Weirdhouse Cinema: Day of the Beast

In this episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe welcome the holidays in – on Krampusnacht – with the 1995 holiday horror film “The Day of the Beast,” directed by Álex de la Iglesia and starring Álex Angulo, Armando De Razza and Santiago Segura.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Stuff to blow your mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob
Lamb and this is Joe McCormick. Today is Crampus Knocked.
And since actual Crampis films are scarce, we have the
twenty fifteen movie, some more recent material of I would
say dubious quality, and sadly two seemingly lost German TV

(00:34):
films from the nineteen sixties. Passing up on all of that,
I figured today's Weird House Cinema selection needed to be
some manner of alternative Christmas movie, Christmas horror tale, or
something that at least invoked a horned humanoid during the holidays.
And this criteria finally led me to check out a
film that had been hanging out on my watch list

(00:56):
for a long time, the nineteen ninety five Spanish dark
comedy The Day of the Beast.

Speaker 3 (01:02):
I thought this was a great selection, Rob. I'd never
seen it before, but I massively enjoyed it. It's really
put me in the mood for the holidays.

Speaker 2 (01:11):
I really dug it as well, and I really wasn't
sure exactly what to expect. You know, up until the
last minute watching it, because as I'll get into, like
the synopsis, just reading the synopsis, that could go a
couple of different ways. And I had never seen anything
from its director before. That's Alex di la Iglesia. You know,

(01:32):
certainly familiar with his reputation as a director, but I
just never had checked out his work before. I love
Spanish genre films, obviously, but I would say that I
would attribute my vague reluctance to the fact that if
you're not familiar with his general vibe, you might reasonably
expect this mid nineteen nineties offering to be grizzlier and

(01:53):
nastier than it actually is.

Speaker 3 (01:55):
It goes kind of hard at some part.

Speaker 2 (01:57):
It does. It's not a kid's movie and it's not
a walk in the park. But I don't know, Like
this came out the same year as seven, and you know,
certainly in the wake of things like pulp fiction and
Natural Born Killers, and I don't know, It's like I
was just always wary of it because I was just
imagining the most extreme and transgressive directions that this synopsis
could go in.

Speaker 3 (02:18):
It goes hard, but it also has a big heart.

Speaker 2 (02:21):
It does. Yeah, so rather than a bleak grim dark exercise.
I found The Day of the Beast to be just
terrifically funny for starters. It's laugh out loud funny. Yeah,
and it's also it's also very serious in its own way.
It puts comedy first to a large degree, but there
is some serious contemplation on the nature of evil in

(02:43):
a superstition played modern world.

Speaker 3 (02:46):
Yeah. Absolutely, I think this movie has a more mature
relationship with good and evil than a lot of films,
especially a lot of satanic themed films.

Speaker 2 (02:57):
Yeah, yeah, like you, and if you go into the
expecting it to be just a satanic peril movie, you're
gonna get something different. I'm not gonna say you're gonna
be disappointed, because I think the film's just too good
to find much reasonable space for disappointment. But yeah, I
mean that, ultimately the content doesn't go again near as

(03:19):
hard as I expected it might. And there's almost a
I thought, a Charlie Chaplin energy to parts of the film,
and certainly to the to our protagonists, to the protagonist
in the way that he's presented in the picture, and
this sort of, you know, at times, a kind of
comedic aloofness, and also some of the action sequences in
the film also have that kind of I don't know,

(03:40):
that kind of action charm to them.

Speaker 3 (03:41):
I agree.

Speaker 2 (03:42):
Yeah, So what's the elevator pitch here? I would say
it's a priest, a TV occultist in a metal head
walk into the apocalypse, all right, Day of the Beast
or what Elda Dia Labastia. This film is luckily if
you if you want to go out and watch it
right now before getting into our discussion of its plot

(04:03):
and its characters, which is inherently going to involve some spoilers. Yeah,
it's widely available to stream or to acquire digitally, and
as far as physical media goes. Severn has a two
disc Blu ray available and it looks quite nice.

Speaker 3 (04:18):
I streamed this one, but it was on one of
those platforms where I pay, and for some reason, this
one still had ads in it. Oh really, some of
them still have ads and some don't. I don't know.
Maybe that depends on what sub subscriptions you have. Anyway,
it had some ads, and it some really obnoxious ads
by the way. They were like, you know, invest your
retirement savings and crypto and all that costuff. So that

(04:42):
was cutting in in the middle, but it didn't attract
too much. Yeah, it was still a great experience, and
you know, the transfer is good and everything excellent.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
All right, Well, let's let's talk about the folks behind
this film. This is if I didn't I think I
mentioned this in passing, but this is a this is
a Spanish film. It takes place in Spain, mostly in Madrid.

Speaker 3 (05:12):
Yeah, and not incidentally, the geography of Madrid is a
huge player in this movie. Like it's based in large
part around a lot of different Madrid landmarks.

Speaker 2 (05:24):
Oh yeah, I have personally never been I've never been
to Spain and I've never been to Madrid. Most of
the films that I've watched from Spain, I guess some
of them have been set in Madrid, or at least
had like passing reference to Madrid, Like you know, your
your urban character leaves Madrid, maybe your Paul Nashy character
leaves Madrid before going out into the to a rural setting.

(05:45):
But I'd never seen a film that really made such
amazing use of Madrid landmarks. So it's like I kept searching,
like what is this building? What is this landmark? And
I'm probably going to get served all sorts of ads
for Madrid tourism now, which I welcome. Yeah, lac Abino
was in Madrid, wasn't it. Oh yes it was, But

(06:06):
then again that was what year was that, early seventies,
early seventies. Okay, so some of the one building in
particular did not exist yet. But then yeah, I also
have to say, it's like it's not only the locations,
but just they're so beautifully shot and such great use
is made of them in Day of the Beast that
it just sucks you right in. All right, Well, let's

(06:28):
talk about the folks behind the picture here again, director
and one of the screenplay credits goes to Alex Di
la Iglesia born nineteen sixty five Spanish film director, screenwriter,
producer and former comic book artists whose work can I'd
broadly be categorized, I understand as black comedy, but with
elements of horror and action sprinkled throughout, and certainly some

(06:50):
of his best known films, or at least the ones
that have the strongest cult followings internationally, are gonna lean
a little towards horror in action m H. In the
late nineteen eighties he got into art direction and poster
design for film and directed his first short film in
nineteen ninety one. This is and apologize here and elsewhere

(07:12):
if I'm butchering any Spanish here, but Merindas assinas and
this is about a killer soda. I think the Merindus
is like a brand of soda. I'm to understand, okay.
And he followed this short up with the feature length
Mutant Action in nineteen ninety three. This is about mutant
terrorists in a future dystopian world that prizes physical beauty

(07:34):
above everything else. Okay, And then he directed the live
action sequences for a nineteen ninety four arcade video game
titled Marbella Vice what like on the rail shooter that
apparently spoofed Miami Vice. I had to look up some
footage from this and it's, you know, it's it's kind
of rough looking, as you might imagine. It's not wowes,

(07:57):
pure cinematic experience. Interesting project.

Speaker 3 (08:01):
I just looked it up. Now, wow, so an arcade
video game with full motion video elements. Wow.

Speaker 2 (08:09):
And after that came today's film Day of the Beast.
We'll have a lot to say about this. But he
followed Beast up with the ninety seven Crime Spree cannibalism
romance film Perdita dur Rengo. This was, like I believe
I had a Spanish Mexican American co production, starring Rosie Perez,

(08:30):
Javier Bardem, and James Gandelfini. I haven't had the chance
to see this one yet, but I frequently see high
octane clips from this movie online, generally of Javier Bardem
doing like just being a maniac. Like at one point
he's wearing a Santo mask. It looks like a lot
of fun. And now that I've actually gotten a taste

(08:52):
of this director's sensibilities, I think I'm far more likely
to check it out.

Speaker 3 (08:56):
I've never even heard of this, but yeah, I want
to see it now. Oh oh, I just looked it up. Man.
Javier Bardem's look in this is good. He you know
what in this movie, they're kind of giving him a
metal head look a little bit like our metal head
and the movie we're talking about today.

Speaker 2 (09:13):
Yeah, I mean, obviously extremely handsome actor, but we now
know that if you put a weird haircut on him,
I mean that's just that's that cinches it. You know,
you're in basically an Oscar territory at that point. Yeah,
so after After Perdita Durango, subsequent films included the ninety
seven comedy Dying of Laughter, two thousand's Commonwealth, twousand and

(09:37):
two's eight hundred Bullets two thousand and eight, The Oxford
Murders that had Elijah Wood and John Hurt in it,
the sci fi comedy TV series Pluton BRB Narrow, the
twenty ten clown movie The Last Circus that's like creepy,
like creepy Spanish clowns. If you spent any amount of
time looking around at like a horror and horror or

(10:00):
adjacent box art, you may have seen this one. So
I was like, oh, yeah, that movie, I've seen the
Box twenty thirteen's Witching and Bitching, and the TV series
that some of you might have caught on HBO in
recent years, thirty Coins.

Speaker 3 (10:14):
I'm pretty sure this is the only thing I've ever
seen by this director.

