This 1995 flick stars Alex Angulo as a Catholic priest who has decoded some numerological code in the book of Revelation that reveals the Antichrist is going to arrive on Christmas -- but where? In order to find out, the priest decides the only person to really ask is Satan himself, and the only way to meet Satan is to go undercover as a sinner -- so, he spends much of the movie ripping people off and committing funny little "crimes" in an effort to cover up his holiness with sin.
In order to summon Satan, the priest enlists the help of a death metal loving record store proprieter (Santiago Sagura) and a hacky occult TV-show host (Armando De Razza). It's a race against time as Christmas rapidly approaches and our priest hero finds himself tasked with pesky errands like finding the blood of a virgin.
To give you an idea of how this movie might play if it had been made in the English-speaking world, picture this: Simon Pegg's the priest, Nick Frost is the metalhead. There you go.
The version of this film I watched had a bad English dub but even with that in place you could tell the director, Alex de la Iglesia, and cast have good comedic timing, especially Santiago Sagura as the record store guy. He steals pretty much the whole movie, and is a very memorable and funny character.
The movie is a little dated and clearly did not have the biggest budget, but enough directorial talent showed through that I looked up Iglesia's filmography to see if he ever went on to anything else and was pleased to see that another upcoming Horrorfest movie was one of his -- LA COMUNIDAD. So, I'll be looking forward to that one.
No comments:
Post a Comment