I used to do a lot of movie and TV reviews but I don’t really engage very often these days. Mostly, it’s because there aren’t a lot of really good movies out there. I got really tired of explaining why movie X was bad, especially when lots of people out there happened to like it.

Therefore, today, I’m going to talk about a Netflix movie called Chupa. It was actually kind of cute.

Now, this comes pretty  close on the heels of seeing 65, the new Adam Driver sci-fi film. I really didn’t care for it. A considered, for a moment, talking about it, but again, just being negative isn’t a lot of fun, therefore, I didn’t bother.

We went into seeing Chupa without any expectations. It would probably be a dumb movie, but we had nothing better to do that night, so why not? In fact, it was actually a lot of fun. It wasn’t anything spectacular, but it had heart, the story was decent and you could tell that the people who made it, they actually cared about what they were doing.

In 1996, scientist Richard Quinn and his team are trying to capture a chupacabra in Mexico, under the assumption that their blood has healing properties. He manages to injure one in a chase but it gets away. Thousands of miles away, 13-year old Alex is headed to Mexico to visit family after his father dies of cancer. He wants nothing at all to do with his heritage but his mother is making him to. Once he arrives, he meets his grandfather, former luchador Chava, who was seriously injured in a fight and forced to retire with mental problems, and his two cousins, the wrestling-obsessed Memo and his tomboy cousin Luna. Alex is not at all comfortable on the small family farm.

The first night, he finds a baby chupacabra and discovers that his grandfather has been protecting it. This leads to Alex trying to keep the secret, especially after Quinn comes to the farm in search of “strange animals”. However, Chava is having problems and it becomes increasingly obvious that his problems may preclude him living alone on the farm.

Once Memo and Luna discover the chupacabra, named Chupa, they agree to keep it safe. However, when Quinn comes back and takes the chupacabra away, they go on a wild chase to get it back and to see it reunited with its family.

Now, is this high art? No, certainly not. The effects, while not terrible on the small screen, sometimes leave a lot to be desired. There’s a cougar in there toward the end of the movie that really looks bad, but that was really the only time that I got taken out of it by the CGI.

Where it shines is the heart though. Sure, the idea of protecting a baby CGI cryptid might seem silly, but the cast really sells it. We get to see how Alex moves from the grieving son without much of a family to understanding just how much having people that care about you matter. It’s not something that will appeal to a lot of people today, but as a family movie with some pretty traditional family values, it’s really pretty good.

That’s really where I brought up 65 though. In that movie, Adam Driver’s character, hell if I remember what his name was, loses his daughter while he’s on a deep space mission and then, he finds the sole survivor of his ship’s crash, where they wind up on Earth during the age of dinosaurs. Absolutely nowhere in that movie did I  give a damn if they survived. They never established the characters in such a way that they hit an emotional chord. It was just “here’s a guy, with a backstory that I didn’t care about, trying to protect a girl, that I didn’t care about, from an endless array of CGI dinosaurs.” Big deal. It was 100% flash over substance.

Yet Chupa was different. Immediately, you cared about Alex and his fish-out-of-water story. With each new character that came along, you cared about them because they were good people. Sure, they might be a little odd at first, but very quickly, you came to sympathize with their plight. Yes, Quinn was a one-note villain, but you know, it wasn’t really about Christian Slater, it was about finding the road home to your family. I appreciated that.

If you’ve got Netflix, give it a shot. For a 95 minute movie, it isn’t a huge time investment and if you’re just looking for some good old-fashioned family fare, it’s really pretty hard to go wrong.