Speaker 2 (10:18):
Same. Yeah, Like I say, I've been familiar with his
name for a while, but yeah, this is the first
time I actually built a trigger in something. He's a
major name in Spanish cinema. He was nominated for Best
New Director for ninety three's Mutant Action. This was for
the Goya Awards, and then this film earned him a
nomination for Best Screenplay in ninety six, and he won

(10:40):
for Best Director that year. The Goya Awards, essentially the
Oscars of Spain, are of course named for the Spanish
romantic painter Francisco Goya, and the award itself is a
bust of him, and I think it's fitting that this
film won a Gooya, as it would seem to share
Goya's distrust and criticism of superstition in society. The sleep

(11:02):
of Reason produces monsters and so forth.

Speaker 3 (11:04):
Interesting.

Speaker 2 (11:05):
Yeah, all right, so that's dela Iglesia. But then the
other screenwriter, the other individual that shares the screenplay credit,
he has a really long name, so bear with me
and my apologies. I I get this wrong. Jorge Gerricea
Chevrea for nineteen sixty five Spanish screenwriter and frequent, long

(11:27):
standing collaborator with dela Iglesia. He worked on I think
all of the films, all of the dela Iglesia films
I just named, and he's a two time Goya Award
winner and multi time nominee himself.

Speaker 3 (11:40):
This is one of those comedy films where you can
really feel just the perfect meeting of script and cast though,
so it's you know, it's a two crucial ingredient sandwich.
It's like peanut butter and jelly here, like having them
both come together makes something more magical than either one.
So it is a really good script on the page,
I think. But the energy brought by the main cast,

(12:04):
I'd say all three of the main Wise Men, but
the main cast generally, like it really elevates it. It
just feels like serendipity.

Speaker 2 (12:12):
Yes, I agree. Yeah, the three Wise Men characters here
is they're referred to in the film later on. Yeah,
all the actors here are tremendous. We have again our priest,
our TV occultist in our metal head. We're going to
start with the priest because he is he is the
central character.

Speaker 3 (12:30):
Really, this is our more Charlie Chaplin type character.

Speaker 2 (12:34):
Yes, Yes, and his priest, whose name is Angel Berriatua.
We later learned he's not only a priest but also
theology professor. He's played by Alex Angelo, who lived nineteen
fifty three through twenty fourteen, three time Goyle Award nominee
and also one time Aeriel Award nominee in Mexico, that

(12:56):
aerial nomination was for his supporting role in two thousand
and six is Pan's Labyrinth, directed by Guierre mol del
Toro and of course filmed and set in Spain. That
was the Spanish Mexican co production.

Speaker 3 (13:08):
And has a little bit of the same thematic content
as this film. Not that much overlap, but a little bit.
But I forget, who does he play in Pans Labyrinth?
Do you know?

Speaker 2 (13:19):
It's been a long time since I've seen it, But
he plays a character, doctor Ferrero. This is a this
is the doctor character. But I have to admit I
only vaguely remember him from the picture. Generally it's the
monsters I mainly remember from Pans Labyrinth.

Speaker 3 (13:34):
He's not the evil Francoist officer.

Speaker 2 (13:37):
No, no, I think he's an anti Francoist character, yes, okay.
Angulo's career span three decades and included multiple collaborations with
dela Iglesia, including all of his early works, including the
Arcade Game. His credits also include the nineteen ninety seven
Pedro A Motovar film Live Flesh.

Speaker 3 (13:58):
So you've already compared his performance here to Charlie Chaplin,
and I think that is very apt. There is an
understated and yet still highly physical quality to his comedic performance,
like he's all over the place. It's an athletic, physical
comedy role, but he's also he maintains a certain type

(14:19):
of calmness throughout much of it. There's also a balancing
act in that the core proposition of this character is
that he's like a priest who's breaking bad. He's a
priest who four reasons that will be explained in the film,
has decided that he must become evil, and yet he
remains mostly very likable and seems very sweet nature. And

(14:42):
while he is doing terrible things.

Speaker 2 (14:44):
Yeah, yeah, and you know, part of that is the
way that his particular sinful acts are staged and how
in which one what sinful acts he engages in, and
sometimes there will discuss there's there's a really almost kind
of innocence to the things he chooses to do. Yes,
and like how many many books you need a shoplift
in order to get into hell?

Speaker 3 (15:02):
That's saying, But there's an innocence to his character in
multiple ways. There's one type of innocence that's kind of endearing.
There's a different type of innocence or obliviousness that I
think ultimately in the end is revealed as his major
character flow and the thing that he has to kind
of overcome in the end of the story.

Speaker 2 (15:22):
Yeah, yeah, I think that's a good point. Like there's
there's definitely this sense that like he's breaking bad, but
it is very much an intellectual and theological decision that
he's made. Yeah, But also at the end of the day,
it's like he's having to learn all this from You
can go from zero to whatever speed he needs to
acquire in order to become the sinner he needs to

(15:44):
become to save the world.

Speaker 3 (15:45):
He's like gonna sit down with a guy who listens
to heavy metal music, and he's like, I've just heard
about this thing called evil. Could you help me figure
out what this is? I need to do some Yeah.

Speaker 2 (15:54):
And so the two other wise men in this trio
are individual that he turns to in one way or
another in order to get the inside goods on how
to become evil and how to connect with Satan, the
first of which, billing wise, is the character Cavan, a
TV occultist played by Armando de Razza born nineteen fifty

(16:16):
five Italian actor and singers at least a couple of
albums that came out back in the day before this movie.
I think he's best known for this film, at least internationally,
active from nineteen eighty one through at least twenty twenty
four in both Italian and Spanish productions, but I gather
that a lot of his work has been in comedy

(16:37):
that hasn't necessarily traveled as much internationally. But he's very
good in this like his character I would say, is
more overtly morally dubious compared to the other two wise men.
But he's also the only one who puts up like
a rational skeptical fight against superstition, despite his hypocritical role
in promoting occultist superstition nonsense on television.

Speaker 3 (17:00):
Yeah, yeah, he's he's completely hypocritical, But I don't know.
We've seen characters like this in other stories where the
fact that he is completely and almost openly hypocritical gives
him a level of insight and transparency that the other
characters lack.

Speaker 2 (17:19):
Yes, And then completing our trio, we have the metal head,
the death metal enjoyer Jose Maria played by Santiego Segura
born nineteen sixty five, Spanish filmmaker and generally comedic actor
who's enjoyed a great deal of success in Spanish media
while also becoming quite familiar, I think, to international audiences

(17:40):
via his frequent collaborations with not only Alex dela Iglesia,
but also Giamel de Toro. Oh yeah, Like, he appears
in at least seven dela Iglesia films, including Mutant Action
and Perdita Durango, and at least six Del Toro projects
as well. The main one, the one that I instantly
come to and the reason I keep spotting him in

(18:03):
other Del Toro films, is that he plays the minor
sleeves bag vampire Rush in Blade two. This is the
guy that Blade hunts down in the very closing moments
of the film, like to close the book on some
of the sleezy vampires from early on in the movie.

Speaker 3 (18:20):
I confess I have forgotten this sequence, so I don't
remember what you're talking about.

Speaker 2 (18:24):
It you didn't even see Blade two that long ago, right?

Speaker 3 (18:27):
I saw Blade two a few years ago, okay, or
within the past, within the past three years. I saw
it for the first time, okay.

Speaker 2 (18:34):
Well, anyway, he plays a comedic character in that, but
he also has small roles in Hell Boys one and two,
Pacific Rim, the TV series The Strain, and he even
has a cameo as a condemned criminal in Del Toro's
in my opinion, excellent twenty twenty five Frankenstein film.

Speaker 3 (18:52):
Oh, is he one of the guys getting examined for
the quality of his body parts?

Speaker 2 (18:56):
Yes? Yeah, well he's gallows.

Speaker 3 (18:57):
Yeah. Is he the one with stinky breath?

Speaker 2 (19:01):
He is. He's the one whose his mouth is so
atrocious that Victor tells him that's that he should be
thanking the executioners because he'd be dead within a year. Yeah.
But he also pops up and let's see two thousand
and ones Jack and Jill nineteen eighty one's High Heels
and two thousand and threes Beyond re Animator.

Speaker 3 (19:21):
Oh, is Beyond Reanimator the one with the song? Oh?

Speaker 2 (19:25):
You know, I don't think I've seen Beyond Reanimator. I've
only seen the og re Animator. But it makes sense
that he would pop up in it because I think
Stewart and Yazna, like some of those films they made
were filmed in Spain and were I think Spanish co
productions or Spanish productions in total. So yeah, he pops
up in interesting places. This guy.

Speaker 3 (19:46):
Why do I feel like this has come up on
the podcast before. There's a song from one of the
Reanimator sequels. I'm pretty sure it's Beyond Reanimator. It's like
a techno dance song where this guy goes reanimate your feet.
Oh goodness, a few dead bones behind bones.

Speaker 2 (20:02):
Yeah, yes, we have doctors now, yeah, yes, yes.

Speaker 3 (20:07):
That's what I remember about beyondre Animator.

