Pan was an ancient Greek god who was similar in stature to the Satyr...a small fellow with the upper half of a man and the lower half of a goat. In many ways, Pan was the original Goat Boy and as such, I pay homage to his cloven hooved greatness.
What's more, Pan is one of the fantasmagorical stars of the amazing horror-fantasy film Pan's Labyrinth (or, El Labyrinto Del Fauno as it is known in it's original Spanish). Directed by Guillermo Del Toro (Hellboy, The Devil's Backbone, Blade 2, Cronos), Pan's Labyrinth is a cinematic one of a kind. Set during the death throws of the Spanish Civil War, the plot follows an imaginative young girl and her mother to an isolated mill deep in the Spanish countryside where they are to reside with an evil fascist captain bent on stamping out the resistance in the region. The mill they inhabit lies near to an ancient labyrinth, which soon sparks Ofelia's flights of fancy away from the horror of her brutal surrogate father.
Yet, her imagination doesn't open up a happy-go-lucky dream world, rather, with the help of some insectoid fairies, she soon becomes tasked by Pan himself to perform a series of tasks involving terrifying risk and grotesque creatures.
Along with stellar performances (especially by 13-year-old Ivana Baquero as Ofelia) Del Toro's masterpiece is a combination of vivid cinematography, haunting sound design, slick VFX and some of the truly gnarliest physical effects and production design ever brought to screen. The movie is scary as anything I have seen in recent years, with real-world horror mingling freely with dark fantasy. But don't take it from me alone, Pan has already won 7 Goya Awards and has been nominated for 6 Academy Awards.
The last movie that got my goat to this level was Children Of Men by Del Toro's Mexican fellow traveller Alfonso Cuaron. Factor in the oscar buzz around Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu's Babel, and I think we can easily identify the tightest cinematic clique since the Easy Riders, Raging Bulls posse rolled into Hollywood in the 1970's.