MEXICO CITY — Think of it as “Desperate Housewives” — make that very desperate — with butcher knives, vials of poison and bottles of hydrochloric acid. Or an extremely stressed-out “Lipstick Jungle.”
It’s the hit Latin American TV series “Mujeres Asesinas” (Women Assassins), a high-gloss revenge fantasy about the fury of women scorned that has become a major TV hit and a minor pop-culture phenomenon in certain Spanish-speaking parts of this hemisphere.
It has run through three seasons in Argentina and is gearing up there for a fourth. It also has scored high ratings and strong critical notices in Colombia and Mexico, and it seems destined to show up very soon on U.S. television screens.
“Many people from the United States and Latin America ask us every day and every week, ‘When is it coming to Peru?’ ‘When is it coming to Chile?’ ” said Alex Balassa, one of the show’s executive producers.
Loosely adapted from real-life crime stories, “Mujeres Asesinas” follows a fairly simple formula. In Mexico, viewers saw two episodes each week in which women are grievously wronged, usually by a man (father, husband, lover, “john”). Then they are transformed by the abuses they endure into hellions. Each of the two separate hour-long segments builds to a gruesome climax.
Predictably, “Mujeres Asesinas” has stirred talk in the Latin American media about whether it might incite women to commit more acts of revenge- fueled violence. Several of the series actresses have dismissed that idea.
“I think one of the values of the series is that it speaks not only of the depth of the female psychology, but rather it speaks … (of) the human condition, no?” said Cecilia Suarez, the actress who plays Ana “Corrosiva,” an acid-wielding anti-heroine who delivers a brutal payback to her control- freak plastic-surgeon lover.
Of course, tales about women getting mad, then getting even, have played well across all cultures, starting with the ancient Greek tragedy “Medea. But two things set “Mujeres Asesinas” apart from its less-sanguine competitors.
One is the quality of its leading ladies. The just-concluded premiere Mexican season featured several of the country’s best-known actresses, including Veronica Castro, Itati Cantoral and Isela Vega, best known outside her homeland for playing a prostitute in “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia,” Sam Peckinpah’s black-humored 1974 cult classic.
The other is the raw, graphic violence. Similar scenes are depicted regularly in telenovelas, but seldom with as much Grand Guignol flair.