Speaker 2 (20:09):
Yeah. The music video for this song features scenes from
the movie. I'll have to comb through it later and
see if Santiago shows up in that or not.

Speaker 3 (20:17):
Okay, well, anyway, he is wonderful in this movie. I'd
like an all time great buffoon performance.

Speaker 2 (20:26):
Yeah, just a real fun character, great performance and very
lovable character. Like he's just a lovable, grubby metal head.
And his friendship with the priest is actually is quite endearing.
You know. He just he loves him and he's he's
he's only just many but he's like completely loyal to him,
and he's just up for whatever crazy adventure he is
going to take him on.

Speaker 3 (20:46):
You know, he's much like a dog. He doesn't think
about anything very deeply, and he is a little crass
and and rough around the edges, but he's very loyal.

Speaker 2 (20:56):
Yes, So those are those are our three hys been
getting into some of the supporting characters here. We're not
going to cover all of them, the main ones. Let's
say we have Rosario. This is Jose's mom who runs
a boarding house, and she is played by Terrella Pavez,
who lived nineteen thirty nine through twenty seventeen. Spanish actress

(21:18):
who appeared in more than ninety films during her long
career with I'm to understand part of her late career
revitalization being due to this film. Her credits go back
to the mid fifties and she had She had a
small role in the nineteen seventy five Italian horror film
Evil Eye. She won a Goya for her supporting role
in twenty fourteen's Witching and Bitching, and I was looking

(21:39):
it up online and I saw that the award was
presented to her by Javier Bardim, So you know, it's
a real classy affair. She's terrific in this. It's Jose's
hateful mother who wants nothing more than a chance to
shoot a criminal in her home with a shotguy.

Speaker 3 (21:55):
She's like, she's almost drooling talking about her fantasies of
punishing criminals and those she deems socially undesirable. So yeah,
she's like a kind of shrieking bigot mother character.

Speaker 2 (22:07):
Yeah, so yeah, great performance here. Also in the boarding house,
we have the character Mina, played by Natalie Secina born
nineteen sixty seven, Spanish actress of stage, screening TV and
apparently a former child actress. I think she may be
best known for this film. She's not from Madrid, like
what she's supposed to be, from Toledo, I believe.

Speaker 3 (22:28):
Yeah, that sounds right. She's a character who is I
think presented as basically morally good and is a bystander
who just happens to get wrapped up in all this
grubby business about Satan and summoning the devil.

Speaker 2 (22:42):
Yes, yeah, so we'll have more to say about about
her character as we proceed. We also have a bit
character that shows up. This is our cultest Cavan's girlfriend.
Her name is Susanna and she is played by Maria
Grazi Kuchinata born nineteen sixty eight, Italian actress and future

(23:04):
supporting bond girl. So like not main bond girl, but
supporting bond girl she pops up in nineteen ninety nine's
The World Is Not Enough.

Speaker 3 (23:12):
Okay, I think that's the one with Denise Richards.

Speaker 2 (23:15):
Yeah, who plays the villain in that.

Speaker 3 (23:17):
It's it's a Jonathan Price, Robert Carlyle.

Speaker 2 (23:21):
It's Robert Carlisle.

Speaker 3 (23:22):
Okay, we come up on the show. Yeah, it's Robert Carlile.
And this is the one with the nuclear submarine where
it's Denise Richards and Sophie Marceau and yeah, yeah, yeah.
The one before it is the one with Jonathan Price
where he plays basically he's like Rupert Murdoch, but he's
also got a submarine. I think I think.

Speaker 2 (23:41):
The Jonathan Price one is the first Bond movie I
watched that just actively bored me, and so I think
I just assumed that I saw the one after that
as well, and then I just didn't remember it. But
I think, as we've discussed before, I just haven't seen it,
so I can't even really speak to it. But this
is not really the Bond era that I'm as fond.

Speaker 3 (23:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (24:01):
Oh, we also have a grandfather character. This is this
is Jose's grandfather that lives in the boarding house, played
by an actor credited only as a Pololo. I could
not find out anything else about him other than other
than he is also in mutant action. He lived nineteen
thirty three through two thousand and four. He's memorable in

(24:22):
this is a funny, funny supporting character. Yes, all right,
And then the score for this film is by Battistaalina
born nineteen sixty. This score won him Agoya nomination, and
I'm not sure the other films he scored have have
you know, much reach outside of Spain, seemingly best known

(24:43):
for this score, which I have to say is solid
and effective. And we also have a theme song here,
Aldia di Labestia, performed by def con Dos, a Madrid
based rap metal band. I look them up. They have
a disco and a life outside of this film. They're
not like the fictional band Satanica, though I'm sure there

(25:06):
are bands named Satanica out there, but there is a
fictional band by the name of Satanica that features into
the plot.

Speaker 3 (25:21):
All right, You ready to talk about the plot?

Speaker 2 (25:23):
Yeah, let's get into it.

Speaker 3 (25:24):
So we open with church bells ringing loud in the
cobbled courtyard of what looks like a Spanish cathedral or
building of some kind. We can see this long stonework
wall supported by arches and a gray building with boxy
turrets in the background. Rob, do you know anything about
this location? I know you were looking up a lot
of the locations in the movie.

Speaker 2 (25:44):
Yeah, I had to look this one up because I'd
never seen it before. Apparently this is the Franciscan Sanctuary
of Our Lady of Aranta Zoo in northern Spain. The
new basilica here was completed in the mid twentieth century.
Beautiful architecture. Just a taste of all the wonderful location
shots to come in this film.

Speaker 3 (26:03):
The stone work on the outside of the turrets at
the church here, it looks like a foam acoustic lining
on the inside of a studio, except made out of stone. Yeah,
because it's got these triangles kind of poking out anyway.
So we see a man run into frame. He's dressed
in black clerical vestments and a black beret, and he

(26:26):
looks hurried and distressed. He cuts across the courtyard and
goes into a nearby chapel. Inside, it's a very beautiful room.
At the head of the church, there's this massive half
dome with red interior walls and then a line of
woodscreened windows with a huge cross standing behind the altar,
and we can see sunlight beaming in from the windows

(26:47):
on one side of the chapel, and the priest that
we saw outside hurries down the aisle toward another priest
who is older with a long beard, kneeling in prayer
in front of the cross. The priest that just entered
is a middle aged man, bald on top with a
horseshoe of dark hair. We will later learn that this
character is named Father Angel Berriatua. He kneels beside the

(27:09):
priest that's already there. He says, Father, I want to confess.
The older priest says, what have you done? Berriatua says nothing, Father,
I haven't sinned, but I intend to commit all the
evil I can. The older priest is confused why would
he do that, and Berriatua explains. He says, because it's necessary.
He has finally deciphered the code and he's discovered that

(27:33):
this is the only way. Then he kind of leans
in and explains something to the older priest, whispering in
his ear while the church bells ring again and we
can't hear what he's saying, but we see him showing
the older priest a bunch of crazy looking writing on
crinkled up pages of notepaper. The older priest finally understands
what his friend has discovered and he agrees to help him,

(27:57):
but he gives a warning, remember one thing, our enemy
is powerful. He will do away with us. He may
even be hearing this conversation. And then both of the
priests kind of look around frightened, and then barri Atua
accidentally drops his stack of scribbled papers, and when he
steps aside to gather it all up, the giant cross
in the front of the church suddenly topples over, crashes

(28:20):
to the floor, and crushes the other priest.

Speaker 2 (28:22):
Yeah, just clearly just crushes him dead right there on
the chapel floor.

Speaker 3 (28:27):
That's the cold open, so smash. The other priest is dead.
And then a heavy, slow tempo rock song kicks in
and we get a credits montage which shows our priest
arriving in the big city, getting off the bus in
Madrid at the Puerta de Europa office complex, which I
guess is still under construction at this time.

Speaker 2 (28:46):
Yeah, also known as the Kio Towers. This was constructed
between nineteen eighty nine and nineteen ninety six, so it
was in the final stages of construction during the filming
of this movie.

Speaker 3 (29:00):
So the priest walks the city, passing some street performers
who are playing music on the sidewalk who happened to
have a large black goat with them standing up on
top of some kind of lean to structure on the
side of the street there, and he just begins sinning immediately. Yes,
we watched the priest stop to steal all the coins
in a beggar's donation basket. He's going around improvising. You

(29:24):
can see him just looking through his environment for opportunities
to sin. So he steals from a needy person. A
policeman asks the priest to come over to a nearby
car wreck and administer last rites to a dying man.
When the priest gets to the wreck, he steals the
man's wallet and then tells him to rot in hell.

(29:45):
And then he walks away, and he stops to discard
a photo of the man's family from the wallet, and
he replaces it with a tarot card representing the devil.
Then he puts on some headphones. I was wondering I
don't I think we ever get clarity on what he's
listening to at this moment. We'll get some more about

(30:06):
his music endeavors in just a bit, but at this point,
is he supposed to be listening to the heavy metal
song that's playing on the soundtrack? Would that be a sin?

Speaker 2 (30:16):
I mean, it's certainly implied by this in this film
that it would be considered a sin.

