In the new Spanish thriller 1992, the serial killer leaves a calling card. Sure, that’s not unusual, but the calling card itself is: A figurine of a cartoon rooster, the mascot of a long-ago World’s Fair in Seville. Weird, right?
1992: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: A security guard sleeps in his car on a rainy night; he’s awakened by an explosion.
The Gist: Richi Zurita (Fernando Valdivielso) is the security guard who is likely sleeping something off; he started his own security company after being drummed out of the police, where he was a homicide detective. The explosion came from a factory where his friend, Alvaro Garcia, works. When he shows up, Alvaro is burned to a crisp, as is Roberto Valcarcel, the well-known owner of an apparel chain. Richi manages to find Alvaro’s wife Amparo (Marian Álvarez) in the mess and takes her out.
It turns out that Amparo wasn’t there when the explosion happened; she was driving to the factory, arguing with Alvaro about being unfaithful. Her car was right outside when the office exploded. After Alvaro is cremated, she finds Richi and asks him to look into what happened, as the police keep telling her it was an accident. When she went in after the explosion, she found something strange: In Valcarcel’s hand was a tiny, untouched figurine of Curro, the cartoon rooster mascot of the World Expo that was held in Seville in 1992. Valcarcel came to prominence via costumes he designed for that expo.
Richi, who is basically a drunk who lost his family in a car accident some years early, feels recharged by the case. He asks his former colleague, Robledo (Gorka Lasaosa), who is now commissioner, for help. Most of the rest of his former colleagues have nothing but contempt for him, but Robledo knows that Richi’s instincts as a detective were usually pretty good.
One problem: No figurine was found at the scene; in a flashback, we see that it melted. Richi tells Amparo that maybe she was seeing things, but she insists that it was there. Only after a second person tied to Expo ’92, found burned to death in a bathtub holding a Curro figure, does Robledo take Richi seriously.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? 1992 is a thriller series along the lines of Cross, where one person tries to stop a deranged serial killer.
Our Take: Creators Álex de la Iglesia and Jorge Guerricaechevarría don’t really mess around with 1992. It’s a pretty straightforward thriller, with Richi and Amparo basically teaming up to find the serial killer who sets people associated with Expo ’92 on fire while wearing a Curro mask.
Sure, there’s some internal stuff going on with both characters: Amparo is having so many nightmares that she moves to her mother’s unoccupied house, and Richi is essentially still living out his own nightmare after the deaths of his wife and daughter. But, for the most part, it’s two people racing to find a killer before more people die.
It’s definitely a more gruesome series than you might imagine; the creators have no problem showing charred corpses frozen in agony, along with scenes of just how they got that way. It seems to be gratuitous, but perhaps an extended scene of the killer torching his second victim has some relevance somewhere down the line.
Other than the gruesomeness, though, much of what goes on in 1992 is stuff we’ve seen before, especially the disgraced cop with a tragic past defying the odds and figuring things out that his former colleagues couldn’t. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the show won’t be entertaining, but there aren’t a lot of signs that we’re going to get twists and turns that are really all that twisty and turny.
Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.
Parting Shot: A naked and scarred killer is seen in his lair, holding his hand over a blue flame from a Bunsen burner.
Sleeper Star: No one particularly stands out, because the story is mostly about Richi and Amparo.
Most Pilot-y Line: Richi grabs one of his former colleagues by the collar in the middle of a restaurant and none of the other customers seems to notice.
Our Call: STREAM IT. 1992 isn’t reinventing the wheel when it comes to thriller series. But it’s just audacious enough, especially with its use of a cartoon rooster mascot, to make it watchable.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
The post Stream It Or Skip It: ‘1992’ On Netflix, A Spanish Thriller About Killings In 2024 Being Linked Back To A World’s Fair In 1992 appeared first on Decider.
