La noche de la bestia (1988)

Some days you hit gold, some days you hit shit. Today I took a big scoop of the latter and ate it all too willingly. The reason for this shit-eating is Hugo Stiglitz, a man I’ve been almost sickly obsessed with since I first saw Nightmare City many years ago. The man can be a bit stiff, but he’s still Hugo – the no. 1 sex symbol of Mexico! This time we meet him in this late cheesy entry of eighties horror/sci-fi La Noche de la Bestia!

It’s the for the annual hunting weekend and the boys, including Hugo, is preparing with bringing a lot of beer, fishing equipment, weapons and a jolly good spirit! After at least thirty minutes of chatting, drinking, shooting rabbits and posing in way to small swimming trunks, a woman comes running and after her a truck of gun-crazy wackos in yellow hazmats and impressive mullets. She’s a scientist on the run, escaping from the result of last nights nuclear explosion (yes, believe it or not) nearby. The boys kills her pursuers and gives her shelter in their cabin. But they don’t know that she has a bloodthirsty parasite in her that want to switch body… and not only that, outside a big monster is lurking, hungry for human flesh!

Well, this sounds like fun, yeah? I would say five minutes of this 73 minute long is worth watching, and these five minutes is represented by these screenshots:






That is probably the WORST VISUAL EFFECT I’ve ever seen in a movie, and if you think it looks “ok” here, just watch the movie and see it in movement. If I understand the Spanish correctly they, after watching the huge nuclear explosions, just decide to go to bed and “let the police handle it”. When the parasite takes over Hugo Stiglitz and makes him go rampage for a minute or two is fun and quite bloody, and the monster itself – which looks silly as hell, but quite original – crashes thru the floor and tries to kill our surviving heroes it’s also fun. Ok, the flashback when the scientist’s finds the meteorite is good too and the scene where a guy get his foot ripped off is entertaining too, but that’s about it.

The rest is Hugo and his gang of Mexican macho men talking, drinking, swimming, burping and joking (I think, but they laugh sometime and the story also include an exploding blow-up doll gag). It’s a pity because they have a cabin by the lake, a crazy monster and primitive gore – so why don’t the use it more, dammit?! If I made this movie it would be five minutes talking and the rest just pure monster mayhem! The ending is “meh” by the way, and seem to be a bit sentimental and serious, which is hard to take serious because we just saw a big papier maché monster trying to whip our heroes to death with its tongue!

But I own this on original DVD, which still makes me cooler than all of you. Ha!