Speaker 3 (30:20):
You know, when I was growing up, heavy metal was
widely regarded as as sin. I don't know if it's
still considered the same, or maybe it was just regarded
as close enough to count as sin. You know, like
the heavy metal lyrics are probably going to be sinful,
so it's just the you know, if you're if you've
got a D tuned guitar, if you're tuning down to

(30:41):
to D standard or C sharp or whatever, then yeah,
that's evil.

Speaker 2 (30:46):
I remember, more just sort of anti popular music in
general general messaging. Yeah, that didn't focus as much on
heavy metal, but but then they would be like, you know,
don't listen to any of that, but listen instead to
this this official you know, popular church music. And then
you listen to it, and you know, you quickly realized, well,
this is a no go, this is no substitute, and

(31:09):
then you easily find ways to to to rationalize it
as well, like to where or at least in my experience,
it's like you can you listen to Black Sabbath and
you're like, well, actually, most of these songs are really
not that far out of line with Christian theology, so
it's totally fine all of it.

Speaker 3 (31:26):
I mean a good number of Black Sabbath song lyrics
could literally just be Christian sermons.

Speaker 2 (31:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (31:31):
Yeah, some of them are quite preachy.

Speaker 2 (31:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (31:34):
Anyway, after this, we get the title screen, which is
great design. Do you know who did this design? It
looks awesome.

Speaker 2 (31:40):
I looked in the credits and I didn't see anybody
with like title card credit on this, but it is phenomenal. Yeah.
Eldad Labstia in blood red letters set against black, with
the white silhouette of a horned humanoid casting the shadow
of a cross, and the cross the crucifix is most
mostly inverted given the shadow, so it's yeah, it's delightfully subversive.

(32:04):
The holy symbol of the Church cast by the devil
again perhaps inverted. I'd say easily one of the best
title cards I've ever seen. It's tremendous.

Speaker 3 (32:14):
After the title screen is just more sinning than the
priest keeps going. He walks around. He goes up to
a human statue mime guy performing on top of a
pedestal beside a subway entrance, and at first he looks
at the guy's donation box and I'm thinking, oh, he's
going to steal his money again, but instead he suddenly
pushes the guy off his platform into the subway staircase.

Speaker 2 (32:38):
Yeah, hilarious.

Speaker 3 (32:39):
He stops to look in a shop window that is
some kind of toy slash gun store. I didn't know
if there was a commentary of some kind going on here.
Like the display case is all dolls holding real guns.
There's that baby from the ninety sitcom Dinosaurs holding a pistol,
and there's a Teddy Bear with a semi auto rifle.
He doesn't do anything at the store, is just kind

(33:01):
of taken in the sights.

Speaker 2 (33:02):
Yeah, this I think is more a moment of just
sort of realizing or getting some potential insight into the
current state of Madrid, but also just the world in general,
Like this is what we've come to. Here's the here's
the the ninety sitcom Dinosaur's baby, not the mother, not
the mama, Not the mama, and there's some sort of

(33:24):
a weapon like right there in his lap.

Speaker 3 (33:26):
There's also a moment here where he's walking down the
sidewalk with his headphones and suddenly a police car screeches
to a halt nearby. Several cops jump out of the
car and just start viciously beating what appear to be
some random young men who are walking in front of
the priest, and the priest does not intervene, He just
sort of watches the beating. He also stops at this

(33:48):
point to watch a newscast that's playing on a television
screen in a shop window, and it's reporting on a murder,
on the death of a man described as a tramp
who was burned alive by an attacker shouting clean up Madrid.
And this is a graffiti slogan Limpia Madrid that we
will also see spray painted around the city. It seems

(34:12):
like this is our first indication of it in the film,
but this will come back. This is a phrase associated
with some kind of movement, a sentiment driving a wave
of fascist street violence. So it's interesting already at this
point we get a kind of duality. The priest is
here in Madrid to on one hand, do some important

(34:33):
sinning himself. We haven't gotten the full explanation for why
he has to do this, but he must sin. But
also he's here to kind of bear witness to a
wave of some sort of depravity that is sweeping the
society and is manifested in these different things he sees,
and the you know, teddy bears with guns and the
right wing street violence where you know, like unhoused people

(34:55):
are getting beaten up and murdered.

Speaker 2 (34:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (34:58):
Also around this time, the priest catches another thing playing
on a TV in a shop window. It's a commercial
for a psychic calling himself Professor Cavaan. He is a
man with dark hair and a goatee, wearing all black
with a big open collar showing his chest a skull
hand necklace. I think it's actually a hand with an

(35:18):
eye in the palm dangling from a necklace, big belt buckle.
He's on his TV set. He's leaning on a sculpture
of a toothy cat monster head and he says, oh La,
if you want to know what your future will be,
call me and remember, with my help we can achieve
the impossible, and we're gonna later see more clips of

(35:39):
this guy's call in Psychic Show. So at one point
we see him taking calls from viewers, and you know,
he'll give predictions about people's lives. Oh, I'm sorry, your
husband will be out of work for five years and
you're going to have a major medical event.

Speaker 2 (35:55):
That I thought was really telling because yeah, he's talking,
he's selling the idea that you can achieve the impossible
through his visions, but he's also just peddling doom.

Speaker 3 (36:04):
Yeah, he's giving people really bad news, and we're later
going to learn he's consciously a Charlatan, So he's giving
people really bad news knowing that there's no basis for it. Yeah,
later we also, I thought this was interesting. We also
see these pre taped segments of Professor Kavan doing Catholic
exorcisms modeled on the scenes from the film The Exorcist.

(36:27):
So is he a Catholic who doing some of the
same rights that would be administered by a Catholic priest
or is he a satanic slash a cult magic guy? Interesting,
Like in my upbringing, I would have understood those things
as being opposite camps things pitted against each other. Though

(36:47):
I guess now in the world, I'm more aware of
a lot of figures that would kind of have a
foot in both of those camps, and I guess that
is what he is, But I don't know. At least
in my awareness as a child in Tennessee in the nineties,
I would not have thought that there could be somebody
who is both a like occult magic TV psychic and
doing Catholic exorcisms.

Speaker 2 (37:08):
Yeah, I definitely get this sense. It's more performative than
anything here. But certainly, once we get to know the
character a bit more, I think it becomes more clear.
But yeah, at this point in the film, it's less clear.
At this point in the film, what are we to
make of the exorcism that he's performing. Like, one of

(37:29):
the main themes and one of the main questions in
the movie is to what degree is the supernatural threat legitimate?
Does supernatural evil actually exist within this film? Like, you
go into a movie like this and you just kind
of expect the answer to be yes, because that's the
most entertaining answer. If you've seen the trailer, you probably think, yeah, okay,

(37:51):
I saw like a demon goat in the trailer, so
there must be real, legitimate, supernatural evil. But the movie
really ultimately ruminate on this this question. Yeah, you know,
where what is the real evil that our main character
is confronted with? Is it the the machinations of the devil?
Or is it something more pressing and more immediate in society?

Speaker 3 (38:13):
Yeah, that's right. I think there are interesting questions about
that in the end. Yeah. So anyway, Angel is clearly
interested in Professor Kvaan. He's like, this guy has something
I need. So he writes down.

Speaker 2 (38:24):
Aultism bad sinning. This guy has answers, right exactly.

Speaker 3 (38:28):
He writes down his phone number.

Speaker 2 (38:31):
Six six six six six.

Speaker 3 (38:33):
That's what it is.

Speaker 2 (38:34):
Yeah, oh nine six six six six six sixty six,
don't really call it's.

Speaker 3 (38:39):
Double six sixty six. So, uh so Angel after this, Oh,
he steals another guy's luggage. He's just walking down the sidewalk,
steals his luggage, big red suitcase. At one point he
passes a street preacher who is reading from the Sermon
on the Mount and he kind of stops and squares
off against this guy, and this seems to frighten off

(39:00):
the other preacher. I didn't quite understand this part, did
you have an understanding of why the other guy runs away.

Speaker 2 (39:06):
I didn't get it on my first viewing either. I thought, well,
maybe this is some sort of meante like a Jesuit
Franciscan thing, But we're never one clear on what a
major division of the church our character is associated with.
I don't think there's some illusion that he might be Jesuit,
but we never hear it from him, I don't recall.

(39:28):
But after seeing the movie all the way through and
then going back and watching this scene again, I think
it has to We have to interpret it based on
that ambiguity that I already talked about, and so you
can think of it as Okay, a priest on an
evil path just spooks the righteous priest. But I think
the more compelling answer is that it's more about the

(39:49):
fact that in the face of all these real world
problems that are present in modern Madrid, the priest with
the megaphone is just ineffectively and meekly preaching on the
streak on the street, packing up and leaving at the
drop of a hat, you know, the slightest confrontation by
not like a criminal or a sinner, but just a

(40:09):
member of the church just looking at him, and he
just packs it up and runs off.

Speaker 3 (40:14):
Gives him a hard stare and he's out of there.

Speaker 2 (40:16):
Yeah yeah.

