(1995)
Dir - Álex de la Iglesia
Overall: GREAT
The second full-length The Day of the Beast, (El día de la bestia), from Spanish filmmaker Álex de la Iglesia is renowned by many of his peers as a game-changing horror movie that helped to revitalize the genre in its native Spain. Iglesia's penchant for dark comedy jives perfectly with the end of days scenario where a possibly delusional, unassuming priest is hell-bent on a quest to sell his soul to Satan so he can find out where the Antichrist will be born in order to destroy it. Along the way, several other likeable, eccentric characters come into the picture including but not limited to a goofy metalhead, a violence-prone mother who is handy with a shotgun, a drug-fried grandpa who refuses to put on clothes, and a charlatan, occult expert TV personality. The wonderfully committed performances help keep things moving in Iglesia and frequent collaborator Jorge Guerricaechevarría's ridiculous yet inventive script where the next hilarious moment gets that much more strange and diabolical all at once. This is also one of the first Spanish films to use digital effects and though they are rather poor from a technical standpoint, everything else going on is so relentlessly entertaining and clever that any perceivable flaws can quickly be forgiven.
(1996)
Dir - Francisco Rodríguez Gordillo
Overall: MEH
Five years after suffering a rather serious heart attack, Paul Naschy staged what would be a failed comeback with Licántropo, (Lycantropus: The Moonlight Murders, Lycantropus: The Full Moon Killer), the eleventh entry in the Waldemar Daninsky series and first since 1983's The Beast and the Magic Sword. Elements of the film seem right out of the Spanish Wolfman's 70s output, namely the flat direction and piles of exposition. The problem is that both of these "qualities" are exactly what undoes the final result as the movie is alarmingly talky, almost completely absent on gore, actually absent on sex appeal, and incredibly boring. Worse yet, it throws in a pathetic slasher sub-plot and Naschy only appears in werewolf makeup for what amounts to less than a minute of screen time. The makeup itself is far more toned down and therefor light years less impressive than what his previous portrayals were known for, plus the once exuberant actor is noticeably older and clearly struggling to muster any enthusiasm in his performance. There are some halfway passable attempts at creating a suspenseful atmosphere with the flat material, but this is still quite a slog.
(1999)
Dir - Juame Balagueró
Overall: MEH
The full-length debut from Spanish filmmaker Juame Balagueró has a strong emphasis on cliched mood aesthetics and plot details, but the half-baked script undoes things much further. An adaptation of Ramsey Campbell's 1981 novel The Nameless, it has a sinister, thriller-style premise of an emotionally traumatized mother, an ex cop, and a curious newspaper reporter investigating an evil, clandestine cult, but the end result is more unnecessarily cryptic than frightening. Some of the cast does solid work with the underwhelming dialog, but a few of the performances are rather difficult to sake seriously in their scenery-chewing creepiness. Writer/director Balagueró relies far too much on lazily manipulative music and quick, static cuts of grainy, disturbed imagery to give the film a differentiating style, becoming underwhelming in the process. Things grow increasingly convoluted as it frustratingly reaches its schlocky, melodramatic climax and again, if the presentation was more effectively menacing to match the deadly sincere intentions, then this may have packed more of a punch instead of a whimper.
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