Exorcismo: Defying a Dictator & Raising Hell in Post-Franco Spain (1972-2024) Severin Blu-ray Set Review

The People Who Own the Dark (1975) Plot:

World War III turns the population blind or insane.

 

Review:

A group of doctors, models, and socialites convene in a mansion in the hills of Spain, and when the night draws near, they put masks on and begin to “enjoy pleasure without limits” (orgy!), and just as they’re about to get serious, World War 3 erupts. At first, it appears to be an earthquake, but when they look outside, they realize that a nuclear attack has happened, and they begin to panic. They argue about what to do next, and soon they send a party of men out to the city to collect food and gasoline. When the men go to the city, they find that the general population has gone blind, and there is chaos in the streets. One of the men is killed in a scuffle, and the rest go back to the mansion to share the news. Meanwhile, some of their party are going insane. One fat doctor takes off all his clothes and runs around like an animal, and the others get close to killing each other. One doctor, played by Paul Naschy, emerges as the leader of the group because he’s the only one who hasn’t lost his head, and he finds the time to strike a romance with one of the models. He observes the insect activity outside is drastically altered, and therefore, he understands that doom is imminent. Soon, the mansion is overrun with hordes of the blind townspeople who have decided to murder the socialites, and Naschy and his girlfriend are the only ones to escape the zombie-like onslaught. They are rescued by a bus commandeered by hazmat-suited soldiers, and just when they think they’re safe, Naschy and his girlfriend are poison-gassed along with everyone else in the bus and dumped in a ditch.

 

I’m not really sure what this movie is trying to say. We know from almost the get-go that the group we’re introduced to are not “good people.” Before they begin their hedonistic orgy, they make a toast to their patron saint, the Marquis de Sade, so I suppose they all deserve some sort of bad fate, but gee whiz, they get it good. I think it’s funny that all of the blind people wear dark sunglasses, and there is never an explanation as to why they go blind. Also, why gas the people after saving them? Doesn’t make sense. Paul Naschy fans might like this more than others, and it’s a change of pace for him after playing famous movie monsters. Directed by Leon Klimovsky.

 

The Bell of Hell (1973) Plot:

A young man is released from an insane asylum, and he goes home and plots revenge on his family for sending him away.

Review:

Juan (or John, played by Renaud Verley) is released from a mental institution after years of incarceration, and he goes home to the small village where he once had a normal life. His handicapped aunt (played by Viveca Lindfors) has taken control of his family’s estate after her sister – Juan’s mother – committed suicide, and Juan’s three pretty cousins Esther, Teresa, and Maria live in the home where Juan grew up. It’s clear from the start that Juan is unstable: He plays cruel and ghastly practical jokes, makes a plaster mold of his own face and body, digs graves in remote locations for some unknown purpose, and spends his weekdays working at the slaughterhouse where he learns to slaughter cows very efficiently. His female (and very nubile) cousins are attracted to him in ways he’s not quite prepared to deal with, and though they realize that their mother wronged him years ago by having him committed, their mother restricts Juan’s freedoms and keeps him on a pretty tight leash, not allowing him to reclaim his passport or giving him the assurance that he’s welcome back home. When his elaborate plot of revenge hits a snag when he develops a conscience just in the nick of time, he’s punished by the townsfolk during the ceremony of erecting the new cathedral bell in the town square.

A strange pall of doom and madness clouds this haunting film from director Claudio Guerin, who was killed in an accident on the final day of filming. The real scenes of cow slaughter intermingled with sexual imagery and torture – not to mention the off kilter mood the main character exhibits during the duration of the film – make this is truly weird and unsettling movie to watch, but it’s a strong, indelible film no matter how you consider it. The soundtrack is filled with the singing of children, reminding me of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies where little kids sing the nursery rhyme of Freddy Krueger. It’s just an unusual piece of work, and the fact that the director died while making it only turns it into something that much more disturbing.