Speaker 3 (40:17):
Next, while passing in front of a sex shop where
the where in the window there is a blow up
doll wrapped in Christmas lights. That's great, Angele receives a
flyer for an event handed out by a man in
a parka. It says the future is in your hands
no stradamus, poet or prophet, and then it advertises a

(40:38):
lecture in a nearby university hall. The following night, Angel
stops the man handing out the leaflets and he says says,
I want to be one of you. I want to
see the devil, and the man does not seem to
know what he's talking about, so he gets weirded out
and runs away. Right after this, we're about to meet
another major character. Ungle goes into a heavy metal record

(41:02):
shop and approaches the shopkeeper with a handwritten list on
a scrap of paper. He's like, I need these things,
and he hands him the paper and then we see
the paper and it says Napalm des de Easy Iron
Maiden spelled normally and then hasse de say And it
took me a second, but then I was like, oh,

(41:22):
it's ac DCA. But here in the heavy metal emporium. Yeah,
we're gonna begin a beautiful friendship. So the guy working
in the shop is a greasy dude about thirty years old,
with long, stringy hair, a denim jacket with the sleeves
cut off, wearing a whole bunch of satanic metal insignia.

(41:42):
He's got a pentagram tattoo and everything. And this is
Jose Maria. He's going to become a major character. Agele
gets directions to to find the metal bands he requested,
and he starts flipping through the records in a box,
and Jose Maria confirms that the bands he requested are
indeed heavy heavy in Spanish, this is Forte and Jose

(42:05):
Maria has a wonderful little tick where he quietly mutters
fute about lots of things, like every time Ungle says
something about the devil, he's likete. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (42:16):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (42:17):
The two of them chat. Apparently Jose Maria studied theology
and Catholic ethics when he was in school. But then
he says, look where I ended up, because I guess
he's very, very devil affiliated now. And we also learned
that Angle is not just a priest but a theology professor.
Ungle asks to hear a sample of a few metal records,

(42:38):
including this one called Live Death with a big, gory
monster face on the cover. I should have looked that
up to see if that's a real record. I don't
know if it is.

Speaker 2 (42:46):
Yeah, there's plenty of We see plenty of real records
in the background and in the store of the front
window of the shop, and it's yeah, it's fun to
sort of. I had to pause the movie a couple
of places, just decided try to take it all in
because I don't remember ever going into a like a
metal centric record store. I don't. I don't know that

(43:07):
if I would have been comfortable as a child or
a youth going into such a place, you know, the
danger of it all. But you know, certainly I remember
looking at the more outrageous, you know, album covers it's
like Camelot Music back in the day, or going into
the look like the T shirt shop at the mall
and seeing some of the you know, the the more

(43:29):
shocking T shirt designs for different metal bands.

Speaker 3 (43:32):
I equate that with feeling a little freaked out going
into Spencer's Gifts when I was a child and seeing
the spawn figurines.

Speaker 2 (43:40):
Yeah, yeah, it was like Spencer's Gifts, and then there
was a like a an off brand like Local. I
guess it's almost kind of a Headshot, but without the
drug paraphernalia, like just the shirts and some weird incense
and so forth.

Speaker 3 (43:53):
So anyway, this the live Death record. Jose Maria confirms
that it is indeed heavy, and he puts it on
and he starts headbanging and playing air guitar along to it,
and the priest is like, no, no, don't play it like that.
You got to play it backwards, because he's looking for
a signal or a message of some kind. He's trying
to see if he can find some instructions from the devil,

(44:14):
because it.

Speaker 2 (44:14):
Is all stuff that, like he's come to believe, supposed
to steadily lead you astray. Yeah, but he doesn't have
that much time. He needs to become a massive center tonight. Yes,
And so he's like, good, just go ahead and play
it backwards. Let's cut to the chase, get to the
part where I am able to appeal directly to Satan.

Speaker 3 (44:33):
I love how innocent he is. It's like he's never
heard music before. He just assumes, based on word of
mouth that these records have satanic messages when you play
them backwards and he needs to hear something from the devil.
They don't find any messages. And then jose Maria gives
him a tape of a band called Satanica, gives it
to him on the house since he likes the priest's style,

(44:56):
and then he invites the priest to see them in
concert the next evening at a venue called Hell. Then
he also invites the priest to come stay at his
mother's boarding house, where he also lives along with his mother, who,
as we mentioned earlier, is a kind of She has
a paranoid right wing disposition. She's obsessed with crime, fantasizing

(45:17):
about violence against people she sees is undesirable. Also, there
is his grandfather, who always walks around naked or wearing
only a bathrobe and is regularly dosed with LSD by
jose Maria kind of unceremoniously, here's your acid pops.

Speaker 2 (45:35):
Yeah, and this does contain full frontal male nudity for
comedic value.

Speaker 3 (45:40):
Yeah. Also lives there with a woman named Mina, who
works for his mother. Jose Maria is attracted to Mina,
but the feeling is not mutual. The priest takes Jose
Maria up on the offer and goes to stay overnight
at the boarding house, where we see him intentionally burning

(46:01):
his own feet with a hot cigarette. I was like, oh, wow,
that's rough. Later, it's going to be revealed that he
is burning marks in the shape of a cross on
the soles of his two feet, and I think I realized,
only thinking back on it later, that they're like, oh,
is that blasphemy because he's like walking on the cross,
he's stepping in.

Speaker 2 (46:19):
Yeah. Like, I think that that vaguely reminds me of
some of the the accusations that were made against the
Knight's Templar that they would step on the cross. Yeah,
they would step on the cross or like putting the
cross on the soles of your feet. Maybe it was
from some other alleged acts of Satanism, but in the

(46:40):
movie here it's it's kind of in many respects, it's
kind of like the hardest non comedic thing that he
that he does, like to himself or others in the
name of this path of sinning. But I guess it's
kind of there to like punctuate the seriousness of what
he's doing, because again we don't know all the ins
and outs necessarily of of the the plan.

Speaker 3 (47:00):
Yet, right. We also see him yank a crucifix off
the wall and throw it on the floor when he
gets in the room, unceremoniously. Just yeah. So after this
there is a great shoplifting scene. There's a scene the
next day where the priest goes and tries to shoplift
a book about magic by Professor Kavan from a store.
In fact, it's not just a book. It's this book

(47:22):
that is plastic wrapped with a bunch of little trinkets,
the like a little hand necklace and I think some
other stuff, maybe a chalice.

Speaker 2 (47:30):
That's great, you know when I remember when I was young,
you go to the bookstore and you could get the
Satanic Bible, you could get the Necronomicon, but they didn't
come with like candles and.

Speaker 3 (47:41):
Stuff like stuff you need.

Speaker 2 (47:42):
Yeah. Yeah, like this is the starter kit for occultism
and Professor Kavan is supplying.

Speaker 3 (47:47):
It batteries included. Yeah. So Angle rips up the plastic
and he takes the book out. When he gets caught,
he's taken to the security chief's office in the back
of the store, and here we get some exposition. Actually,
for some reason, not sure why he picks this point
to explain everything, but he does. He explains everything to
the security chief. He says, I wasn't stealing for lack
of money. He says, he's shoplifting because he's got to

(48:10):
learn how to do evil. And the reason he must
learn to do evil is that he has to establish
contact with Satan. The reason he has to establish contact
with Satan is that he discovered a secret message encoded
within the Book of Revelation which revealed that the world
would end today in his words in the movie. So
it's supposed to be Christmas Eve, December twenty fourth of

(48:32):
the year the movie takes place, and at midnight, the
Antichrist is going to be born and that will be
the end of the world. Security chief kind of steps
aside to talk to his assistant as like any of
the local asylums missing a patient, call him up and see.
But when he turns back into the room, Angel knocks
him out with an iron and escapes. And then on

(48:54):
the way out of the parking lot, he just keys
all the cars.

Speaker 2 (48:57):
I laugh so hard when he keys all the cars
on the way, like how many cars do you have
the key in order to get into help. That's where
he's coming from.

Speaker 3 (49:14):
So the world is ending today and the priest needs
to get close to Satan before the end of the
day so he can intervene to stop that from happening.
Uh the uh. Then there's a kind of lunch scene
at the boarding house which is hilarious in multiple ways.
The mother there is serving everyone burned rabbit that she
got on sale. We can come back to rabbit in

(49:36):
a bit, of course. This is the scene where we
see granddad walking around naked, just like the bathrobe flopping open.
Jose Maria gives him a tab of acid like it's
his daily blood pressure medication, and then he also just
takes some too. It's like, oh yeah, just popping that
in with lunch. Yeah, just your yeah, your lunchtime dose
of acid givings. He offers similisty to the priest and

(49:58):
the priest is just like no, thank you. But the
priest tries to recruit Jose Maria to help him on
his quest. He says, tonight the Antichrist is going to
be born. I have to stop it. So we need
to figure out how to summon the devil so that
I can intervene to stop the Antichrist being born. He says,
I must sell my soul to the devil, but I

(50:19):
don't know how. And then Jose Maria says forte.

Speaker 2 (50:23):
Yeah, I love Jose Marias just he's down. He's like, yeah,
let's do it. Like he's he's only just met the priest,
but he's just he's so loyal to him. You know,
they're just great friends from the get go.

