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Spanish director Alex de la Iglesia cut his
teeth as Pedro Almodovar's production designer, and "Day of
the Beast", his second feature, shows off that (dubious)
pedigree in a lurid and catchy fashion (though with very little
added weight); his version of Madrid in this film is a garish,
candy-colored package overflowing with millenial
hysteria...roving packs of hoodlums roam the streets immolating
the homeless, seminars on Armageddon prophecy are delivered on
Christmas Eve, and Father Angel Barriatura embarks on a perverse
crime and sin spree in an obsessive attempt to gain the trust of
Satan in order to destroy him. Father Angel is under the belief
that he has cracked the code of Revelations through numerology
after decades of working at it in a cabalistic fervor, and that
he has knowledge of the place and birthdate of the Antichrist:
Christmas 1995, somewhere in Madrid. Enlisting the help of an
acid-dropping heavy-metal loser and a fraudulent but hugely
popular television psychic, Angel begins his frantic quest for
mankind's salvation through his individual self-corruption. Of
course, that's about as deep as "Beast" gets...this
ain't exactly Bunuel (hell, it ain't even "The Omen
III"). The cheeky, juvenile and overtly slapstick tone of
the picture is established in the opening scene wherein an
elderly monseignor is crushed to death under a 20-foot cross, and
Iglesias spends the rest of the film making damn sure nobody
takes it at all seriously. And that's the film's main failing;
it's novel at first to watch the nebbishy priest pushing sidewalk
mimes down subway steps, scratching parked cars with his keys,
and stuck in the middle of a death-metal moshpit, but the already
rather thin joke evaporates rather quickly, and is replaced, all
too typically, with narrative inconsistencies and special-effects
overload. A darker, more insidious tone and a slightly more
thoughtful exploration into the nature of religious hysteria
would have benefitted the picture greatly. As it is, though, it's
breezy and generally confident, and for no-brainer, schlock,
lowbrow entertainment, it's at least two steps above average.
Whatever *that's* worth.
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