n the heart of San Francisco's Mission District, amid the simple taquerias, men dressed in white pushing ice cream carts, and the noisy traffic congested with buses and double-parked UPS trucks, you can see the shells of old movie theaters, their marquees blank but for a few remaining letters.

People used to gather at these theaters to watch films from Mexico, where mustachioed men with big guns would seek retribution on the big screen. But the budgets of these films got lower and lower, and so did the quality. Now they get dumped directly into rental stores.

"I can't get them anymore," says Ligia Orozco, manager of the Tower Theater, one of the only theaters left on Mission Street. They've switched from Mexican films to American movies with Spanish subtitles. Up the street, the New Mission Theater has been converted into a discount store, and the Grand is boarded up. "Everything's closed down," Orozco says.

Last year, only one domestic film placed in Mexico's Top 50 at the box office. It would appear that the once great film industry of Mexico is dead.

It's not. In fact, with government deregulation and a new export-minded commitment to quality over quantity, Mexico is taking steps that could make its film industry one of the more competitive world markets.

Right now, Mexico has a new crop of talented young directors, including Roberto Sneider and Guillermo del Torro. Sneider's black comedy, "Dos Crimenes (Two Crimes, a.k.a. Kissing Cousins)" is creating a buzz on the festival circuit, and del Torro's "Cronos" was one of the best, most stylish horror films produced by any country in recent years. Among other awards, it won the Critics' Week Award at Cannes.

The Mexican government has deregulated the way films are distributed. Until the early 1990s, the government guaranteed distribution of local films and set aside 50 percent of its screens for local movies, regardless of quality. Since filmmakers knew that their films would make it into theaters, they rushed through production quicker and cheaper.

Also, the Mexican government recently allocated funds for a new, state-of-the-art film production lab where high-quality prints can be made. In the past, they had to be processed in the United States.

Jorge Alberto Lozoya, head of the national Instituto Mexico de Cinematografico, announced last spring that they would only make five films this year, some with budgets in seven figures. Grupo Cine, which makes scads of micro-budget films, is remaking the 1940s classic, "Salon Mexico," with a $1 million budget, a first for them.

The early signals look good. Together, "Cronos" and "Like Water for Chocolate" won 130 awards at film festivals. The Cuban co-production, "Fresa y Chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate)," was nominated for an Academy Award for best foreign film. "El Callejon de los Milagros" (Miracle Alley) has become a domestic hit, second only to "Like Water for Chocolate."

It's hard to say if these higher-quality films will do anything to revive the theaters in the Mission. There will be a much smaller number of films coming from Mexico and, unlike the films that used to play at the Mission theaters, these are mostly going to be art films, which are more easily exported. The next big budget production, "El Crimen del Padre Amaro (Crimes of Father Amaro)," is based on the 19th century literary classic by Jose Maria Eca de Quieroz.

Mike Bagley of Video Express, which stocks a large number of Mexican films, says the low-budget Mexican films are still as popular with Spanish-speaking audiences as American action movies. "They like the real cartoony ones with the big guns on the cover," he says. Sometimes you can find good performances, stylish photography, exciting shoot-outs. "Some of them are actually a lot more violent than American movies," Bagley says. However, there's not much cross-over appeal with English-speaking audiences.

Currently, there's a glut of really bad movies, and unlike low-budget movies from Europe and Asia, there are no English language fanzines to sort them out. They often tell similar tales of revenge and, according to Bagley, have a flagrant disregard for realism. "They have these six-shooters," he says. "They shoot six times and just keep on shooting."

They also rarely have subtitles, so to see good films from Mexico, movie fans who speak only English might want to wait for the next wave of bigger budget films. But to see them on the big screen, we'll all have to wait.

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MAIL PRISM (prism@sfsu.edu)     
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