 

Morbus (1983) Plot:

Zombies overrun a backwoods area where a writer and a prostitute hunker down in a cabin.

Review:

Reanimating the dead is a result of a fluke combination of some fluids that a scientist discovers, which sets off a micro apocalypse in a small Spanish town, starting with the morgue. Shambling zombies migrate towards the woods, where a guy with mommy fetishes hires two hookers to read him bedtime stories in the back of his sedan in the middle of a dark wooded area. Zombies show up, snatch and devour the guy and one of the hookers, but the other hooker, a real looker named Anna (Carmen Serret, who spends almost the entire film completely naked), runs off alone in the dark. Knocked out by one thing or another, Anna wakes up naked in a cabin owned by a fiction author named Juan (Ramon Ferre), and he insists that he saved her life, but he’s not in any way, shape, or form concerned that this naked beauty just showed up near his cabin without any clothes on. They get acquainted (wink, wink, nudge, nudge), and spend the next few hours together, and she keeps insisting that there were zombies around the area, but he doesn’t believe her. Meanwhile, Juan has a creepy, cackling neighbor named Shui Shi (Victor Israel who looks like he belongs in a loony bin) who loves ogling Anna in her perpetual nude state (she never really bothers to cover up), and really, who can blame him? When a Satanic cult performing an orgy in the cabin near Juan’s becomes overrun with zombies, the undead shamblers eventually make it to Juan’s … where they ruin Juan’s chances with Anna.

A goofy sex and nudity-filled “horror” movie that isn’t the least bit concerned with scaring anyone with its horniness and lame-brained attitude, Morbus still manages to have a weirdness to it that miraculously manages to haunt with its nightmarish mood and co-star Israel’s nutty performance. The obvious reason to enjoy it is its near constant nudity and nonchalant attitude towards sex and playful randiness, and filmmaker Ignasi P. Ferre seems to have wanted to reach and appeal to the lowest common denominator here, and I think he succeeded on that front.

 

The Priest (1978) Plot:

A priest suffers from chronic lust, which leads him down a dark path of denying God.

Review:

Father Miguel (Simon Andreu) is part of a parish of priests, and their superior is completely exasperated with several of his underlings, namely with Miguel, who is chronically lustful and prone to vivid sexual fantasies, some of which involve children. Told (unhelpfully) to simply ignore his lusts, Miguel’s most fervent frustration lies with the fact that he takes the confession of a married woman whose husband no longer performs traditional sex with her, and she continually confesses to Miguel that her husband sodomizes her on a daily basis, which Miguel finds to be an abomination and a sacrilege. But the fact that he knows this personal detail about her puts him in a position where he feels he can no longer take her confession without lusting after her, but the whole thing backfires when she confesses that she is in love with him. Taking his frustration elsewhere, Miguel visits a prostitute to actually feel physical intimacy with a woman without having to imagine it, and afterwards, he confesses to his superior what he has done, which gets him demoted and sent on a sabbatical where he goes home, visits his mother, and rekindles old traumatic memories of his first sexual experience, which we see in vivid detail. As a boy, he was peer pressured into violating a chicken, which might explain a lot of his problems. Afterwards, when he goes home, he realizes he may not believe in God anymore, and he mutilates himself, much to the shock and horror of his parish, who save his life. He leaves the priesthood, manhood and faith missing, but his honor somehow intact.

Equally horrifying, unsettling, and miraculously human, The Priest is incredible graphic with its sexuality and frankness, even to me, and that’s saying a lot. Writer / director Eloy de la Iglesia seems to completely grasp this world and this deeply lonely and alienating mindset of a man who simply cannot control his urges, but manages to self flagellate himself to the extreme in order to purge his sins. It’s not an easy watch at all, and viewers should be warned by its extreme content. Lead actor Andreu does an indelible and commendable job with this delicate material.

 

Poppers (1984) Plot:

A young man is released from prison years early, only to find that there’s a sinister reason why.

