In a tourist-packed Puerta Del Sol, Madrid, a silver painted Jesus Christ (with his 8-year-old son, since it’s Dad’s custody time, of course), a green army man, SpongeBob Squarepants, an Invisible Man and Minnie Mouse, perform a heist on a pawn shop. The police arrive, capture the invisible man and Minnie Mouse, and gun down poor old SpongeBob. José (the silver Christ, played by Hugo Silva) and Tony (green army man, played by Mario Casas) hijack a taxi, driver and passenger included, and drive away, intending to escape to France. Before they can get there, though, they get stuck in a small border town called Zugarramurdi, home to a coven of evil witches led by Graciana (the always welcome Carmen Maura).
Thus begins Las Brujas De Zugarramurdi, Alex De La Iglésia’s 2013 return to what he does best: bringing Hollywood mayhem and B horror madness to the Spanish quotidian. It must be a special pleasure for a Spanish person to see the kind of hideous, run down tavern you’ve probably seen in countless horror films before, except this one is playing José Luis Moreno (a Spanish ventriloquist) tapes on the television.
The film is convoluted, messy, silly and borderline tasteless at times. It’s the kind of film where you can see, besides what I so giddily typed in the first paragraph, a hot witch humping a broomstick smeared with frog’s blood, or an old witch with sharp metal dentures, crawling around the ceiling like a spider.
The film is convoluted, messy, silly and borderline tasteless at times. It’s the kind of film where you can see, besides what I so giddily typed in the first paragraph, a hot witch humping a broomstick smeared with frog’s blood, or an old witch with sharp metal dentures, crawling around the ceiling like a spider. What about a boy being roasted in the oven, or barbecued fingers of a man from Badajoz? Or a strange man imprisoned under a toilet? If that’s not enough then what about, during a classic De La Iglesia third act, a gigantic Venus Of Willendorf walking around, with recently stomped witches glued to her feet, eating people just to shit them right out? It has everything!
Our heroes, José, Antonio and Manuel, the abducted taxi driver who ends up joining the gang, are bumbling idiots who believe that women are to blame for everything that has gone wrong in their lives. For them it’s like in The Cramps’ song, All Women Are Bad. They are evil demons dead set on destroying an honest man’s life. José is behind on maintenance payments and resents his ex-wife’s (played with gusto by Macarena Gómez) scolds and accusations of irresponsibility, Tony feels emasculated by his girlfriend’s success, brains and sexual prowess, while Manuel thinks his wife, sister and mother all get together in the coffee shop of “El Corte Inglés” (shopping centre) to badmouth him. They never take a second to think why the ladies treat them like this. Their tirades against women are so vicious that it would be offensive, if they weren’t coming out of the mouth of such irremediably stupid, oblivious losers.
Witching & Bitching (the English title, proving that it’s not only the Spanish and the Portuguese who are terrible at translating film titles) loses a bit of steam around the 40-minute mark, and it’s about 20 minutes too long, but, like the beloved The Day Of The Beast and many others from De La Iglésia’s filmography, it’s tailor made for the cult crowd.
Though if the filmmakers seem interested in making a point out of this at first, then it appears they forget about it, especially during an unfortunate scene where Eva, the broomstick humping witch (Carolina Bang and her devilish grin), goes on a completely irrational fit of jealous rage against her unlikely new beau, José. “You mean you prefer being with your friends rather than me?! I’m not enough?!” she hisses before slapping him across the face. It leaves a bit of a strange taste in your mouth, but before you can think too much about it, we meet Luismi (Javier Botet, famous for playing monsters in Mama and [REC]) and resume the joyful madness.
But Las Brujas De Zugarramurdi is not about social commentary, anyway, it’s about watching flying witches, witches with their heads on fire, witches sucking on black blooded toads and how Santiago Segura says the word “fist-fucking”.
Witching & Bitching (the English title, proving that it’s not only the Spanish and the Portuguese who are terrible at translating film titles) loses a bit of steam around the 40-minute mark, and it’s about 20 minutes too long, but, like the beloved The Day Of The Beast and many others from De La Iglésia’s filmography, it’s tailor made for the cult crowd. A film in the tradition of those that Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson unfortunately no longer make. And that’s always a good thing.
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LAS BRUJAS DE ZUGARRAMURDI, preceded by the short COLERA will be screening today (Tues 30th at 8.15pm) as part of the 10 th London Spanish Film Festival.
Read full info here: http://www.londonspanishfilmfestival.com/2014-festival/2014-films/las-brujas-de-zugarramurdi.html
