Since I know next to nothing about Latin American myths and legends, with a couple of the horror stories in this anthology I had no context to explain the supernatural shenanigan’s, so I had to just go with the flow and simply bear witness to what was unfolding, and what was unfolding was weird and weirdly captivating, not to mention funny (two of the tales are horror comedies). Now, I haven’t yet delved into any of the extras; generally with the bulk of any review I like to watch the movie first, experience it cold, then go and “review” what I’ve just seen to the best of my ability. After that, and only after do I hit up the extras and see how they made the film, or in this case, hopefully, get a crash course in portions of Latin American mythology.
I had no idea this movie existed until the trailer hit the internet, accompanied by a rather eye catching poster. The trailer ended up piquing my interest, and so it stayed in the back of my mind until word reached me a physical media (long live physical media!) release was on the horizon, then I decided to roll the dice, acquire a review copy and pray to the movie Gods it was as interesting as its trailer. For me anyway, it was, and here I am stringing words together to form these things we call sentences to properly convey my enjoyment, plot and spoilers, to which your reading eyeballs will be unable to look away.
Satanic Hispanics (2022) is a horror anthology centering on Hispanic mythos, with each segment helmed by a Latino director; there are two horror comedy segments, and two serious ones, with a wraparound that is for the most part serious as well, with slight moments of levity. The wraparound is where we start, with a dude the end credits refers to as “The Traveler” (Efren Ramirez)—as I’m writing this, I had to look up Ramirez’s credits, since he looked vaguely familiar, and, holy shit, he was Pedro in Napoleon Dynamite (2004)?!?! I love that movie!! Anyway, in El Paso, he’s discovered by a SWAT team to be the only survivor inside this building with a shit-ton of dead bodies; all appearing to be gunned down. He’s handcuffed to a chain in a separate room, and is so desperate to get the fuck out before the cops reach him, he attempts to hack off his hand at the wrist with a meat cleaver, but misses and gets the hand instead. Oh, fuck, that’s going to leave more than a mark, my man . . .
Oddly, weirdly, strangely, in the next scene in an interrogation room he’s looking way to calm for a dude who should be in a lot of pain. Interestingly enough, why his almost hacked off hand isn’t paining him is eventually addressed later on. What the two dicks interrogating him, Detective Arden (Greg Grunberg) and Detective Gibbons (the late Sonya Eddy; she died a few days after filming her scenes) will learn is he’s immortal; this is when he unwraps his hand to show them not a hair or piece of flesh is out of place. The segments are stories he tells the two detectives, but more importantly he has to be gone from this place in 90-minutes or everyone in this building is going to die. You see something’s been tracking him, something he calls San La Muerte, aka Saint Death, and it’s been tracking him for as long as he’s been immortal and it has the ability to kill him, which is why he moves around all the time, typically staying 2-hours ahead of it. Except for today. Nope, today, he’s going to have to confront this thing. Amongst his possessions is a special bullet that can take it out, not permanently, but dispatch it temporarily from this material plane. The gun, a Saint Killer, to that bullet is a very new looking musket taken into possession by the cops years back, and luckily still in this very precinct.
What did The Terminator (1984) give us? Well, let’s see, Arnold Schwarzenegger, James Cameron, a cool concept, Tech Noir and, oh, right, a siege on a police station that’s been an inspiration for filmmakers ever since. The last time I saw something like that happen again was in Jeepers Creepers (2001); Mike Mendez, who directed the wraparound had to be inspired by that scene as well, what I liked about his version is he kind of “flips the script” on what I was expecting to see as Saint Death casually walks in. For starters this thing arrives in one form, but the cops blast it so much that disguise comes off to show us what it really looks like (I refer you to the two posters at the top of this review). It’s first form is pretty cool too: all dressed in black, wearing around its face something a nun might don, but wearing a Clint Eastwood-type cowboy hat, with a face so “alien” the whole image reminded me of something I might see on The Mandalorian.
This thing didn’t come with guns like the Terminator did to shoot everyone to death; no, this motherfucker is insidious; it has powers of telekinesis to toss cops right and left, but that’s only used between tragic bouts of mind control where all it has to do is gesture at someone, hopefully, someone with a gun, and that person will take his or her weapon out and start randomly killing anyone near them, capping themselves in the head right after. He makes two cops blow each others heads clean off with their shotguns. Even bystanders are casually gunned down. The Traveler manages to end this siege by getting his gun and shooting it, where it evaporates.
Looking up that term, “San La Muerte,” Wikipedia tells me ” . . . is a personification of death.” A Latin version of The Grim Reaper is what I get from that, which now explains its first form when it comes into the police station. That look did have a Reaper vibe to it.
