EL DIA DE LA BESTIA (DAY OF THE BEAST)

Dia De La Bestia Movie Trailer

A small and harmless looking priest, father Ángel Berriartúa, Professor of Theology at Deusto University, has been studying the ?Apocalypse of Saint John? for over 25 years with the aim of deciphering the hidden message in that Holy Text. He finally reaches the conclusion that the Antichrist will be born in Madrid, the 25th of December 1995, before dawn.The problem is that he doesn?t know the exact spot of this delivery. Distressed over the lack of time left and prepared to get in touch with the followers of the Evil One before it is too late, he decides to arm himself to the teeth and launch an improvised criminal career in the Spanish capital. A young heavy metal fan, José María, helps him to get in touch with Professor Cavan, a character that is a mixture between medium, fortune-teller and mystic. The three will join together to form an improbable team with a common goal: capturing the Antichrist.

Spain´s Cult movie from Underground (now Nationally famous and acclaimed) film director, Alex de la Iglesia, El Día de la Bestia (Day of the Beast) was a movie which set a host of new technical standards for the Spanish film industry The movie was still in the top ten after five months of being released, and is now considered to be a Spanish modern classic.

Dia de la Bestia was Alex de la Iglesia 's second film, in which he brought the topic of the return of the Antichrist to the eyes of the Spanish moviegoers. El día de la bestia (The Day of the Beast) took six Spanish Academy Goyas,including that of Best Director. The movie took in over $5 million in Spain, and, established Alex de la Iglesia with his first International recognition. Dia de la Bestia won the first prize at the Gerardmer Fantastic Arts Festival and succeded in making sales to major countries around the World. After having made Día de la bestia, AlexDe La Iglesia has become one of the hottest young directors in Europe. John Hopewell's review is presented below.

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 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.".

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Product Details

Actors: Santiago Segura; Alex Angulo

Directors: Alex De La Iglesia

Format: NTSC, Dolby, Import, Widescreen

Region: Region 1 U.S. and Canada only

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 De la Iglesia did sell his soul to the Devil. During Berlin, BMG acquired distribution rights to Latin America for his movie Perdita Durango. Tony Kirkhope´s Metro Tartan took El día de la bestia for the UK. El día has also sold to Japan.

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.

Watch a Scene from Dia De La Bestia

In this scene, Jòse Marìa offers a tab of LSD (Un tripi) to the priest, who explains to him that he has a mission. The Antichrist is to be born that very evening, and the priest has the theoryu that he must commit a serious sin in order to sell his soul to the Devil in order to meet him (and kill him), but that he doesn't have a clue how to sell his soul. He explains that he has a book, which doesn't explain clearly what he has to do, and thus, he asks the "Satanic" Jòse Marìa to assist him.

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 was, the biggest English-language picture of the year coming out of
Spain in it's time: Perdita Durango. Based on American writer Barry Gifford, the film was shot 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 Gotham 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 inspirations 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 towarn 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.

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Primarily I wanted to explode the 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."

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Other Reviews (Amazon)

By Eric Zarahn

The eschatological plot of The Day of the Beast, which has been sufficiently related in the synopsis, does not circumscribe it. It is a grand and generous piece of post-modern art. It is not a horror, a comedy, or an admixture. Rather, this is a very earnest meditation on both the absurdity of aspects of the Western tradition (with the Catholic Church as a worthy proxy) in particular and the human condition in general. By playing the ridiculousness of literal interpretations of the New Testament (explicitly eschatology, but implicitly the whole kit and caboodle) off of the (or less cynically,"an") alternative of grime, incest, illiterate ignorance (to be contrasted with the literate ignorance of the church), and desolation, a highly sophisticated tension is developed which can engender a mild melancholia in the viewer, despite the wild action unfolding on thescreen. Though the perspective is ironic, the characters' perspectives are not, each fully immersed in his own tiny life and each taking that life very seriously. The impetus provided to the priest by his belief is the catalyst for the plot development. It drives him away from his cloister and to the ugly city. Though the belief, taken on its own terms has universal implications (in its own universe), we see the priest as a man motivated by a set of ideas and a worldview into which he has been indoctrinated since a young boy. To him it is reality, and in fact there can be no other reality to him. Though this is true for all characters in all stories, the use of such an extreme belief makes this point effortlessly. A perhaps fantastic (and perhaps not) thing is that his strength of belief is able to gain him confederates, the TV charlatan and the Satanist. The question of whether their quest is true or not is irrelevant. Indeed, the viewer even demanding a judgment on whether there is an absolute truth to the quest would burst the dialectical soap bubble. What is happening is a car-crash of beliefs, all born of non-sense. Despite this heady subtext, this film is not in any way distant. The acting is highly engaging, there is action, the city settings are full of color and pleasing to the eye in their stylized grittiness, and the dialogue is a satisfying blend of the absurd and the prosaic, done so well in some Spanish cinema. It would be wrong to say the ending is ironic, because to do so would mean having missed the deliciously ironic nature of the film from the outset. But it is indeed a delightful ending. We almost blush at our previous preoccupation with the conflict between biblical non-sense and everyday non-sense when we see two broken, haggard men in a city park, alone except for each other, and heroes only to each other. Ultimately, this is a film about companionship, reminding us that passing time inlimbus patrum with friend than alone.

Review By Alessandro Bruno
There have been many movies made about the apocalypse and the second coming from damien to the overblown Arnold Schwarzennegeer extravaganzas - End of Days. This is easily the best of them. It approaches the subject with erudition, sarchasm and humor. I have seen the film in Spanish in Spain in the year it was released and would not recommend any other version than the original because the performances are excellent. The Italian TV magician/Producer speaking Spanish with an Italian accent is really funny and the expressions of the stoned heavy metal devil worship expert also need to be understood in their native language to get the full effect. The story takes plece on new year's eve (1995) and a monk has calculated on the basis of a biblical code he has uncovered (very smart writing here)that the apocalypse is imminent. As he searches for experts on exorcism and devil worship he runs into an Italian TV host of a paranormal phenomena show and a metallica fan who runs a devil worship occult shop. The three set out to save the world. Th ecast also features a very sext Maria Grazia Cucinotta of 'Il Postino' fame. It's a shame north-american audiences are not too familiar with this one.