost leaves burn marks on Anna’s arm too. Anna seeks help from father Perez who leads her to former priest Rafael Olvera, who can help get rid of the entity. Rafael arrives at Anna’s house, setting up candles and other items to protect the family. In the night, La Llorona repeatedly attacks them and attempts to drown Anna and Sam in the pool. Patricia arrives, attempting to give Anna’s children to La Llorona in exchange for her own. Sam and Chris flee while Anna pleads with Patricia in the basement; Patricia comes to her senses and releases Anna, allowing her to help her children.

Chris delays La Llorona by showing her a necklace Anna took off of her in the pool, which makes La Llorona briefly assume her human appearance. Sam then accidentally unveils a mirror which takes La Llorona out of her human appearance and proceeds to attack the children. Anna stabs her through the chest with a cross made from a Fire Tree – trees that grew by the river where La Llorona drowned her children, the only ‘witness’ to her crime – and the spirit is destroyed. Anna and her children thank Rafael for his help; as the children run back into the house, Anna sees what looks like a puddle of tears.

Scary but mostly because of the jump scares and hardly anything to shout over the rooftops. The story is something very familiar and isn’t very exciting. 7 outta 10!

4 Common Computer Problems & Their Solutions

No matter what kind of computer you own, and what level of experience you have with it, there are a number of problems which you can always expect to run into. Knowing what these problems are can help you to prepare for them, anticipate them, and ultimately keep them at bay – and it will also equip you with the knowledge to ensure that you can fix those issues should they happen to arise anyway. Some of these problems are a little more common on older machines, while some are more specific to one or two particular operating systems. But they are all things that any computer user should be aware of, and in this article we are going to take a look at some of the most common of them, along with their simple solutions, so that you can be truly prepared for them as best as you can be.

Restarting Constantly

If your computer is routinely restarting without any apparent good reason, it can be a particularly frustrating problem which might even cost you some work. In the worst case scenarios, you could lose a huge amount of effort and even some income this way, and if nothing else it is a problem which can make using a computer incredibly frustrating indeed. When a computer is constantly restarting for no apparent reason – also known as kernel panic – it can strike terror into your heart. But there are a few things you can do in order to try and solve this particular problem, and you should never feel as though all is lost even if this is happening quite frequently.

One of the most common causes of this problem is that your computer doesn’t have sufficient RAM or hard drive space, or maybe a combination of the two, so look into that first. Alternatively, it might be that you have a number of outdated drivers, which is a simple case of doing a search in order to find the latest ones. Sometimes, you can do that from your desktop through your operating system directly. It’s also worth keeping all of your software updated to help avoid this problem.

Too Slow

If there is one thing that most computer users complain about eventually, it is the computer being too slow. This is something that happens to most machines over time, but if you feel that it should not be happening yet, or you are just keen to try and improve it anyway so that you can get more out of your computer, then it’s good to know there are plenty of ways to improve a slow computer. First of all, clear up as much of your disk drives as you possibly can. A fuller drive means that your computer has to work harder to access files, including software files, so the less there is to search through, the quicker everything will be. You might also want to think about looking into your operating system’s configuration tools to see whether there is anything obviously slowing things down in the background. Removing unnecessary background processes will speed up your computer hugely. Finally, consider installing more RAM into your computer, so that you can hope for it to access files more easily and readily, and thereby run faster.

Pop-Ups

This is truly one of the most annoying things that you can possibly experience as a computer user. Fortunately, the solution is simple. The best way to make sure that you are not bothered by pop-ups on your computer is to follow the preventative approach. In order to prevent pop-ups occurring, consider installing Ghostery and Adblock in your chosen browser. These will block all adverts without fail, so you will never have to see an ad again. They will also ensure that you are not tracked by advertising cookies, so you won’t have targeted ads and your computer will be freer of pop-ups generally. If you already have some pop-ups turning up reliably, give your computer a full scan with an antivirus suite to get rid of them for good.

Printing Failures

It’s amazing how often people struggle with their printers, but if you have ever tried to get a new printer to work you will know just how hard it can be to do just that. There are a lot of things that might get in the way of a printer working fully as it should, but one of the first things to look into is whether or not your drivers are updated for printing. Then you will want to look into whether your printers are listed as offline – if so, change that, and you should be good to go.