Review:

Handsome young rocker Santos (Miguel Ortiz) is at a nightclub with his buddies and girlfriend one night when a very rash reaction from him ends up in the stabbing death of his best friend, by his hands. Sent to prison for murder, Santos is paroled after only two years, shaving years off his sentence for good behavior. On his first night out, he meets a sexy and way-out-of-his league dancer named Lola (Giannina Facio, who would later marry Ridley Scott after appearing in many of his films), and life seems good for a second until Santos receives an invitation by some very wealthy older men who invite him to participate in a “hunt” where he’ll be the quarry on their sprawling natural preserve. The penny drops: One of the rich men was the father of his best friend whom he killed, and he wants revenge, and this offer to run for his life isn’t a choice at all, but a thing he must do now that he’s already on their turf. They hand him a bag with a fortune in jewels and if he can survive the day and night and escape the preserve with his life and the bag, he is free to go, and somehow Santos shocks them all by not only surviving but killing a few of them in the process. When he makes it back to civilization, he teams up with Lola who helps him turn the tables on the remaining cadre members who are still trying to find him, but instead of remaining the hunted, Santos and Lola become the hunters and sneakily plot a way to kill the other rich guys and keep all the jewels.

Trendy and sexy with flares of homosexuality and punk rock lifestyles, Poppers begins very unconventionally, but then lines up into a very conventional “Most Dangerous Game” territory and never quite recovers from that line of thought. At first, I had no idea where the movie was going and was very intrigued by it, but then it’s basically Hard Target and Surviving the Game all over again, which is fine, I guess, but not very challenging. The film is nicely shot with fluorescents and shadowy light and has some cool songs on the soundtrack, and director Jose Maris Castellvi, who didn’t do much else for cinema, seems to have really understood the subcultures he captured here.

 

Triangle of Lust (1978) Plot:

A woman who parachutes out of a plane before it crashes ends up stranded with a handful of kidnappers who keep her hostage.

Review:

Susi (Patricia Adriani) is a beautiful young woman having an affair with a wealthy man, whose wife orders him to dispose of her. Obedient to a fault, he takes her on his private plane, and when they’re in the middle of nowhere, he acts as if the plane is about to go down, and he hands her a parachute and shoves her out the window. But he made a mistake and gave her the wrong parachute, which works, and she ends up landing safely on a beach, completely stranded. She’s approached by a swarthy guy with a gun, who takes her to his base camp, which is a farm in the middle of a jungle where Susi realizes that she’s in big trouble. Two men and two women (played by Barbara Rey and Manuela Wondratschek) are hiding out in this place, keeping a kidnapped prisoner buried in a box in the ground, just waiting for the ransom to be paid, and now that Susi is part of the equation, she becomes their prisoner as well. At first, the men treat her like a sex object, trying to rape her, but their girlfriends (who are very open to swapping partners and walking around in the nude all day long) are Susi’s only allies, but after attempting to escape twice, Susi is forced to stay tied up and bound to a bedroom until the other prisoner is brought in to join her. When she and the other prisoner (a young man with wealthy parents) work together to free themselves and grab a gun, it’s at the most opportune time because police swarm the farm and lay siege to the kidnappers, who scramble to make it out alive. Susi’s odyssey is only beginning because what happens next is pretty wild.

From Spanish exploitation / sexy movie filmmaker Hubert Frank, Triangle of Lust has a paper-thin plot that is sometimes overly complicated and obtuse, while also being completely bone-headedly conceived in a way that makes it feel like a smutty sex novel that is meant to appeal to the lowest common denominator, but I tell you what: I liked it! It’s complete trash, but it had a level of fantasy that I was able to escape into in a way that I appreciated, especially as a man, and it really has no reason to exist other than to feature totally nude women walking around for no purpose whatsoever, and yet there’s a level of danger and exoticism and eroticism that doesn’t exist in movies made today outside of a pornographic film. It’s smutty, sexy, and strange, with a dreamlike quality that suddenly turns nightmarish, and if there are more movies like it, then point them out to me, please.

