I don’t know much about de la Iglesia. Maybe I should as I have seen quite a few of his movies (well, just over half of his features, but still there aren’t that many directors I’ve seen nine movies from) and he has had a prolific career with some international success despite being very Spanish in his output. Or at least I would assume many of the references in his movies are very obscure anywhere outside of Spain.

However, he is in the auteur section for a reason. His visual style isn’t that distinct, but the way his movies approach the world is that the world is dark, but there is also humor in it. Sure, the world might be ending, but why not follow around a bumbling priest for a while. Why not send someone into a war in his clown makeup? Why not have fun with a mass burning of witches on a scale that would probably constitute a genocide?

Here’s a different point of view to his work: In 800 balas (800 Bullets – and this is a spoiler) there’s a movie being shot within the movie. There isn’t a hint of this. It feels like a very straightforward de la Iglesia movie. So, is his style already so heightened that I can’t tell the difference if he was trying to make it obvious that it’s a movie within a movie? Usually there are deliberate hints of that with overacting or otherwise just going too far with things.

He does like to play around with genres. Of course, there’s the comedy and there always seems to be at least a hint of crime, but in various movies we see a little bit of western, some action, some occult horror, some war and so on. Whatever suits his needs for the moment and often the movies are pastiches of these genres. This is sometimes to their benefit and sometimes not.

There always seems to be something problematic in his work, but you never really know whether he is making fun of it or just being toxic himself. Sometimes he is just clearly in the wrong, which I call him out on below. (Not that he will read this, but you know.)

El día de la bestia (Day of the Beast)
Spain, 1995, dir. Álex de la Iglesia

A half-star review from Letterboxd: I cant believe a grown man wrote this

A five-star review from Letterboxd: Dude, Where’s My Son of Satan?
Always a good feeling from this Christmas classic!

Ángel is an academic who has just discovered what he has been trying to figure out all his career: The day Satan will come to Earth. However, that is just a few days away and now he has to figure out where all this will happen so that he can stop it. The best way he can come up with is to sin as much as possible to gain the trust of Satan, so that maybe he can directly receive this information. While he is technically a priest, he has remained in academia his whole life, so his understanding of the real world is quite limited, so he needs help and the best help he can find is from a heavy metal fan, José María, and a TV occultist, Cavan, even if that occultist is just a fraud. He does come through in the end, though, as he is good enough of a fraud to have done actual research for his book.

The beginning of the movie is especially fun as Ángel is just trying his limited best at sinning. For example, he insults a man he is supposed to be giving the last rights to while stealing his wallet. He is just not very good at it and regularly forgets what he is supposed to be doing and reverts back to just being an elderly clergyman. In the end, that doesn’t even matter in any way.

Meanwhile de la Iglesia does try to include some amount of social commentary into the film as well. Satan’s arrival is preceded by a gang of yuppies who roam the streets murdering homeless people.

The climax of the movie is set at a real location known as Gate of Europe (Puerta de Europa). Is that a reference to isolationism? Is Satan using liberal trade policies to enter Spain? Or is it just that the towers just look ominous and was thus an interesting setting or maybe they symbolize modernity that is causing people to leave the church. The place is very distinct with two towers in incline towards each other which can look very striking from the right angle.

In either case, it turns out that Satan was already there all along.

Perdita Durango (Dance with the Devil)
Spain, 1997, dir. Álex de la Iglesia

A half-star review from Letterboxd: ???????????? there are tears in my eyes

A five-star review from Letterboxd: I need to go to sleep but De La Iglesia is my fucking hero. Full stop.

Perdita Durango is a criminal who meets Romeo, another criminal, but who is also a practitioner of Santeria. Together they need to make a sacrifice so that Romeo can go on a mission from a crime boss. So, they kidnap a young couple.

I don’t want to claim I understand too much about Santeria, because I just don’t. However, I do know that no-one really knows how many practitioners there are as the estimates vary by a factor of 10 between the lower and upper ends. Also, I do know that many of the practitioners see themselves as Catholics even though their practices are based on traditional western African religions. Historically, the religion has been lumped into the broad category of witchcraft, but I do think that’s reductive.

