Satanic Fluid and Eldritch Real Estate

If you had to nominate someone to sit in the same niche in Spanish genre cinema that Ed Wood occupies in the American pantheon, Juan Piquer Simón might be worth considering. He got his big break with a 1976 adaptation of Journey To the Centre of the Earth, but subsequent to this his career spiralled into a farrago of utter trash. His 1979 Supersonic Man is one of the worst of the wave of Superman imitators which got unleashed in the wake of the first Christopher Reeve movie, his E.T. ripoff Los Nuevos Extraterrestres was, under the title Pod People, had the dubious honour of being in one of the funniest ever Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes (it’s the one with the greatest musical routine ever captured on screen), and his most high-profile project was probably Slugs, an adaptation of a Shaun Hutson novel, which bombed.

So, obviously, genre cinema addicts Vinegar Syndrome have been happy to give his work the sort of careful Blu-Ray restoration that they absolutely don’t deserve. For this article, I’ll take a look at two of their releases. Both of them find Simón tackling some fairly similar motifs – spooky goings-on in creepy houses blighted by occult horror – but one’s from close to the start of his career, and one is from the tail-end of it.

Satan’s Blood

Electronics engineer Andrew (José María Guillén) and nurse Anna (Mariana Kerr) are a young married couple hoping to have their first child. (Anna is currently four months pregnant, but suffered a miscarriage in her previous pregnancy so there’s obviously some worry there.) One day, when they are out for a weekend drive with their dog Blackie, they encounter Bruno (Ángel Aranda) and Mary (Sandra Alberti). Bruno insists that he and Andrew went to college together – and even has some photographic evidence which superficially seems to back it up – and the two couples decamp to Bruno and Mary’s massive villa out in the wilderness to hang out, as you do with people you haven’t spoken to since college all the time. Anyway, turns out Bruno and Mary are actually Satanists and they’re luring Andrew and Anna in for nefarious ritual purposes, and Blackie the doggo dies first; who would have guessed?