 

Faces (1978) Plot:

A sculptor with a lack of purpose meets a woman who becomes his muse … and his doom.

Review:

At 28 years old, Juan (Juan Pardo) is already a sensation in the art world, but he is also at a mid-life crisis and has lost his vitality and his inspiration and has a strange waking-nightmare sensation where every person he sees has no face at all, just a blank “no face.” While on an airplane, he sits next to a woman (Carmen Sevilla, billed as “The Woman”) who stands out from everyone else because he can see her face for what it is, and he instantly feels a connection to her. He convinces her to spend the next few days with him at his art studio, which sits in an idyllic seaside paradise, and she sits for him as he begins to sculpt her image in a life-sized dimension out of clay. They make love and they become very close over the next few weeks, but she remains distant and strange towards him, although the word “love” is spoken more than once between them. When he realizes that he knows nothing about her, Juan visits an old lover named Teresa (Barbara Rey) who dabbles in witchcraft to try to get some insight into his new lover, but The Woman seems protected by her own brand of witchcraft, but also has a man in white shadowing her wherever they go. When people around them begin to die, Juan begins to wonder just who this strange woman is he’s brought home, but by the time he gets any answers, he may be too late.

Surreal and slow moving, Faces is a supernatural-lite romantic drama from filmmaker Juan Ignacio Galvan. It starts off on an allegorical note and keeps going in that direction, leaving the viewer in a state of confusion by its frustratingly obtuse conclusion, but there is something there, just not enough to make it worth watching more than once unless you find connections to its rather aloof characters.

 

Bloody Sex (1981) Plot:

Three girlfriends become waylaid in a small village where they find shelter in a mansion / castle where a killer lives.

 

Review:

After meeting at a conference about witchcraft, three female university students – Norma (Rosa Romero) and her two lesbian friends Andrea (Vicky Palma) and Laura (Diana Conca) – are on a road trip vacation together when their car breaks down near a sprawling mansion / castle. They wander in, and the lady of the house is an artist named Maria (Mirta Miller), who has an adult son, who is mute (Ovidi Montllor). Maria welcomes the three young women into her home, and offers to put them up for a few days while their car is being repaired in the village, and sure enough two of the three gals get right to having sex as soon as possible, while Maria begins using Norma as her model (nude) for painting. Meanwhile the mute son is lurking around and indulging in his voyeuristic tendencies while the other two are having sex, but when a killer begins killing the gals one by one (without the others knowing what happened yet), Maria’s house is clearly not a safe place for the girls, who only have a limited time before realizing that they’re going to be killed unless they get smart real quick.

A giallo with some extra heaping doses of sex and nudity, plus one particularly graphic and shocking murder scene, Bloody Sex is appropriately titled, and should appeal to fans of giallos as a little-known film in the genre. The film has a twist ending and a downbeat mood that hasn’t lost any of its effect all these years later. From filmmaker Manuel Esteba, who seems to have specialized in sexier-than-usual horror films and slashers.

 

Sins of a Nympho (1979) Plot:

A filmmaker’s party turns into an orgy … for the damned.

 

Review:

Word spreads around town that a local filmmaker is going to have a hot industry mixer party that night, and all the cool, pretty people make sure to be there. A young guy named Fermin (Fernando Martin) thinks it would be a great idea to invite his new girlfriend Stela (Azucena Hernandez), who is the type of girl you bring home to meet mom, but not necessarily the type you bring to a hip party, and so he asks her to go with him, but she refuses. It’s not the only thing she refuses from Fermin, whom she hasn’t yet gone all the way with, and so Fermin goes stag to the party, not realizing that the party is going to end up being a complete bacchanalia of sex and drugs. The party is in full swing (wink wink) when Fermin is surprised to find that Stela shows up to show her solidarity to him, but the horny, do-anything-with-anyone partygoers grab Stela and basically throw her to the swine (pretty much literally as there is a loose pig running around) just for the giggles, and much to Fermin’s shock and horror Stela allows herself to be degraded and stripped naked (along with everyone else who have absolutely no inhibitions) just to prove that she’s strong and hasn’t a care in the world, which wounds Fermin deeply. As the party becomes more out of control, the ultimate test comes when the partygoers turn to a ritual of rape of the unwilling women, and when Stela is offered up as a sacrifice, Fermin must be her rapist if he is to spare her from being raped by a stranger. But then, the party turns even deadlier when everyone is deliberately poisoned, leading to a mass death … but fate has a twist in store for Fermin and Stela.

