Days of de la Iglesia

Sept. 21-28, Alamo Drafthouse Downtown

By Marc Savlov, Fri., Sept. 16, 2005

Perdita Durango

There comes a point about midway through Spanish director Alex de la Iglesia's rapturously sacrilegious horror comedy The Day of the Beast (1995) that you begin to fear not only for Mr. de la Iglesia's immortal soul, but your own, as well. Iglesia's films are best described as the unholy love child of his friend Pedro Almodóvar and Lenny Bruce by way of Quentin Rodriguez: a grimly fiendish worldview overseen by the Catholic Church had it been overseen not by lightweights like Torquemada but Mel Brooks, instead. His 1993 breakout film, Acción Mutante, a clever take on class struggle masquerading as a wry, outrageous ode to hideously dispossessed mutants everywhere, remains a favorite of every cineaste's inner misfit to this day, but it's barely as threatening as a rusty nail clipper when compared to 1997's blood-drenched magnum opus Perdita Durango, which features Rosie Perez and Javier Bardem as a pair of ne'er-do-wells cruising to Sin City with a truckload of frozen fetuses and Screamin' Jay Hawkins in tow. Iglesia's newest, the scathing Crimen Ferpecto, does for contemporary consumer culture and vainglorious menswear salesmen what Dawn of the Dead did for mall rats and mayhem, only more so. Like his other friend, sometime Austinite Guillermo del Toro, Iglesia is a 24-fps revolutionary in the purest and most visionary sense. He leavens his coruscatingly explosive societal broadsides with baptismal fonts full of grue and a wicked sense of pitch-black cinematic slapstick that Virginia Rappe would instantly recognize and Fatty Arbuckle would just as instantly embrace. Viva la revolucion!