HERE COMES THE DEVIL

(A.k.a. AHI VA EL DIABLO)

Felix (Francisco Barreiro) and his wife Sol (Laura Caro) are holidaying with their children, Adolfo (Alan Martinez) and Sara (Michele Garcia). Their vacation is pleasant but uneventful – at one point, it seems that it will mainly be remembered as the place where Sara first had her period.

However, events soon spiral out of control when the kids are encouraged to go exploring local rocks on a nearby hill so the parents can chill. Felix and Sol take the peace and quiet as a chance to indulge in some heavy petting in their car, and fall asleep afterwards. When they awake, it’s getting dark and the kids are nowhere to be seen.

Panic sets in as the police instigate a search of the area while Felix and Sol argue over who’s to blame for this turn of events. It hardly helps when the attendant at the local garage tells them those rocks are said to be cursed.

Eventually the police return with the kids in the back of their car. Panic over, the family retire to their home. But Sol soon notices how withdrawn Adolfo and Sara have become. Neither will speak of what happened to them in the cave where they were found.

So, their parents determine to find out the truth by other methods. A child psychologist is employed. Through a series of gentle interviews, he ascertains that Sara suffered a sexual trauma of some description while in the cave. When the kids are coaxed into drawing pictures of their experience, all they offer are crude illustrations of a red pick-up truck.

It’s enough: Felix remembers spotting one nearby, on the night the kids went missing. A spot of local sleuthing puts Felix and Sol onto the truck’s owner, the creepy loner Lucio (David Arturo Cabezud), and they set about exacting their revenge.

But the kids are behaving increasingly odd at home, lying about where they spend their days and sharing silent secrets between one another. Sol is still not convinced that they know the truth about what happened in the cave, or how it could possibly tie in with the legend of a serial killer who vanished among the rocks. But she’s determined to find out …

HERE COMES THE DEVIL was written and directed by Adrian Garcia Bogliano, the guy who previously gave us I'LL NEVER DIE ALONE, PENUMBRA and the "B is for Bigfoot" segment from the recent THE ABC'S OF DEATH.

This finds the talented and prolific director (check out his IMDb profile, you’ll see he’s helmed no less than 18 efforts in the last 15 years) in a more moody and atmospheric frame of mind.

If the opening salvo of sex and blood promises a barrage of gore-soaked weirdness a la the excesses of more extreme Asian horror films, the tone swiftly shifts when we’re then introduced to the lead protagonists and the vibe becomes closer to the slow-mounting paranoia and acute observations of relationships under immense pressure that we look for in Spanish genre pictures.

Bogliano’s script ensures that Felix and Sol are realistic characters, easily identified with and therefore our empathies are with them as they sink deeper into their emotional abyss. Performances are uniformly strong, with Caro taking top honours for her fine balance of vulnerability, sexuality and resolve. The child actors are basically required to adopt a permanently cold, detached stance and do this with skill.

Local landscapes are used well to give the film a look that is simultaneously warm and foreboding: the rock-covered hills that the kids vanish into are a character unto themselves: all sinister, inviting beauty and threat.

The cave itself is unmistakably vagina-like in its appearance, leading me to another major facet of Bogliano’s screenplay: the subtext. Sex and death are correlated effectively, incorporating the loss of innocence and something even more taboo … but I don’t want to say too much on this matter, as that really would be giving too much away.

Spattered with a couple of decent gore scenes and a persistent chill in the air, HERE COMES THE DEVIL is an intelligent and technically accomplished horror drama that builds to a satisfyingly chilling twist climax. It didn’t go unnoticed, either, that the film boasts its fair share of pretty outrageous moustaches.

The film was presented on a DVD-R disc as a very early screener disc from Metrodome, so there were no menus or extras to comment upon. All I got as a 'bonus' was an occasional watermark reminding me the disc was the property of Metrodome.

Picture quality was, however, pretty solid - nice deep colours and stable blacks helped counteract a slight lack of depth and detail in the 16x9 transfer.

Likewise, the Spanish 2.0 audio track provided a reliable playback throughout. Burned-in English subtitles were well-written and always easy to read.

HERE COMES THE DEVIL is a well-mounted, thought-provoking and convincingly staged muse on the links between sex and death. It’s a family drama of the darkest nature, and arguably Bogliano’s strongest film yet.

Review by Stuart Willis