1.Spain´s hilarious El Día de la Bestia (Day of the Beast) which set new technical standards for the Spanish film industry, is still in the top ten after five months in release, and is fast becoming a Spanish modern classic.
. Father Angel (Alex Angulo) having a hell of a time tracking down the devil in an apocaliptical Madrid.
3. Father Angel and Professor Cavan on the trail of the Devil.
4. Spanish cult director Alex de la Iglesia (centre) confronts the Devil while directing El día de la bestia.
To make his second film, Alex de la Iglesia brought hell to the rescue. The result, El día de la bestia (The Day of the Beast) has taken six Spanish Academy Goyas (including Best Director), $5 million in Spain (and still counting), and, establishing its international credentials, the first prize at the Gerardmer Fantastic Arts Festival and sales to major territories worldwide. Having gone through hell making Día de la bestia, De La Iglesia is one of the hottest young directors in Europe. John Hopewell previews a devilishly funny comic actioner.
If the Devil puts in an appearance at Santa Monica, put the blame on thirty-year-old cult Spanish film director Alex de la Iglesia. The invocation of the Devil recited by slap-head Father Angel in his latest film, horror spoofEl día de la bestia (Day of the Beast), is authentic - "a shortened version of the actual one Father Grandier burned after his Loudon confession (as depicted in Ken Russell´s The Devils)," he glows. "The pentagram is authentic and so are the symbols of the knife, the virgin's blood and the belladonna root. There were moments when we really thought the Devil was going to appear. If he had, believe me, I would have sold my soul instantly to assure El día de la bestia was a success.".
Incredible but true; or not. But De la Iglesia's second film is probably the first Spanish feature ever to be shot with the camera blessed in order to ward off evil.
And maybe Dela Iglesia did sell his soul to the Devil. During Berlin, BMG acquired distribution rights to Latin America for the upcoming Perdita Durango. Tony Kirkhope´s Metro Tartan took El día de la bestia for the UK. El día has also sold to Japan. Deals are pending for Benelux and France.
In many ways, El día de la bestia marks a watershed Spanish film-making. It was the first Spanish film to make sustained use of sound design - some 200 special effects in all. It is also one of the first Spanish pictures to appeal obviously and directly to Spain´s teen to twenties audiences. The often deliriously funny, or just plain delirious, comic actioner - about a priest's attempts to thwart the birth of the Antichrist in modern Madrid - has moved megabucks making $5 million and still counting. That figure makes it one of the five highest-grossing Spanish films of all time.
The figures and critical clamour has also transformed De la Iglesia, whose only other feature-film credit is the riotous, if far-less sustained Acción mutante (Mutant Action, produced by Pedro Almodóvar) into a scaldingly hot asset in Spain. De la Iglesia´s next project is, to date, the biggest English-language picture of the year coming out of Spain: Perdita Durango. Based on American writer Barry Gifford, the film will shoot this Summer in Texas/Arizona with Victoria Abril and a major US actor in the male lead role.
For all the commercial caché which El día de la bestia has acquired, it´s still a delightfully anarchic romp.
El día de la bestia opens, splendidly, with Father Angel dreaming of a black Christmas. After 25 years of batty erudition, the poker-faced padre has finally cracked the Biggest Secret in History: the real meaning of St John's Apolcalypse.
It was staring him in the face: all you have to do is to add up the hidden numerical value of every letter in the Apolcalypse, then take the Jewish calender, which assumes that the world was created 3,000 years before the birth of Christ, divide by the number of days in 4,994 years and there's you have it: the Antichrist will be born on 25.12. 1995.
Anyone could have worked that one out: unfortunately Father Angel works that one out on 23.12.95.
Father Angel informs his monsignor who appeals to the heavens for aid and is immediately crushed by a megalithic cross, like a maggot by a meteor.
Father Angel travels to Madrid since its one hell of a city and attempts to earn brownie points with the Master of Darkness, robbing a blindman of his begging bowl, pushing a mime artist down a metro shaft and blessing a dying man with the hope that he goes to hell.
Just not bad enough. As his stubble and frustration grows, Father Angel stumbles into a heavy metal music store run by death metal freak José María and establishes a base at the dismal pensión presided over by José María's termagent mother who chain-cooks rabbit while grandad wanders around in his birthday suit fed on LSD tabs administered to him by José María.
With José María in tow, the priest seeks out the aid of a TV witchdoctor Professor Cavan who fronts The Dark Zone, the top-rating reality show on a Berlusconi-owned private TV station.
Cavan's not the kindest of occult hot-line gurus. One María José phones up, for example, from Valladolid. "Your husband won't find a job, not for the next five years," says Cavan gratifyingly. "Also there's a health problem."
"My husband's?"
"No, your's...." He continues.
Cavan's also a fake. But he's the best Padre Angel's got.
Armed with a shotgun, Cavan, one of José María's magic mushrooms, and candles, Father Angel takes to what look like the sidestreets to hell - a mixture of Gothan City and Bladerunner - to find the blood of a virgin - a hard task in one of the louchist capitals of Europe - in order to invoke the Devil.
The Devil does put in a brief walk-on appearance as a goat rearing on its hind legs. But the unlikely trio still need a clue as to where the Devil's son will be born so as to thwart this Apocalypse now.
The demonology in the film is based on fact, - or at least widely-believed bosh. According to De la Iglesia's research, the Devil is making something of a comeback: a perhaps apocryphal nutcase demonologist, professor Greg Hocks, calculates that while God has supposedly been spotted 125 times since 1987, but the Devil has run up 300 reported appearances.
But De la Iglesia has other inspiratiions too. "There´s a line on the Spanish poster for Alfred Hitchcock´s Vertigo which perfectly defines our story: Á poor devil stuck in a tremendous plot'. My co-writer (Jorge Gerricaechevarría) and I wanted to place a helpless person in the middle of the biggest event in the history of mankind. Like a Lovecraft story taken to the extreme in which an old priest tries to warn the public that the Ancients are coming. No one believes him, Cthulhu appears, and the End of Time arrives. We wanted a similar idea in a crazy story where the viewer wouldn´t know what was real, like Polanski´s The Tenant. There´s a bit of Taxi Driver in the mix too because the main character is crazy but the public takes his side. Primarily I wanted to explodethe seriousness typified by movies such as The Omen and The Exorcist. Father Angel does have this big responsibility to mankind but he really couldn't care less."
The third film to roll off the Sogetel/Andrés Vicente Gómez 8-10 features a year production pact, El día de la bestia screens tommorrow at the AFM. Sales company Sogepaq International aims to close major sales by the close of the market.
PROD CO: Sogetel, Iberoamericana Films (Spain), M.G. SRL (Italy).
PROD: Andrés Vicente Gómez. DIR: Alex de la Iglesia.
CAST: Alex Angulo, Santiago Segura, Armando de Razza, Terele Pávez, Nathalie Seseña, María Grazia Cucinotta.
RUNNING TIME: 103 mins.
SALES CO: Sogepaq International.