I’m telling you this, because I want to make it clear that I don’t know how true or fair the practice depicted in this movie is. I do know that they don’t sacrifice people. After all, despite the problems with the estimates in their numbers, there are millions of them (probably). So, even if each small group killed someone every once in a while, that would cause enough deaths for someone to take notice.

Also, the movie gets very rapey. This is kind of a problem when the rapists are supposedly also the protagonists. That’s kind of the problem through the movie: It never really knows where it wants to go. Who are we supposed to be rooting for? Our outlaws aren’t exactly people you would like to identify with.

This is a very weird comparison, but I’m going to make it anyway: The people in Billy Wilder’s movies always did the right thing, but they always did it too late. Like Joe Gillis in Sunset Blvd who finally tells the truth as he sees it to Norma Desmond only to find out that things have gone too far and then be shot dead by her. This movie kind of has the same feel. Not that it’s anywhere on par with Sunset Blvd, of course, as very, very few movies are. Also Gillis is somewhat more forgivable than Perdita.

This isn’t a very good movie, but I wanted to include it because of the interesting depiction of Santeria. It just happens that I’m not sure how good the representation is.

Muertos de risa (Dying of Laughter)
Spain, 1999, dir. Álex de la Iglesia

A half-star review from Letterboxd: esto me pasa por dejar que mi madre escoja pelis
(Author’s note: I am going against my principle of not using automated translations I’m not sure about, but since this is the only half-star review and I believe this means something along the lines of “I shouldn’t let my mother choose the movies” and Google Translate kind of concurs, so here we are.)

A five-star review from Letterboxd: the TRUE kings of comedy. live action tom and jerry. between this and ravenous we were spoiled for homo psychological warfare movies in 1999. I love that he actually got uri geller to do his stupid spoon thing again

This is the story of two TV comedians, Bruno and Nino, and we see early on that they hate each other so much that they end up shooting each other in front of the cameras. This is the story of how they found themselves in that situation.

I assume there are a lot of culture specific references here that I simply don’t understand. This happens during the end of Franco regime, so early ‘70s. How much do we outside of Spain actually know about the era? We can infer some things just based on context, but that doesn’t mean that we can get the more subtle homages to various entertainment programs of the era.

Here’s the problem with movies like this: It depicts fictional comedians and you need to make them at least believably funny or make the audience believe that the fictional audience would find them funny. So, either you do a lot of work to give them an actual act or you find a shortcut. They used the shortcut. During their first time on stage together, Nino freezes and Bruno decides to slap him out of it. The audience loves it, so it becomes their whole act: Finding excuses for Bruno to slap Nino.

Initially Nino is all about this. He just wants the laughs and even signals Bruno to do it again. However, after Nino invites other people to slap Bruno live on air during an interview, the slaps become a point of contention between them.

Even with the absence of cultural understanding, the movie is funny in a very violent and disturbing way, just the way I like it. The two of them, who should have a lot going on in their lives, dedicate themselves into making the other miserable and they seem to be unable to even do it in a way that wouldn’t make themselves also miserable while doing it. It also costs them a lot of money and opportunities, but personal vengeance is so much more important to them than anything else.

La comunidad (Common Wealth)
Spain, 2000, dir. Álex de la Iglesia

A half-star review from Letterboxd: I saw this film in Spanish class… it was so bad, boring and all the adjectives I can say to say it’s really really…mm shit?

A five-star review from Letterboxd: a very exciting film following a diva just trying to get some dough

I wonder if the wordplay in the English title works in the original?

Julia is a real-estate agent who is trying to rent out an apartment. It looks good, but there are problems with it, so she just ends up staying there. Then, one night, a neighbor dies and she finds a hidden cache of hundreds of millions of pesos (which would be a couple of million in euros or dollars) in his apartment. So, what does one do with that? You can’t exactly turn up at a bank and just hand it in. Also, soon enough she finds out that everyone else in the building knew of the money and were just waiting for the man to die so that they could divide it among themselves.

Mostly the movie is just these neighbors accosting Julia in different ways before everything erupts in less violence than you would expect based on de la Iglesia’s previous movies. Sure, there’s some gore, but still less than normal. Well, his normal.