Mostly a plotless affair with vague political subtext enmeshed within a savage orgy and a flesh parade that goes on a downward spiral, Sins of a Nympho might’ve thought it was “saying something,” but all I read into it was an excuse to be completely without restraint, but it’s far too loose and frivolous to be taken seriously. Filmmaker Miguel Madrid was obviously thinking he was making something important here, but I see through his facade of sex and subtext and see emptiness.

 

Creation of the Damned (1974) Plot:

Nuclear holocaust forces two couples to coexist in a bomb shelter.

 

Review:

Two excruciatingly boring adult couples and an older teenaged boy are stuck in a large bomb shelter after worldwide nuclear devastation. They play billiards, eat their deceased cat, bicker amongst themselves, lust after each other’s wife, and eventually kill each other before the movie’s grand finale, which has the most attractive of the wives stepping out of the shelter and facing the elements.

 

There is very little to be gleaned from this time waster, and if you decide you have to see it, know that the director, Jose Uloa, could have made you care about the cat before the characters ate it for dinner, but he didn’t, so there you go. Also known as Refuge of Fear.

 

The Devil’s Exorcist (1975) Plot:

A teen girl becomes possessed, leading to tragedy and horror.

Review:

Teen beauty Sheila (Inma de Santis) is both blessed by beauty and privilege, but cursed because evil chooses her to toy with when she becomes possessed by a malevolent spirit that completely changes her, body and soul. She becomes orphaned by her own hand, but no one suspects she is to blame, and she is adopted by a wealthy family who tries to protect and love her, but wherever she goes, death and calamity follows. She kills children and even pets (dog lovers will be shocked and stunned by the animal death in this film), and soon she murders her adopted mother, leaving her to be taken in by another woman, who will soon face a fate worse than death … possession!

Produced in the wake of the enormous success of The Exorcist, The Devil’s Exorcist rode the coattails of a great many other rip-offs, but it doesn’t just follow the same structure, but instead kind of falls into the evil children / demonic kids category, almost to the point of feeling like The Omen in a lot of ways. Star de Santis is stunningly beautiful in the film, but she played evil pretty well. Sadly, her life was cut short in a car accident a little over a decade later. From director Jorge Darnell.

 

Battered Flesh (1978) Plot:

A woman is sent to prison, where she lives much of her life, trying to maintain her dignity.

Review:

After her arrest for years of writing bad checks, Costaleta (Esperanza Roy) is sent to a women’s prison, which during the regime of Franco dictatorship was virtually a death sentence. A humble woman with flaws, Costaleta has already spent much of her life in and out of prison, and so she knows how to navigate the social structure during incarceration. She becomes well liked amongst her fellow inmates because of her calm, rational demeanor, and yet she is despised by the butch prison guards who delight in torturing her and making her life a living hell. When She does a selfless act (she helps a fellow inmate’s child on the outside by utilizing her knowledge of the law), she gains the trust and respect of her fellow inmates, who then look to her as a leader, and she earns the love and devotion of the woman she helped, a lesbian named Senta (Barbara Rey), with whom she begins a very careful relationship within prison, which is taboo during the period. Years pass, and Senta is released, and then after incredible resilience Costaleta is paroled, and when she is released, she tracks Senta down, only to find heartbreak waiting for her when Senta has moved on with another woman, leading to Costaleta making a choice to end her own life.

