Bloody Sect (1982)

Original title: Secta siniestra

The relationship of Helen (Emma Quer) and ex-mercenary Frederick (Carlos Martos) does not stand under a happy star. Their first trouble starts when Frederick’s mad wife, whom he keeps, as is tradition, hidden in the attic, pokes his eyes out when she finds him and Helen in the aftermath of sex. There must be some divorce and marriage business going on afterwards, for the Mad Wife ends up in an asylum with what will turn out to be very bad security while Helen swears never to leave Frederick. No word of criticism towards the treatment of wife number one is uttered, obviously. Why, she’s even wild for having a child with the guy. Reader, she married him, and so on.

Alas/fortunately, Frederick has some sperm trouble and will never be able to fulfil his wife’s wish there. Eventually, they decide to try artificial insemination. As luck will have it, they end up in a fertility clinic that has been infiltrated by the not at all suspicious members of an inept Satanist sect. So, Helen is soon carrying the Anti-Christ.

Being pregnant with the son of Leonard Satan (at least his sect minions call him Leonard) has its drawbacks: there are particularly violent mood swings, a hunger for raw flesh, really nasty, though curiously symmetrically applied, rashes on Helen’s face, and regular bouts of terrible pain. On the plus side, Helen really doesn’t seem to get any larger at all with Satan Jr. No pillows were budgeted for the production, apparently. Also not great is that the trio of cultists we encounter have a terrible tendency to make their own work very difficult indeed, killing people by strangulation, with adorable fake bats or just with telekinesis for the tiniest reasons, really making themselves rather obvious. Admittedly, they do manage to keep Helen and Frederick isolated and under the control of one Sister Margaret (Concha Valero) for a time, and get a handful of murders in.

But eventually, they will also turn out to be the kind of cult who can be beaten by a little boy and a blind guy, a cult worshipping a baby Anti-Christ who melts when encountering a random cross-shaped object ten meters or so away.

To state the obvious, when talking about Ignacio F. Iquino’s Bloody Sect, one really needs to wear one’s psychotronic glasses to stay in the proper frame of mind to appreciate the film. Iquino’s direction is flavourless and without any sense of mood. Every single scene is lit absurdly brightly. Our director also seems not to have realized how bad his actors and his effects are, nor did he have any plan to work against any of these tiny little problems.

So everyone’s insane mugging is staged with flat acceptance, suggesting that in Iquino’s Spain, wild eye-rolling, pantomimic facial expressions and wild shouting are indeed the way human beings communicate. This leads to a very peculiar mood where characters’ actions aren’t just illogically scripted but where their general insanity, their willingness to shrug off even the greatest weirdness, as well as the plot’s complete lack of common (or other) sense are treated as if they were the most quotidian things imaginable. Incompetent but insanely over-murderous Satanists whose appearance is generally accompanied by wind coming from nowhere and red light, mad women in the attic, and the cutest fake bats that were ever meant to suck a blind man’s blood, the film seems to say, are just not that strange in its world.

This does of course not a conventionally good film make (one might even suggest the actual filmmaking here is pretty dire), but to my jaded eyes, Bloody Sect’s insistence on filming utter weirdness as drily as possible turns it into a rather special little film. And special beats good, not just in October.