True crime stories have to be pretty important to merit a documentation more than 15 years after the fact. Horrific and sad as they are, murders are unfortunately a fact of life in most modern television and movies, making the real thing sadly mundane in comparison. The massacre that took place at the Las Cruces Bowl in 1990 is in no way lacking in horror, but even if time has provided some distance between the survivors and the events, it has not yet provided sufficient illumination to make them seem more notable than that. Director Charlie Minn clearly has a great deal of interest in and compassion for the events that played out (enough that he even includes himself in the proceedings towards the end here), but he doesn’t have the proper context, insight, or grasp of the broader implications to make A Nightmare in Las Crucas an integral part of this ongoing story.
This much is known to be true: on February 10, 1990, at a family-owned bowling alley in Las Cruces, New Mexico, two gunmen entered while the day was still beginning its operations and demanded the contents of the safe. After herding the few occupants into the back office where the safe was located and procuring its contents, the gunment then began to shoot their captives in the back of the head and set fire to the bowl. When police arrived, they found 12-year-old Melissa, her mother Stephanie, and cook Ida Holguin still alive but nursing wounds. In the years interim, a number of leads have been pursued, and various accusations have been made, but nothing has ever come close to an arrest, let alone a conviction for these crimes. The town of Las Cruces has moved on, in a way, but as a number of testimonies here indicate, many people there still hold out hope that the killers may one day be found.
A Nightmare in Las Cruces opens with an interesting contradiction: the genuine 911 call that alerted the authorities to the crime juxtaposed against staged re-enactments, which show every sign of being physically accurate, but are in no way convincingly shot or acted. Really, it sums up the film’s whole approach to the material: the physical combined with the interpretive. Every time there is an opportunity for primary source footage to be used, it reliably is, with home video of the crime scenes, the investigation and the funerals sprinkled throughout. Wherever suitable footage does not exist, however, Minn tends to rely on re-enactments (such as the ones mentioned previously) or talking head interviews, of which there are many. Nightmare is clearly a passion project for Minn, and like so many passion projects, its ambitions are a good deal greater than the production values at hand, and are lacking in impact as a result. As horrible as the deliberate murder of an infant is, there is a wide gap between its genuine terror and the one that film-makers are able to depict.
At the end of the film, Minn enters, after having detailed the investigation, the false leads, and the lives of those involved that have unfortunately stagnated due to the murders. He spares us philosophizing, but does climax the film on news footage of him making the movie, imploring the audience to know that the true killers (whose artist impression sketches are shown several times) are still on the loose, and that no one has been convicted to this day. After an hour and a half, this seems like kind of a small conclusion to come to in comparison with the time that has been spent detailing it. The murders at Las Cruces provided no insight into the mechanics of New Mexico society, nor were they known to be connected to any other major crimes, nor did they appear to produce fissures in the community at large. In sum total, the massacre here was notable mainly for its awfulness, and Nightmare manages to convey that in plain enough terms. It fails, however, to distinguish these events from the rest of the kaleidoscope of American crime in the last forty years, or show how they in any way reflected the circumstances that produced them. At best, the people of Las Cruces suspect that the event wasn’t random, but then, Nightmare trades its deeper significance on just that: suspicions, hunches, and feelings that, however rational or irrational, just won’t go away.
DVD Bonus Features
The disc comes with a director’s commentary and a trailer gallery.
"A Nightmare in Las Cruces" is on sale May 31, 2011 and is rated R. Crime, Documentary. Written and directed by Charlie Minn. Starring Hafid Abdelmoula, Shannon Caruso.