Based on a book by Ines Palou, whose life and suicide this movie inspired, Battered Flesh is an incredibly grim and downbeat drama that has more than a touch of realism to it with its unflinching and completely non-sensational approach to the material. This is certainly a “Women in Prison” movie, but it’s not one where there’s a glimmer of hope or escapism. It’s just sad and depressing, which makes it all the more effective. Star Roy delivered an entirely convincing performance as the woman whose life may have seemed invisible to the world, but whose story had to be told. From director Javier Aguirre.

 

That House in the Outskirts (1980) Plot:

A pregnant young woman’s husband brings her to a mansion he bought for her so that she can have her baby in peace and quiet, not realizing that she has a dark history with the house.

Review:

Beautiful and pregnant Nieves (Silvia Aguilar) is delighted to be having her first child with her much older husband Joaquin (Javier Escriva), a wealthy man who loves her very much. He has a surprise for her: He has bought a mansion in the outskirts so that she can spend the remainder of her pregnancy in luxury. As soon as Nieves lays eyes on the house, a chord of fear and guilt strikes her like a lightning bolt: Years ago when she was 17, her lover got her pregnant and forced her to have an abortion … at the very same house, which was once a clandestine abortion clinic. Once Neives is dropped off by her husband and left in the care of the house’s only inhabitant, a kindly seeming older woman, Nieves begins to realize that the house has memories, and the woman watching over her used to be a violent schizophrenic who remembers Nieves from when she was younger and helped perform her abortion but now has inclination to punish her for her sins …

With dread that oozes from its every pore, That House in the Outskirts is a downbeat thriller with a surprisingly upbeat ending (thank goodness), and filmmaker Eugenio Martin manages to make a somewhat political and sociological statement while also navigating a mainstream-style horror / thriller. The cast in uniformly convincing.

 

Supernatural (1981) Plot:

The spirit of a woman’s husband comes back to haunt her after he dies.

 

Review:

Julia (Cristina Galbo) is at work when she gets word that her husband has been in a terrible car accident. She rushes to the hospital where she’s told that he has died. But as she stands beside his corpse on the slab in the morgue to identify his body, his cold, charred hand reaches out to grab her, signifying that he’s not done with … yet. She has him buried soon thereafter, but almost as soon as she lays him to rest, she realizes that his spirit is not at rest, no, not at all. In fact, she sees ghostly manifestations of him throughout the house: IN their bed, in the halls, and all around her she sees the impossible: Her husband is haunting her! She convinces the authorities enough that they’re willing to exhume his body to make sure that he was actually buried, and indeed he was. But Julia is telling the truth: Her husband – or the malevolent spirit of her husband – has never left, and people close to her, like her live-in maid, are killed in strange, unexplainable ways, which says all she needs to know that if she doesn’t find a way to stop her husband from haunting her, she’ll likely be a victim.

A fairly basic, by-the-number ghost film, Supernatural goes the extra mile in trying to explain all the otherworldly phenomena its main character goes through, with long, drawn-out scientific examinations, graphs, charts, and computer mumbo jumbo the plot can muster. We do actually get some gnarly glimpses of the demonic manifestations of what’s haunting her, and that’s when the movie pops and sizzles, but there’s just not enough of it. Director Eugenio Martin tried to give the movie a spooky sense of the supernatural, and yet despite its namesake, the film is more or less limp and not quite as scary as it thinks it is.

 

Dimorfo (1980) Plot:

A Jewish man flees the Nazis into the countryside where he hides for years with a family that has some very strange dynamics.