There’s also this moral ambiguity that always seems to be present in his work. The person helping Julia out in the end is also a man who has been watching her shower from the opposing window. Of course, Julia doesn’t have any claim on the money either, but the movie is still setup in such a way that she is our protagonist. I guess someone has to be.

The building is decrepit, but the one apartment is very nice. Like an oasis in a desert, except that the desert really wants to come in when, at one point, it starts to rain cockroaches.

The movie is pretty badly structured and could probably use another round of edits, but it is still enjoyable.

800 balas (800 Bullets)
Spain, 2002, dir. Álex de la Iglesia

A half-star review from Letterboxd: absoluto horror cancer pedofilia
(Author’s note: I don’t believe there’s any need to translate that.)

A five-star review from Letterboxd: much more heartwarming than expected. ADLI is really really fucking good.

So, yeah, there’s a scene in which a local sex worker asks the kid whether he wants to touch her breast and then she guides him into doing it “properly”. Later, he wakes up and she is now naked in the same bed all of the above happened, implying that something else must have occurred in the night (although he is still wearing his clothes at this point). It’s made to seem pretty innocent, but at the same time, there should be no excusing these kinds of situations, nor normalizing them.

With that in mind… Carlos’s grandmother accidentally divulges that his grandfather is still alive and living in Almeria, a region of Spain that was often used as a stand-in for the American west and Carlos’s grandpa used to be a stuntman, but has since turned into running his own Western show in what used to be a town used in filming movies. Carlos, who is supposed to go skiing with his school, ditches the rest to go meet his grandpa for the first time. When his mother finds out, she sees this as a transgression and decides to buy the land the town is on to build a big resort, so the grandpa and his colleagues stage a defense.

As the five-star review above stated, this is indeed unexpectedly heartwarming. Not on the level of the best British feelgood movies, but you know, you can’t expect much to be on par with those. At the same time, that part is also pretty small in the big picture, as mostly it’s just these aging idiots having fun and then being there in the standoff. The kid is mostly there to just witness and pull on our heartstrings and I would readily understand if someone feels that that part of the movie is just manipulative. Especially, as I didn’t, like the movie did, forget that the kid was just a complete asshole in the beginning of the movie.

In some ways the movie feels like de la Iglesia just had access to a bunch of toys and wanted to use them all. Toys being the town, horses, and also all sorts of heavy police equipment.

Crimen ferpecto (Ferpect Crime)
Spain, 2004, dir. Álex de la Iglesia

A half-star review from Letterboxd: you can really, really tell that this movie was made by a man
(Author’s note: This is also the most popular review of the movie on the site.)

A five-star review from Letterboxd: Masterclass on clownery

It is weird to see someone smoke while drinking coffee in a department store cafeteria. You don’t even see that much smoking in movies anymore, but that seems like especially weird even though I do have vague memories of this being allowed in some such places when I was a kid.

There’s some casual homophobia early in the film. I find this peculiar, because Spain has been fine with homosexuality for a while now and is still in the top 10 when it comes to LGBTQ+ rights and acceptance. I guess in a way you could argue that it’s representative of how the character functions in his misogynistic way, but then there’s another homophobic remark just a little later by another character. You could argue that it is still a way to show that these two men are very toxic and they are indeed.

Rafael is very sure of himself and that he will win the sales competition to become the floor manager of the huge department store he works at. However, despite thinking that he has won it, he fails at the last hurdle when one of the customers returns a fur jacket he sold her. So, there’s an altercation between him and the actual winner, which leads to the accidental death of the other man. When he tries to get rid of the body, the body disappears for Rafael to later find out that it was taken by a woman working at the department store and Rafael is now beholden to her.

Most of the movie is Rafael trying to find ways to get rid of his new woman, who he manages to convince to keep the whole thing quiet by telling her that he loves him. This eventually leads him to take the lie so far that they even get married.

The movie does have a nice twist at the end. It is not often that I see satisfactory twists I didn’t see coming from miles away.