I also like this movie ended with (fingers crossed) the setup for a sequel. The Traveler gets out and takes off in a car but eventually gets pulled over a short time later, his words to the cop: “If I don’t get out of here in the next ninety-minutes, you’re all going to die.” I certainly hope this film gets a sequel and a third too. Generally, if I end up loving a movie that ends with sequel potential, I like to see a trilogy, no more, no less. A trilogy feels just about right.
Now, let’s delve into the segments—
With this segment, “Tambien Lo VI,” I felt I needed to Google that title and find out what it meant in English, and its translation is, “I saw it too,” doesn’t quite explain the almost Lovecraftian weirdness I also saw. All I can for this part of the review is just show:
So, it would appear this tale is about a grown child prodigy by the name of Gustavo (Demian Salomon), who lives as a recluse, but talks to his sister a lot, only on his laptop and phone, (for the extent of this segment he never visits her “in the flesh”) and is insanely adept at solving a Rubik’s Cube in a crazy short period of time. He has dreams of competing, but something’s wrong with his apartment building. It appears to be haunted, and he can’t get anyone he talks with to see what he sees. We see him using the flashlight on his phone as an instrument in the gesticulational ritual he quickly performs to get this “ghost” to be seen. He always sees it, but when he asks the person with him if they saw it, they never do, which at first gives you hints to a possible mental breakdown. No ghosts, just the ones in his mind?
Then he asks a ghost hunter to come over and investigate, and for some reason, this dude actually sees something, but he thinks it’s his mother who died in a nursing home. Gustavo will try to explain later he just came up with the ritual, and that he may have inadvertently opened a door between dimensions. Now, what this haunting is I don’t understand, I’m hoping the commentary will shed some light on that. Something freakish and terrifying visits him one day when he’s talking to his sister; it crawls out from under the table, clearly a very well executed practical effect that looks like a mutilated corpse.
Timing is perfect, that ghost hunter comes back, and we learn he’s got a lot of guilt over his mom’s death, and for reasons I could not understand once Gustav shows him the thing that scared the everloving shit out of him, he thinks its his mother. The dude even breaks down, cries and hugs the motherfucking thing. Gustavo tries to tell him he doesn’t think it’s his mother. Then he tries to perform that “summoning ritual” again, this time in an attempt to close the doorway, or send it back? For a second it looks like it works, for it blinks out of existence, then suddenly something insanely horrific happens, the thing, I think, vanishes, and the ghost hunter explodes! Guts and blood fly everywhere!!
Gustav slowly backs out of the room, and then out of the apartment, watching as two sinister versions of himself (doppelgangers?) are seen lurking inside. When the movie returns to The Traveler telling the story, he’ll say, “I don’t think it was him.” So, did Gustav get replaced by a doppelganger?! This haunting is unexplainable but does come with chills and, perhaps, an unintentional touch of Lovecraft—regardless, I dug it a lot.
This is the first horror comedy segment, and it’s quite obvious what the subject matter is with its title, “El Vampiro.” I didn’t have to Google that one. I liked this one a lot too. It’s also the first segment that revels in gore. One of the main reasons I liked it was the actor playing the lead, Hemky Madera; I’ll be honest, this is the first time I’ve seen him in anything, and he was great playing the vampire. Second reason why I liked it was it’s vibe was very What We Do In The Shadows. I’m a huge fan of that movie, the series, and this segment could have been an episode from its show.
This vampire’s been around for five hundred years and every Halloween he puts on a very cliche vampire garb and basically due to the very nature of this particular holiday, goes out in public (at night, of course) and lays waste to humankind. The segment kicks off with him having murdered everyone at this Halloween party, but you see he’s made one little mistake. He’s forgotten about daylight savings time, or rather he got it mixed up. He thinks its one hour ahead in the fall, and one hour back in the spring. Well, this little fuck up has put him in a seriously compromising situation; he’s in the city and he doesn’t have enough time to make it home before sunrise now. This wake-up call is conveyed through a phone call with his wife (who’s also a vamp, duh), Maribel (Patricia Velasquez), who refuses to come get him after the conversation gets heated.
So, now, he’s on the run, literally to get his ass back home. Apparently, he can’t turn himself into a bat, since it’s a skill he hasn’t engaged in for some time, and just ain’t all that great at it. He gets waylaid by having to murder some trick ‘r’ treaters who knocked him off a scooter he stole. This segment gets, perhaps, a little too slapsticky at times; basically in one scene where two cops discover him right after he’s murdered those three kids, and they think it’s some kind of Halloween prank. That is until one of the cops tastes the “blood” of the severed head the vamp is holding thinking its a special effect and realizes this is all too real. Guns are pulled and the vamp has to use his mind control powers to control the situation, but can only control one person at a time, and he bounces between both cops making them go in and out of his control.