Review:

Nazis are combing the countryside to root out Jews, and when they encounter a young man named Solomon (Rodjara, who also wrote and directed and looks more than halfway female, which is the point), they let him go due to a twist of fate that lands him a second chance at life. He ends up on a secluded farm inhabited by three people: An old woman, her son, and her son’s wife, who welcome him into their home, knowing that he’s a Jew. The man of the house is a pervert who immediately begins lusting after Solomon because he despises his wife, and Solomon makes a mistake by sleeping with the young lady of the house (it’s not his fault; he was drugged), and the next day she disappears, never to be seen again, leaving Solomon with the old woman and her homosexual son. The old lady insists that Solomon slept with her and impregnated her (she cleverly deceives him), which is a ploy to keep Solomon around, and thinking he has no choice, Solomon stays on the farm and daily must fend off the sexual advances of the old lady’s son. Over the course of nine months, the old lady pretends to be pregnant, but here’s the truth: Her daughter in law is actually pregnant and is in hiding nearby with the sole reason being that if her husband realized that Solomon impregnated her, he’d kill them both, and so the old woman keeps up the deception until the baby is born, which she will claim is hers. The fact that the child’s mother dies in childbirth is just a stroke of luck, and Solomon raises the boy for five years, loving him … until the old woman reveals to him (and her good for nothing son) the truth of the whole thing, which brings doom (and more wild revelations) for everyone in the farm.

A complete weirdo dramatic tragedy of nearly operatic proportions, Dimorfo is a one-of-a-kind bizarro fest with obvious homoerotic and gay subtexts that overpower the proceedings in a way that feels less-than-subtle to the point of being the point. It’s a guilt-ridden exercise of pain and torture, self-flagellating itself until it quite nearly bleeds itself out on its way to an incredibly bleak ending. Writer / director / star Rodjara (just one name, which is also odd) really screwed the pooch with this one.

 

Exorcismo: The Transgressive Legacy of Clasificada “S” (2024) Plot:

A documentary about Spanish “class S” cinema.

Review:

Spanish dictator Francisco Franco died in 1975, leading to the abolishment of censorship and a relaxation of morality, giving rise to a whole new breed of cinema in Spain, which ended up being classified as “S” cinema, which essentially meant unclassifiable in terms of content. “S” cinema was filled with sex, nudity, gore, and all kinds of deviant material that until then was unheard of, which might’ve included homosexual themes and faithlessness, which for a Roman Catholic country was really wild for the time. Transgressive filmmakers rose up and gnarly exploitation movies that skirted the razor’s edge of hardcore pornography glutted the market from 1977 to the mid-’80s when the “S” class cinema was overhauled and a new type of censorship basically eradicated those films … and the entire industry that thrived for a short time.

Narrated by Iggy Pop, who drolly pipes in now and then to fill in gaps, Exorcismo is the ideal walk through this niche subject matter, filled with clips from a bunch of these types of films to give the viewer a sense of what it’s all about. A perfect companion piece to Severin’s 19-film box set collection of “S” classified films and documentaries, this was a solid overview and history lesson for the interested fan.

 

Severin’s incredible and impactful collection (19 films on 10 discs) of “S” class films is a remarkable achievement of restorations and presentations of these films, and while all the movies aren’t equally “good” or great, I really felt like I was educated with this wild and eclectic collection of movies. Also included in the box set are Far From the Trees (1972), a documentary, and the two-part documentary series called After (1983). An incredible set with some real gems, Exorcismo: Defying a Dictator & Raising Hell in Post-Franco Spain is a wild ride.

 