Speaker 3 (50:34):
Here they bonded over shared musical taste at the beginning,
and now they're just friends for life. Yeah. One thing
that I thought was interesting and different about this from
other movies that have a priest character fighting Satan or
fighting evil. Most movies assume that the priest hero already

(50:56):
has knowledge of the dark arts. The core premise here
is exactly the opposite. The priest is totally clueless about
Satan and the occult, clueless to a more clueless than
the average person, and so doesn't understand it, like takes
things too literally about Satan being found in heavy metal

(51:17):
records and stuff like that.

Speaker 2 (51:19):
Yeah, it helps to give our protagonists this real innocent
vibe that we've already discussed, and it also plays so
well with the overarching themes of the film. So yeah,
we just we're fumbling toward the apocalypse here.

Speaker 3 (51:30):
So they come up with a plan. They are going
to go to the TV occultist and magician, the Professor Kavan.
Surely he's going to know how to summon satan ye.
And here we also get to watch an episode of
Kavan's show where he does some exorcisms, and this part
is hilarious. The occult graphics floating in space, it was wonderful.

Speaker 2 (51:50):
Yeah, cringy CGI show graphics like mid nineties live audience
just eating it up. And then the taped extorcism segments
where he's engaging with and encouraging the superstitions of everyday people.
You see like one of the like that the family
members of the possessed child with like a big garland
of garlic. Yeah, so this is tremendous.

Speaker 3 (52:13):
And we later learned that he views these people with contempt,
like he thinks that they're fools for believing in him.
So also the CGI intro to the Professor Kevan show
looks like beyond the Mind's Eye there is a scene
too far. There is a scene where they follow Professor

(52:35):
Kavon home after he finishes taping his show, so they
follow him in his car. On the way, he stops
to pick up a bottle of wine in a shop
that has just been the site of a massacre by
the Cleanup Madrid Gang. And it's very sinister. How this
scene I think emphasizes the way the violence is just
going on in the background, and it's emphasized that many

(52:58):
characters barely knows that there is like a far right
wing paramilitary running around killing people in the city. They're
just like it's you know, the barely batting an eye
and it the guy just walks past dead bodies in
the shop.

Speaker 2 (53:13):
Yeah. I think upon first encountering the scene, I wasn't
sure how to take it, Like it was I supposed
to learn something about Kevan specifically from it, and I
was also still looking out for the possibility that some
characters might actually be the devil. But yeah, I think
it's more about just people in general and how desensitized
they've become to this sort of violence and this, yeah,

(53:36):
this level of violence in the city. Yeah, and the
violence here by the way, the violence that we see
from the fascist gang. Unlike the most of the rest
of the violence in the film, it's not played for laughs.

Speaker 3 (53:49):
Yeah that's true. Yeah, most of the violence in the
movie is slapstick. But this stuff is dark and scary.

Speaker 2 (53:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (53:56):
Yeah. But anyway, after this, Kevan goes home and the
priest to follow him and goes up to his apartment.
Did you have a note about his apartment?

Speaker 2 (54:03):
Oh, my goodness, this apartment building. So first of all,
we have the exterior of the apartment building, which is
I believe it is called at the Ficio Capital, built
in the early nineteen thirties. Incredible building, at least at
the time of this filming, had this glorious Neon Schwepp's
sign at the top. The interior they use for the

(54:27):
apartment building. I'm not sure. I don't know where this is.
Maybe this is just inside of this actual building, but
I kind of assumed it was another building. But at
any rate, it's glorious, just this like grand I guess
you'd call this space an atrium with stairs going up
and then twin antique elevators ascending up alongside those stairs.

(54:49):
Very elegant, beautifully shot. Again, in general, this film is
just a wealth of amazing Madrid centric locations.

Speaker 3 (54:56):
Yeah, I agree, this building is really cool and so anyway, Yeah,
the priest goes up to Kavan's apartment. He knocks on
the door. Kavan, when he hears the spiel, he thinks
that the priest he's just some crank trying to get
booked on his TV show. But then the priest knocks
Kavan out with a gong mallet, ties him up, and
then subjects him to a captive lecture on the coming

(55:19):
birth of the Anti Christ.

Speaker 2 (55:21):
Worth noting that when Kavan answered the door he had
two Champagne glasses, so clearly he's expecting somebody, and it's
not an apocalypse obsessed priest. He's clearly waiting on a
lady friend.

Speaker 3 (55:34):
That's right. Meanwhile, just note while that's going on and
up in the apartment, down in the car on the
street below, Jose Maria is hanging out. He's like sitting
in the car smoking weed and listening to metal under
the giant Neon Schweb's sign, and the police are coming
by and harassing him for parking badly, and he's quite annoyed. Yeah,

(55:55):
so yeah, we get to see some of this lecture
that the priest is giving to Kavan any any comment
on the priest scholarship here.

Speaker 2 (56:05):
You know, I feel like they kind of walk an
intentional line here between complexity and madness, right, I mean,
it's the way the priest is presenting it, like like
a lot of conspiracy theories and you know, in occultist arguments.
You know it. It seems to be making a fair
amount of sense. It seems to be intelligently composed. But

(56:28):
this isn't enough to really to convince anybody, Like really,
nobody except jose Maria believes this. When he tells anybody
about this, Yeah, like everyone is like, that's crazy, You're
a crazy person. Hosely Maria is the only one who's like, yeah, this, Yeah,
this is what's up. Let's do it.

Speaker 3 (56:47):
Yeah. So but anyway, we get to the end message
of this, which is that the priest thinks, if I
don't contact the devil, find the place where the Antichrist
will be born and stop that from happening, the world
is going to end tonight.

Speaker 2 (57:01):
Yeah, he knows when the Antichrist will be born, which
is tonight, but he doesn't know where, right though, They
kind of ghost over the like what if it had
been in.

Speaker 3 (57:11):
Chicago, different city.

Speaker 2 (57:13):
Yeah, but clearly it was always going to be in Madrid.

Speaker 3 (57:16):
Yeah, well maybe they did it might have I might
have forgotten if they said that he knew somehow it
was going to be in Madrid, but not where in Madrid.

Speaker 2 (57:23):
Yeah, maybe that's more the case. He does not know
precisely where to go in order to stop it.

Speaker 3 (57:29):
So, by the way, there's some really funny stuff in
here just going on in the background where jose Marie
gets tired of being bothered by the cops so down
on the streets, so he comes up to the apartment
and just starts messing around with the gongs and the
masks on the wall.

Speaker 2 (57:41):
Yeah, some great background comedy.

Speaker 3 (57:43):
But also in this scene they establish that in Mockery
of God, the birth of the Antichrist will be like
the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem.

Speaker 2 (57:52):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (57:53):
And they somehow also figure out that the three of them,
the priest, the metal head, and the occult professor, will
be the three wise Men. And the priest makes a
comment here he says, I'm sacrificing eternal life to fool
the devil. And you know, I think that's an interesting
comment because it establishes that, in the priest's understanding, he

(58:17):
thinks he's not going to be excused for all of
the sin that he's doing. He's basically committed to himself
going to hell and actually being counted as part of
the Devil's armies in order to have the knowledge necessary
to defeat the devil.

Speaker 2 (58:34):
Yeah, like he is approaching it with a level of humility. However, again,
the question that hangs over all of this is he
self deluded in this? Does he is he looking for
an Antichrist that is not there and has never been there?
Is he looking for supernatural evil in a world where

(58:56):
it does not exist, where the only thing that exists
is human misery, human superstition and so forth, Or is
there an actual supernatural threat, in which case he is
the only person who can stop it.

Speaker 3 (59:09):
Right, So one way to find that out is I
got to summon the devil and talk to him. So
he's going to try to convince Kevan to tell him
how to do a ritual to summon the devil and
sell his soul and sell his soul to the devil. Yes,
so this has a bunch of different parts. He kind
of he forces Kavan to explain it to him. Kavan
again is like, tied up and incapacitated, he knows he

(59:32):
has to draw a pentacle on the floor get a sword.
They are told they need some hallucinogenic mushrooms, which they
can't get, but jose Maria is like, oh, I've got
LSD and they decide that's good.

Speaker 2 (59:43):
He literally has a pocket full of acids.

Speaker 3 (59:45):
Yeah. And also in the scene, Kevan acknowledges that he
is a fraud and he mocks the idea of people
who would watch his show. He's like, you sound like
a fool. You sound like somebody who would who would
watch my show and bel leave it's real. But you know,
they force him to say more about what he knows
about the ritual, so he's like, well, what we really

(01:00:07):
need is the blood of a maiden. That sets off
a whole middle of the movie subplot where the priest
has to try to retrieve some virgin blood. First, they're
going to get some from Professor Cavan's girlfriend who shows
up at the apartment, but she's not going to work
because she's not a virgin, and she gets injured while
falling being chased by the priest. Then the priest has

(01:00:30):
to go back to the boarding house because his idea
is he is going to steal some of Mina's blood.
When he gets there, they're like, there's some comedy thing
about No, we're having rabbit for dinner, and so it's
like they're always having rabbit at this place. Is there
some significance to this in Spain?