Maribel, in the end, decides to come and save him, but a traffic jam on the way back throws a fatal monkey wrench in the works, and now they’re off on foot looking for a last minute place to hole-up from the sun. A dumpster sounds like a good idea but the lid doesn’t close all the way, and it fries them. All the gore effects in this segment looked pretty good, save for the final one where their bodies are discovered and the charred skeletons looked very cheap.
While this segment does have its baffling moments, it’s not as baffling as “Tambien Lo VI,” I mean, I can understand the basics of what was going down, but to get that secret ingredient of knowledge into my brain that might decipher those elements further, I had to find out what “Nahuales” meant. Googling it gave me some much needed enlightenment:
“In Mesoamerican folk religion, a nagual or nahual is a human being who has the power to shapeshift into their tonal animal counterpart. Nagualism is tied to the belief one can access power and spiritual insight by connecting with the tonal animal within.”
The lead character in this one, Ramon De la Cruz (Ari Gallegos), starts off fleeing through rather gorgeous, Mexican landscape, with a dead body on a horse he’s leading it to . . . wherever. A deep, monstrous growl off in the distance hurries him to a location I first thought was his home, but after he places a frantic call to the CIA, of all people, it felt more like a safehouse. The particulars of this backstory are revealed through talk with this agent; apparently, Cruz has the goods on a corrupt leader and has sold him out to the CIA, and plans to run against him in an election; his family is dead too, but we don’t get the particulars of that, or even who that dead body was on the horse. Whomever he was fleeing from finally catches up to him, and three of these dudes are shirtless and looked like they had been rolling around in dirt for a day and a half. One of them sported a supernatural howling technique that was pain to De la Cruz’s ears. Naturally they beat the shit out of him, and then haul his ass off to the jungle where we meet a new character, an old woman who looks just as grungy. De la Cruz is restrained and ends up being tortured to death or is he an integral component to a ritual? It looked like a little bit of both. Through their contentious dialogue, we learn his crime appears to be he’s stolen some blood that was theirs (back in “The Traveler” segment he has a vial of blood in his possession that piques the interest of the detectives and that is our lead in to this tale) and she’s some kind of “native witch” able to shapeshift into her animal counterpart. We don’t get a full transformation, unless what we see is the full transformation, but before her face ends up with obvious animal features she spends a disturbing amount of time clutching her cheeks and stretching them out far beyond what a normal human’s cheeks might be able to stretch, and uttering words, and acting freaky.
De la Cruz’s throat is eventually slit and away he goes into the great beyond. There’s one more scene, one of the witch and her disciples at a home, unearthing a couple of bodies in a wall. I had the feeling the death of De la Cruz might also have been some kind of revenge plot? Does that mean these shapeshifter characters are the “good guys?” I don’t know, I didn’t get that vibe from them either. Most of the witches dialogue falls into the poetic category, so don’t look for any direct meaning to what’s going on beyond her reveal of the stolen blood, and hints of “lycanthrope.” An interesting segment, however, to say the least. I think my only complaints with “Tambien Lo VI” and “Nahuales” is I needed more story. Both of these would’ve made interesting full length movies or at the very least hour-long short films.
This final segment ricochets back to horror comedy, with a vibe that’s a combination of Evil Dead and anything Quentin Tarantino and/or Robert Rodriguez has made, not one hundred percent of either but shades of all.
What is “The Hammer Of Zanzibar?” Well, I’m going to keep that under wraps for a bit. It’s hilarious. Effective at killing demons, mind you, but damn hilarious!! With a huge side dish of totally unexpected.
This segment starts absolutely normal, with this chick, Amy (Danielle Chaves), waiting for her ex, Malcolm (Jonah Ray) to show up. Restaurant is packed. When he does, he looks like hell, and with the shocking backstory of what they were all doing (she has no memory, for some reason) on this vacation, of witnessing a ritual they weren’t supposed to, worst of all, he recorded the audio (for her documentary). So, this thing calling itself King Zombie (Morgana Ignis) is looking to use that recording to break into this world, big time; in the process it’s been offing Malcolm friends, and the shocker of this meeting is he believes Amy is possessed by it, and this restaurant went out of business a year ago, something he and Amy know, but the demon might not, and by God he’s right about all of it.
