Without Curubeto, fantastic cinema lost its Paladin

Diego Curubeto he loved strong emotions, jumping in the chair, the transformation into fantasy of a reality that, since he was a boy, he had always found too flat. Diego he loved challenges of all kindsdeliver their notes and chronicles almost on the deadline, as in a thriller (which later ended up being almost always brilliant), bravely face, and without covering their eyes, the most horrifying “gore” scenes on the screen, many times with laughter and chills at the same time (Instead, as happened once during a private screening, when she discovered a small cockroach under her seat, she gasped in terror.)I can’t stand that”, he confessed to the astonishment of all).

But, except for those little insects, I was not afraid of almost anything. Not even heart surgery. “I have surgery on Friday”he told me last week, “but I’m going to be saved one day nothing more. Then I go out and on Saturday I write at home the note about Errol Flynn that I have pending”. The next day? Are you sure? “Yes, yes, two days at the most”, he answered me with absolute calm.

His health had been in decline for some time.had been hospitalized on more than one occasion, and his huge, generous heartIt didn’t make it to Friday. She stopped a day earlier. Yesterday afternoon he felt that his heart rate was excessive, the medication for these cases had no effect, he hurried to get to the clinic, and died in the taxi. On your computer the comments of two movies were left that I was going to send yesterday for the print edition on Friday. In my whatsapp I keep your audios from these last days, which I don’t have the courage to listen to again; in them he talks to me about the usual: agenda, notes, ideas, always making jokes. His last posted review appeared yesterday“Tidal Wave”, and the previous, long one, last weekend, which he dedicated to Jackie Coogan, the famous “kid” from Chaplin and Uncle Lucas from “Los locos Addams”.

Although passionate about cinemaDiego had never been more interested in the “prestige” of directors revered by critics (in truth, he had not even set out to be a critic), and his hotbed, his formationwas a legendary television series to whom he would later dedicate one of his most famous books, the “Cinema de Superacción” than the old Channel 11 in black and whiteby Héctor Ricardo García (one of the greatest heroes of the media for Curubeto thanks to that program and other similar ones, such as “Hollywood in Spanish” or the monster movies at Universal on Monday nights), he spent Saturdays at continued, from noon.

It was there where Diego first made contact with the creatures that would accompany him all his life: demons, werewolves, vampires, zombies, monsters from the black lagoon, mummies, mad scientists, giant apes standing on top of the Empire State Building with desperate women in their arms, dinosaurs, godzillas. And also cowboys and sheriffs from westerns, gladiators from peplums, international spies, gangsters, fatal blondes. And the Three Stooges, and Fat and Skinny, and Val Lewton with his panther wife. In a word, nothing that smacked of Bergman or any other form of European intellectualism. He was passing through the other block, and thus he began, when no one dared to do so, a critical career at the age of 20, and Financial sphere He gave him the space so that, with those weapons, he could expand at ease.

In this way he created a term, “gallant”, then used by almost everyone, but before that he had to put up with older Spanish critics, and some local ones, trying to explain to him that this meant something else. It doesn’t matter, he insisted: “bizarre” was neither kitsch, nor corny, nor “transgressive”. Bizarre was simply bizarre, and to those who don’t like it —as he told me so many times—, “go for c…” (one of his favorite expressions). Because In that “bizarre shop”, there was humor: Curubeto, although he appreciated and knew perfectly the great Hollywood classics, both horror and academics, loved fear much more when it was accompanied by a touch of humor. he was the first ofin our midst, talked about Ed Wood and his bizarre “Plan nine from outer space”.

His thing was fear and also eroticism with humorvoluntary or not. That’s why it was he who rediscovered the films of the duo Armando Bo-Isabel Sarlito whom years later he dedicated an extraordinary feature film, “Flesh on Flesh”, where he included documents never seen before, or rarely released, such as the parts of some of his films that were censored in our country, but that were allowed in other countries from America.

in the american way Kenneth Anger, who had convulsed the Hollywood establishment with his “Hollywood Babylon”, Curubeto published here, in the 90s, the local version of those books, “Babilonia Gaucha”, in two volumes. A more pious look, but fun, and without the original bad milk. And then came the books on bizarre cinema, and on super action Saturdays.

There is no one, in the middle, who does not owe Diego a discovery. Although sometimes it was not easy to share his somewhat exotic tasteshis nose for detecting new movements, important directors still little known and currents that would end up prevailing, used to be foolproof. It was, for example, the first to point to the Spanish Alex de la Iglesia when his movie “The Day of the Beast” premiered here, and he was a virtual unknown. Over time, his relationship with the Spaniard would deepen, and Diego took advantage of one of his trips to Buenos Aires to have him participate in the movie “Meat on Meat.”

Almost adolescent, having worked with Roger Corman (another of his idols), when the American cult filmmaker filmed some unpresentable adventure films at the Aries studios in the mid-80s, later he became a specialist on how Hollywood had treated Argentina throughout its history, from “Down Argentine Way” to the different “Avoid”. With much of this material (which he collected from different archives, almost always on celluloid), this newspaper recorded a television program in 1994, “Argentina in Hollywood”, in which together with him and Máximo Soto we interviewed numerous figures from the media.

In parallel with his fervor for cinema developed another passionthe of the technology to watch movies at home: he was “the first kid on the block” to have a laser-disc device, a format that never caught on, then DVD, and a little later, when there was talk of the “analog blackout” and the arrival of digital TV, it became a crusader for the European DVB format against the American ATSC, which was promoted by the Menem government. He never imagined the problems that such technical devotion would cause him, he, who knew nothing of political games. Nor did anyone know, at the end of the last century, that Netflix and the other streamers would wipe out everything before, including physical formats, forever. It was the futile fight.

Parallel to the cinema, his passion for musicespecially the rock and its multiple variants, accompanied him with equal intensity throughout his brief 58 years. His cat, whom he adopted just a year ago, is named Zappa, after his favorite musician.

It will be strange, paraphrasing Borges at the beginning of “El Aleph”, that the incessant and vast universe continues its course, that a new “Evil Dead” or the latest from Marvel is released, and no longer read their opinion, listen to their laughter, or feel its shudder. Goodbye, dear Diego.