Bonus Materials

• EXORCISMO: THE TRANSGRESSIVE LEGACY OF CLASIFICADA ‘S’ Trailer
• Audio Commentary For THE BELL FROM HELL With Kat Ellinger, Author Of Daughters Of Darkness
• Audio Commentary For THE BELL FROM HELL With Rod Barnett, Film Historian And Co-Host Of NaschyCast, And Robert Monell, Writer And Editor Of I’m In A Jess Franco State Of Mind
• Censorship And Curses – Film Scholar Dr. Álex Mendíbil On THE BELL FROM HELL
• THE BELL FROM HELL Trailer
• LUCIANO (1965) – Short Film Co-Written/Directed By Claudio Guerín, Director Of THE BELL FROM HELL
• Audio Commentary For CREATION OF THE DAMNED With Antonio Lázaro-Reboll, Author Of Spanish Horror Film
• I’m Proud Of My Films – Interview With CREATION OF THE DAMNED Director José Ulloa
• Being There – Interview With CREATION OF THE DAMNED Camera Assistant Paco Marín
• CREATION OF THE DAMNED Trailer
• CREATION OF THE DAMNED Still Gallery
• Alternate Opening For THE DEVIL’S EXORCIST
• Audio Commentary For THE DEVIL’S EXORCIST With Shelagh Rowan-Legg, Author Of The Spanish Fantastic, And Film Critic/Educator Simon Laperrière
• A Daring Film – Interview With THE DEVIL’S EXORCIST Actor Jack Taylor
• Horror Comes From The Church – Interview With THE DEVIL’S EXORCIST Cinematographer José Luis Alcaine
• Sound Experiments – Interview With THE DEVIL’S EXORCIST Composer José Nieto
• THE DEVIL’S EXORCIST Trailer
• Audio Commentary For THE PEOPLE WHO OWN THE DARK With Rod Barnett And Troy Guinn, Film Historians/Co-Hosts Of NaschyCast
• Joking On Set – Interview With THE PEOPLE WHO OWN THE DARK Actor Antonio Mayans
• A Unique Iconography In Spanish Terror – Ángel Sala, Head Of Programming At The Sitges Film Festival, On THE PEOPLE WHO OWN THE DARK
• THE PEOPLE WHO OWN THE DARK Trailer
• Audio Commentary For BATTERED FLESH With Shelagh Rowan-Legg, Author Of The Spanish Fantastic, And Spanish Cinema Professor/Scholar Alejandro Melero
• A Spain To Break – Interview With BATTERED FLESH Actress Sandra Alberti
• The Socialist Priest – Interview With THE PRIEST Actor Emilio Gutiérrez Caba
• A Provocative Filmmaker – Interview With THE PRIEST Actor Martín Garrido Ramis
• EL OTRO LUIS (1975) – Short Film By Eloy De La Iglesia’s Friend And Collaborator Alejo Loren
• I Regret Nothing – Interview With SINS OF A NYMPHO Assistant Director Alejo Loren
• SINS OF A NYMPHO Trailer
• The Haunted Cartoonist – Spanish Film Scholar Dr. Álex Mendíbil On The Films Of Rodjara
• DIMORFO Alternate Credit Sequences
• Audio Commentary For BLOODY SEX With David Flint, Author Of Babylon Blue: An Illustrated History Of Adult Cinema
• A Bohemian Life – Interview With BLOODY SEX Producer Gloria Sancho
• BLOODY SEX Lobby Card Gallery
• Sex And Horror – Interview With MORBUS Director Ignasi P. Ferré
• A Well-Deserved Recognition – Interview With MORBUS Actress Carmen Serret
• THE EVIL FACES OF VĺCTOR ISRAEL (2010) – Archival Documentary
• An Unclassifiable Movie – Ángel Sala, Head Of Programming At The Sitges Film Festival, On FACES
• FACES Trailer
• Audio Commentary For TRIANGLE OF LUST With David Flint, Author Of Babylon Blue: An Illustrated History Of Adult Cinema
• TRIANGLE OF LUST Extended/Alternate Scenes
• A Very Strong Character – Interview With THAT HOUSE IN THE OUTSKIRTS Actress Silvia Aguilar
• THAT HOUSE IN THE OUTSKIRTS Trailer
• Audio Commentary For SUPERNATURAL With David Flint, Editor Of Desperate Living
• Supernatural Effects – Interview With SUPERNATURAL Actor Máximo Valverde
• SUPERNATURAL English Title Sequence
• SUPERNATURAL Trailer
• SUPERNATURAL TV Spot
• A Bold And Delirious Movie – Interview With POPPERS Art Director Javier Fernández
• A Film Like No Other – Interview With POPPERS Assistant Director Eduardo Campoy
• POPPERS Trailer
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