Balada triste de trompeta (The Last Circus)
Spain, 2010, dir. Álex de la Iglesia

A half-star review from Letterboxd: Unfortunately, though there was much that left an impression, the cringe prevailed. Perhaps that was the directors intent, but it didn’t carry me through. Still a suggestion if you like clown on clown action

A five-star review from Letterboxd: Destined to be a sad clown, don’t try to fight it

The movie starts with a scene where two clowns are entertaining a crowd of kids. During their performance, a bombing commences and as they try to keep the children calm, the Republican Militia enters in order to draft everyone who can carry a weapon into their fight against Franco. But this isn’t their story. This is the story of the son of one of the clowns, Javier. He grows up to be a clown as well, but can’t help but be a sad one. After joining a circus, he falls in love with a woman, but that woman, Natalia, is in a abusive relationship with another clown, Sergio. This leads to a series of escalating events in which the two men compete for the woman without ever really giving any thought to that woman’s opinions.

While de la Iglesia has written most of his movies with other people, usually Jorge Guerricaechevarría, this one he wrote himself. It does have very different tone than his other movies. While it still aims to be funny, the movie is not playful in the same way as his other work. It’s much darker, which also shows in the coloring of the movie.

The abuse from Sergio towards Natalia is just graphic in a way that makes it impossible to find anything worth laughing at after we first witness it. Not that the war in the beginning made it easy either.

It’s also weird that this is the movie where de la Iglesia seems to be most aware of the toxic nature of how men tend to regard women in his movies. I wonder how much that has to do with Natalia, who is played by Carolina Bang, de la Iglesia’s future wife (they married in 2014 soon after which she stopped acting and became a producer).

While I enjoy Day of the Beast more, I think this might be de la Iglesia’s actual best movie, at least from the ones I’ve seen. Sure, it lacks the comedic edge, but he is also delving into territory that is not familiar to him, but in which he does have something to say. The weird thing is that on paper, so much of the movie is so absurd that if you skimmed through it, you might think it’s funny, but then there’s the brutal beatings that just take the fun out of it. Again, on paper, this might just be bad, but as a story about how absurd the world can be, it works quite nicely.

Las brujas de Zugarramurdi (Witching and Bitching)
Spain, 2013, dir. Álex de la Iglesia

A half-star review from Letterboxd: Accurate title. It’s about witches and every character just bitches about the opposite sex.
(Author’s note: The actual title in English would be “The Witches of Zugarramurdi”, Zugarramurdi being a small town in Basque Country where infamous witch trials occurred in the 17th century. No mention of bitches in the original title.)

A five-star review from Letterboxd: Silly. Cool. Witchy. Funny. Actiony. Dark. Light.
Everything I could’ve wanted out of this kids film. Dug it.
(Author’s note, just in case: No. It might be childish, but it is not a children’s film.)

There are some movies in this series I’ve never seen in a language I know. This is one of them. I have German/Dutch DVD of this and I can understand some words from both of those languages and Spanish, so I might be missing something. Most importantly, the opening credits include a lot of historic women and it is implied that they were witches. This includes some more modern ones like Merkel, Kahlo and… Thatcher. Okay, maybe they have a point.

The movie starts with a gang of men dressed as street performers doing a heist (well, they only rob a pawn shop, it seems). One of them has his son, Sergio, with him. The whole thing goes haywire and they end up shooting multiple people. After the police arrive, they need to get out of there and hide, so they hijack a taxi, stash the passenger into the boot and force the driver to take them to the French border. On their way, they stumble upon cannibalistic witches while the cops and Sergio’s mother are right on their heels.

The witch trials in this region were one of the worst in history. In Salem 25 people died, in the Basque witch trials in Spain, around 7,000 were murdered. And yes, I would count executing people on these grounds as murder. While I couldn’t find a good source on this, it would appear that over 2% of the Basque population was eradicated. So, sure, make fun of that.

There are a couple of what appear to be transwomen among the witches. Since I have no idea what is being said in those discussions, I can’t be sure whether they are men playing ciswomen or men playing transwomen. Still, it is refreshing that in this movie where men and women are largely very divided that someone can break the barriers. Whether this is for camp only I can’t say, but it is also fitting that witches specifically refuse to conform to traditional gender norms.