Speaker 2 (01:00:46):
My understanding, and I could be mistaken here, is that
rabbit was long considered like kind of a peasant food
or working class food in Spain. But of course these
sorts of things have a way of changing over time
and becoming part of high class cuisine. I know, I
know I've seen some. I think maybe I've seen some
of Jose Andreas's cooking show where he's cooking rabbit. So

(01:01:10):
I think it's one of those things that is traditionally
Spanish and you know, can also be celebrated, but not
at this boarding house where it's it's not only rabbit,
it is like the cheap rabbit. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:01:21):
Well maybe it's not a general joke about rabbit, but yeah, yeah,
his mom buys rabbit on sale and then burns it
and they have that for every meal. Yeah, and remember
the mom is like the really mean nasty lady too,
and she whoops in the In the quest to steal
Mina's blood, which has a hole, like, he tries to
like drug her so that he can steal some of
her blood with a with a syringe. He gets caught

(01:01:44):
by Jose Maria's mother and she attacks him with a shotgun,
which a shotgun blast sort of rips up half of
the priest's face like tears his ear off, and he's
all bloody. And then there's a fight and the fascist
mom gets knocked on the stairs and dies, but he
does get the blood.

Speaker 2 (01:02:03):
Yeah. Yeah, great sequence overall. That also has some big laughs,
like when he's dragging Mina's unconscious body and he hides
in the bathroom with her and we see that Grandpa's on.

Speaker 3 (01:02:12):
The toilet and yeah, yeah, but our priest is he's
so he's really breaking bad at this point, he has
he has at least inadvertently killed now. Yeah, so back
at the apartment, there is conflict between Professor Kavan and
Jose Maria about the ritual. There's a really hilarious exchange
where Jose Maria is carving the pentagram onto the floor. Yeah,

(01:02:35):
and Professor Kavan's like, you don't have to ruin my floor.
You can just draw it. You just draw it. And
jose Maria is like, nope, the book you wrote says
you've got to carve it. It's like it doesn't matter. But anyway,
the priest returns and now they've got all the implements
they need to do the ritual, and so the three
of them do the ritual to summon the devil to

(01:02:58):
establish Kavan again still leaves this is just hogwash at
this point. Also, Kevan's girlfriend Susanna is tied up in
the other room while they're doing this, so she's present
in the apartment, but not in the same room witnessing
what's happening. Uh. And so they stand in the pentacle.
I think, do all three of them take the acid?

Speaker 2 (01:03:19):
Yes, yes they do, And I think that's important for
the plot from this point on, is that they have
all consumed acid, and the priest especially has consumed a
lot of acid. Yes, they like crumple up the little
bits of bladder paper and drop it into the into
the bowl with the what is it water or wine,
I can't remember which, and then.

Speaker 3 (01:03:40):
You know something, drink it up. Yeah, Okay, so they've
consumed acid, and then the magician Cavan is still saying,
nothing's going to happen. This is not a you know, this,
this ritual is not real.

Speaker 2 (01:03:53):
Yeah. In fact, when they finished the ritual, they're like,
the priest is like, nothing's happening, and Kevan is like,
that's exact factly what happens when you do this kind
of ritual. Nothing happens because this is all hogwash.

Speaker 3 (01:04:05):
But then things start getting weird. They get a menacing
cockroach crawling across the floor. It seems to have a
magical aura about him.

Speaker 2 (01:04:14):
Yeah, it won't cross the lines of the inscription on
the floor.

Speaker 3 (01:04:17):
And then we meet a goat.

Speaker 2 (01:04:19):
Goat.

Speaker 3 (01:04:20):
Goat comes a black billy goat comes out of the
other room, wanders into the room, turns by pedal, reveals
sharp teeth. There's a whole goat encounter.

Speaker 2 (01:04:29):
Yeah. Yeah, and you know, to be clear, we did
establish one live goat earlier in the picture. Goats can
stand on their hind legs and it can be seen
as creepy. Goats do not have teeth like this. So
one of the big questions that again hangs over the
whole film is is it real or is it imaginary?
And certainly at this point we have to begin asking

(01:04:51):
how much is real and how much is like some
sort of a hallucination brought on by a massive dose
of LSD.

Speaker 3 (01:04:57):
That's right. So this question I think remains the rest
of the film. But fortunately for the priest, at least
after the goat experience, Cavan now seems convinced he's sort
of on the team, and they release Susannah to go home,
and now they're going to be working together, so they
start trying to figure out what the encounter means. There

(01:05:18):
is a message that they're trying to put together from
the leftover remains of a burned piece of newspaper from
the ritual, and it ends up spelling this is not
a game, which I think essentially means to them. They
interpret to me and like, you're not fooling me. Signed
to the Devil.

Speaker 2 (01:05:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:05:34):
This leads into an escape sequence, like the police start
to arrive at the apartment and the three men are
trying to escape. They climb outside onto the giant schweb
sign outside the building, and Jose Maria is deliriously acid
tripping and messing around trying to hang off of the sign.

Speaker 2 (01:05:53):
Like letting go and being like I can fly. Yeah,
They're like, what are you doing? Yeah, So it's a
great comedic action statement.

Speaker 3 (01:06:00):
They get separated by a partial fall. Nobody dies but
Angel and Jose Maria. They flee through the apartment building
as police arrive, going through a different apartment and frightening
some people, and the two of them, now separated from Cavan,
run around to Madrid at this point, trying to find
more signs to point them to where the Antichrist is

(01:06:22):
going to be born. So they end up going to
the Christmas Eve speech in the lecture hall by the
professor on Noster Damas. Remember that from way at the
beginning of the movie.

Speaker 2 (01:06:33):
Yeah, yeah, I have to admit like watching a film
like this where the not every film we watch for
weird house cinema is so tightly composed. Sometimes they are
you know, things are introduced that go absolutely nowhere. So
it can almost come as a shock when I, you know,
when I come around to a film where everything is
connected so beautifully and like little things that are introduced

(01:06:55):
earlier in the film actually have payoff later on.

Speaker 3 (01:07:06):
So the priest causes a disruption during the lecture. He
seems to think that the speaker knows where the Antichrist
is going to be born, and the speaker clearly has
no idea what he's talking about, and this leads to
a big conflict with the police and leads to the
priest and Jose Maria running away. Later in this police chase,
Ungle ends up in a live Nativity scene and the

(01:07:28):
cops end up shooting the wise man, and then Ungle
and Jose Maria escape by hijacking a car. They track
down the Nostrodamus lecture guy and attempt to interrogate him,
but it's clear that he doesn't know what's going on.
And then the priest finally he's despairing and he says
the devil is laughing at us. And somewhere around this

(01:07:48):
point they kind of have a tender moment where the
priest wonders if you know, wonders if he's just being
a fool, and he looks at an advertisement that says,
at last, Heaven is sending you the signal you've been
waiting for. I think, is this an ad for satellite TV?

Speaker 2 (01:08:05):
I guess so that would that would make sense given
the time.

Speaker 3 (01:08:07):
Yeah. Meanwhile, while they're doing that, professor Kavan goes back
to the TV station to solve the mystery himself. He's
on their side now and he's trying to use his
shows research resources, the Dark Zone TV show. It has
a lot of great resources, I guess, also a lot
of people working late on Christmas Eve. Though ultimately he

(01:08:30):
figures out the answer by looking at an illustration of
occult symbols in his own book. The answer. The answer
is that Antichrist is going to be born at the
two Towers, the Gates, the Gates of Europe that we
saw earlier in the film.

Speaker 2 (01:08:43):
Yeah, yeah, that kind of formed these two like these
two lines that are leaning towards each other.

Speaker 3 (01:08:53):
Now, there are a few more things that happen with
the priest. At one point, he's left alone and he
witness this is a savage beating, a savage beating and
fire torture murder of a man living on the street
by the Olympia Madrid gang. These guys come along, get
out of a van and just kill a guy and
he's horrified. And after this, the priest ends up remembering

(01:09:16):
the Satanica concert he had tickets to uh and he
goes to see the band. He is like wandering around
at this metal show, and he like sees a pregnant
woman in the audience and like goes up to her
as if he's gonna ask her questions, but he's obviously
bothering her. And then a bunch of metal dudes in
the audience intervene and beat up the priest.

Speaker 2 (01:09:35):
Yeah yeah, leave them in a bathroom after they smash
his head on a urinal.

Speaker 3 (01:09:39):
Jose Maria comes in to find him beaten in the
bathroom and comes to his aid. He's almost it almost
feels like a biblical parable, you know, he's coming to
help help him from the side of the road because
he's he's the good Samaritan here, and he helps him up.
But then finally there is a like meeting of information.
So it begins through a TV broadcast slash phone call

(01:10:02):
and a kind of weird scene where Professor Kavan is
able to get the information to the priest about where
the Antichrist is going to be born at this office complex.
At the same time, the priest is worrying still that
he may actually just be going mad, but now Kavan
is the one who's fully convinced, and Cavan drives out
to join them and together the three of them head

(01:10:24):
to the Towers, and this is where the final showdown
of the movie is going to take place. When they
get to the Gates of Europe complex, they find they're
at like this sort of site that's still under construction,
and there are a bunch of unhoused poor people living
around the base of the construction site. And they hear

(01:10:45):
a baby's cry. So this seems to signal, you know,
the birth of the Antichrist. But then it kind of
makes you wonder, like, wait, what was the priest going
to do? It seems is he actually is he planning
to kill a baby? And then upon a rival, whatever
they were gonna do is preempted because somebody else is there.
It's the Olympia Madrid Gang. It is the Cleanup Madrid,

(01:11:08):
the fascist street violence gang. And this gang just starts
murdering the people that live there, including a horrible turn
in the very dark turn in the movie, horribly just
shooting the family with the newborn.

