The Day of the Beast Review
I’m hard pressed to recall the last time I saw a feature length horror movie in Spanish (if not a Spanish horror movie in general). I understand the language, but my point of view in English, to keep it short and simple, differs greatly. Hence why I’m only going to (at least try and) point out what I got from that mindset. 25 minutes in and I see one thing I can’t help but laud the movie for: essentially reducing CG into an intentional gimmick rather than a substitute for realism, like most 90s movies failed at. The premise is brilliant but insane: a priest trying to commit as many sins/wrongdoings as possible so as to find a way to contact the devil and prevent the biblical apocalypse, even if it means going to ridiculous extremes like looking up back-masked/subliminal heavy metal music and contacting some TV psychic. This alone allows it to prove how dark humor is essentially its own horror-comedy when taken as over-the-top as it does throughout the first two thirds. Some bits choose that route in a way that recall Edgar Wright if he directed his own take on End of Days after binging Del Toro’s Doña Lupe, other bits intertwine with real life horror (as commentary from what I could tell) to the point they literally even sacrifice subtlety, albeit too quickly, and mix/blur together throughout the last third. It doesn’t really go full-on (yet brief) horror until that same ending, though even then the horror-comedy aspects still worked to the point I didn’t even mind a payoff.