Once King Zombie puts it cards on the table a battle ensues as Malcolm tries like hell to gun this fucker down, but nothing’s working until he whips out “The Hammer Of Zanzibar.” We then get a flashback to how he acquired it, when their last mutual friend, Miguel (Christian Rodrigo) was still alive. They need something to combat this demon and the shop owner has just thing, but first he tells them the story of how he acquired it, which entailed summoning a demon, having a lengthy sexual relationship with it, feeling spurned and then in a jealous rage attacking it and hacking off its horse-sized cock! He then opens the box he keeps the “hammer” in and we see its that demon dong he hacked off! Yup, that’s right, the Hammer Of Zanzibar is a terrifyingly sized tallywhacker of the demonic kind. Sadly, Miguel is suddenly possessed in Deadite fashion, sporting a creepy voice, and to prove the hammer is what Malcolm needs El Jefe (Jacob Vargas), the shop owner, bashes possessed Miguel’s head right off his body. Malcolm is sold. We flash back to the present and watch him take out King Zombie!
Believe or not, there’s even an upbeat ending for Malcolm.
The directors: Mike Mendez (“The Traveler”), Demian Rugna (“Tambien Lo VI”), Eduardo Sanchez (“El Vampiro”), Gigi Saul Guerrero (“Nahules”) and Alejandro Brugués (“The Hammer Of Zanzibar”)—two of these directors I’m familiar with, Mendez being the first, and that goes way back to 2000 with his horror flick, The Convent that has just hit UHD from Synapse Films! He also made The Gravedancers (2006), which I also believe Synapse Films is restoring, and two excellent comedic giant spider flicks: Big Ass Spider (2013) and Lavalantula (2015). Sanchez . . . if you’re into genre flicks to any kind of degree, his name should be recognizable—he’s one of the co-creators of The Blair Witch Project (1999)! Also seek out his underrated found footage creature feature, Exists (2014), about a killer squatch seeking revenge!
Satanic Hispanics (2022) is out now on blu-ray only from Epic Pictures! You can buy it on their site and on Amazon!
Video/Audio/Subtitles: 1080p 2.35:1 High Definition Widescreen—2.0 English Dolby Digital, 5.1 English Dolby Digital—English SDH, Spanish SDH, Dutch, French Subs
Extras Included . . .
- Audio Commentary With Directors Mike Mendez, Alejandro Brugués, Demian Rugna, Gigi Saul Guerrero & Eduardo Sanchez
- Dread Talk (36:04)
- Segment Posters (5 Posters)
- Satanic Hispanics Trailer (1:56)
- Dread Trailers (The Jester, Island Escape, Last Night At Terrace Lanes, Colonials)
Very enlightening commentaries from all the directors. It starts off with Mendez and Brugués, since they also both produced the movie, and their talk is confined to “The Traveler” wraparound segments; the other directors take over solo when their segments begin. Now, regarding “Tambien Lo VI” and “Nahules”: For a while I thought Rugna was going to keep his talk mostly to the technical side , but eventually, and thankfully, he got around to the story, and filled in some of the gaps of understanding I had with his segment. Clearing things up, Gustav accidentally opened a portal in his apartment, and that there are spirits all around us all the time (ah, very Lovecraftian indeed) and now he can see them, specifically, that thing that came out from under the table to terrify him was his dead father, who was run over by a train, explaining the mutilations. But the ghost hunter sees his mother when he looks at the corpse, and it would appear people see different things when they look at these “ghosts.” His death resulted from Gustav trying to shut the portal but unable to do it correctly due to his busted hand. Though I still didn’t understand Gustav seeing an evil, wounded version of himself at the end, and Rugna explains that very last scene being a flipside representation of our dimension. The commentary with Gigi Saul Guerrero for “Nahules” has a couple more participants, one of them is actor Ari Gallegos, the other I had no idea. Her commentary was a bit more technical, but with confirmation the Nahules are animalistic shapeshifters, but she gave no context for that final scene of the bodies being unearthed in the wall.
Mendez mentions The Terminator as inspiration for that police station siege; “The Hammer Of Zanzibar” was at one point going to be a full length movie in the vein of a Quentin Tarantino flick, with this segment being but a single chapter in it; and it does sound like they want to do Satanic Hispanics sequel!
If you’re looking for another film along these lines, what I kept coming back to as I watched Satanic Hispanics was From Dusk Till Dawn (1996). If you’re not familiar with that flick, just know there is a sequel (From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money) and a prequel (From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman’s Daughter), and a short-lived series that ran for three seasons! First season is a long form remake of the movie.
PHYSICAL MEDIA LIVES AT . . . 