Speaker 2 (01:11:20):
Yeah, they're in a makeshift shelter made out of like
cardboard boxes and so forth, and they like gun them
down in it, and then we learned that there was
an infant in there. I guess we heard the infants
cries earlier.

Speaker 3 (01:11:32):
Yeah, so the final showdown turns out to be not
with an Antichrist or with an explicitly satanic cult, but
between our Three Wise Men characters and the Olympia Madrid gang.
And here's where I wanted to mention an interesting pattern
in the movie The Priest. We've mentioned his kind of

(01:11:54):
innocence and seeming lack of experience with the symbol and
reality of evil in the world. The Priest keeps looking
for the root of evil and the soul of the
devil in superficially satanic stuff in heavy metal music and

(01:12:14):
occult magicians. But this is over and over proving a
dead end because all of these people who Openla Traffic
in the image of magic and Satan are revealed to
be playing in one way or another. They're all just
either kind of playing a game and having fun, or
they're running a scam, or none of it is real

(01:12:37):
engagement with evil. I mean, I guess you could argue
that it's bad to lie like Professor Cavan does openly,
but none of it is real engagement with Satan. It's
all some form of play or trick and many but
not all of these people with the superficial engagement with
magic and the Devil are revealed to be rather harmless

(01:12:58):
and even friendly. The actual heart of evil is shown
in the end of the story to be the cruelty
of the supposedly conservative fascist street thugs who present themselves
as allies of morality, rectitude, order, and the church.

Speaker 2 (01:13:15):
Yeah, yeah, the very individuals who are supposedly cleaning up Madrid.
There of course just committing like horrible acts of violence,
torture and murder.

Speaker 3 (01:13:23):
That is what the devil really is. And so there
is a final fight between our three wise men characters
and the members of this gang, the Cleanup Madrid gang,
And at some point in this fight, Professor Kavaan is
badly beaten and left at the bottom of this structure.
But the other two guys, the Priest and the metal Head,

(01:13:45):
they go up to the top of the structure and
they end up confronted with, at least from the Priest's
point of view, what looks like a real whole devil,
full whole bipedal goat head devil.

Speaker 2 (01:13:57):
Yeah, a full special effects shot that some of you
may have seen for like I think the trailer or
like Instagram videos that have drawn imagery from this film,
like a really cool looking, very metal horned humanoid demon
that is depending on how you like take it apart.

(01:14:19):
Either the priest is is straight up hallucinating that the
leader of the Madrid Gang, the cleanup Madrid Gang, is
this devil or this is like the true form of
this human the seemingly human leader of the gang. At
any rate, he is this is what he sees. He
sees this fiery devil from hell up here on the

(01:14:42):
top of this modern structure, and they engage in a
big fight with the devil. The devil like picks up
Jose Maria and like holds him in the air, and
Jose Maria is laughing. Again. The special effects here are great.

Speaker 3 (01:14:56):
That's right, And so he Jose Maria is laughing, is
laughing even as he meets his end at the face
of the devils. The devil kills him, he throws him
off the tower to his death. But then the priest
actually does get to fight and do violence against the devil.
He ends up arming himself and fighting and killing what
it first looks like the devil to him. And I

(01:15:17):
think we, as we've been saying, we never get a
clear answer of exactly what's going on here, but he
certainly fights off and shoots some members of the Cleanup
Madrid Gang and seemingly shoots the Devil, though that might
also just be another one of them that he's hallucinating.

Speaker 2 (01:15:34):
Yeah, yeah, Again, we never get a clear answer on this,
Like if the Cleanup Madrid Gang actually are agents of
a supernatural satan, like literally agents serving the Devil, then
then they manage to defeat their own ends through their
the murderous expression of their xenophobiaan hatred when they kill

(01:15:56):
the unhused people that have the baby that is perhaps
the Antichrist.

Speaker 3 (01:16:02):
That was one way I thought you could read it.
But then again I was thinking about it, and I
was like, is there anything to indicate that the baby
there was actually the Antichrist? I think because when I
was thinking about it, it actually seems that maybe the
revelation at the end of the film was that the

(01:16:23):
birth of the Antichrist was never actually referring to the
birth of a baby, And as with lots of other
things in the story, the priest Angel was misled because
he was thinking too literally and too much on the
surface level reading of this statement about the birth of

(01:16:44):
the Antichrist, when in fact the Antichrist was not a
baby being born, but a spirit, a mentality being born
or becoming ascendant, and that mentality is embodied in Limpia Madrid.
Its ascendancy would be the ultimate at sacrilege and the
end of the world, the ultimate inversion of all good.

Speaker 2 (01:17:05):
Yeah. I like that interpretation. It's kind of like a
nice sort of middle space between just the ideas of
supernatural evil is real or he's just diluted and has
just gone on this adventure of seeking the devil where
the devil is not, but also encountering true mundane evil
and managing to defeat agents of mundane evil in the

(01:17:28):
final showdown here.

Speaker 3 (01:17:30):
Yeah. No, what is clear that is that the death
of Jose is not a that's not a hallucination. That
did really happen. So unfortunately their friend is dead and
they're very sad about this. But despite Professor Kavaan is
badly beaten and burned in this attack, but he does survive.
He's saved by the priest at the end. And so
at the end, these two of the two of the

(01:17:52):
Wise Men are the ones who are left, and we
see them in a park together. They are now unhoused drifters,
hanging out on a park bench watching a TV set
which is playing the New Professor Kevan Show, where a
different guy has taken over the show. It was like
giving a message. He's like to the old Professor Kavan,
wherever you are, we send you our applause.

Speaker 2 (01:18:14):
Yes, yeah, an interesting detail like yeah Kevan is gone,
but he's just replaced like that. The the public's hunger
for superstitious nonsense, it is too great, Like Kevan going
away doesn't stop it. Well, just someone else will fill
that space and fill that hunger. And yeah, they're just

(01:18:34):
they're seemingly just on the street at this point, believing
that they have secretly and I guess in varying degrees humbly,
having saved the world from the Antichrist and they'll never
receive any credit for it. Uh. And this last scene too,
we end up like panning up to see the final shot.
Here in this we see that it's in a park

(01:18:56):
in Madrid, and there is this fountain with this fabulous
sculpture of a fallen angel. This is I had to
look it up. This is the fountain of the Fallen
Angel in Retiro Park in Madrid. Beautiful haunting and then
its presentation. I also read on Wikipedia that it stands

(01:19:16):
at six hundred and sixty six meters above sea level. Really,
this fact did not appear to be very well sourced
on Wikipedia when I referenced it, but I did note
elsewhere that Madrid on the whole is like six hundred
and fifty meters above sea level, so close enough. I'm
buying it. I'm going to buy into it.

Speaker 3 (01:19:35):
Okay, you could say it's six sixty six meters above
sea level plus or minus ten meters maybe.

Speaker 2 (01:19:41):
At some point, yes, I don't have to be I
didn't have time to really go in depth on this.
It's entirely possible that this does factor into the design,
but I don't know. At any rate. It's a beautiful
closing shot for the picture.

Speaker 3 (01:19:54):
So that's Stay of the Beast.

Speaker 2 (01:19:55):
Yeah, good pick, Rob and total thing. Yeah. Great Filmultimately
far more hilarious and thought provoking than I anticipated. This
one's really stuck with me, and I think I'll also
have to return to this again in Christmases of the future.

Speaker 3 (01:20:13):
No doubt, though. I think on Christmas Day this year,
I'm going to have to go with some of the
other the director's other work. I'm gonna watch Mutant Action
or maybe I'll play Marbella Wece if I can find
an emulator that.

Speaker 2 (01:20:25):
Oh gosh, yeah, I know, you can pull up on YouTube.
You can pull up just the cinematic sequences from it.
So if anyone really wants to dive into it, I
believe the material is out there all right. So there
you have it. Happy Holidays. We may be doing I'm
not sure yet. We may be doing at least one
more holiday film in the next couple of weeks. We'll see.

(01:20:48):
There's a limited window here, but if you have recommendations,
write in. We'd love to hear from you. In general,
will remind you that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
primarily a science and culture podcasts with core episodes on
Tuesdays and Thursdays, but on Fridays we set aside most
serious concerns to just talk about a weird film here
on Weird House Cinema, and certainly write in if you
have thoughts on the Day of the Beast or any

(01:21:09):
other films from the various filmmakers involved in this production.

Speaker 3 (01:21:13):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:21:34):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
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