Secta siniestra (1982)

... aka: Bloody Sect

Directed by:

"Steve McCoy" (Ignacio F. Iquino)

Frederick Payne (Carlos Martos) likes to boast about his past, which wouldn't be an issue if his past didn't involve all kinds of war atrocities! During "the war in Uganda," he was captured, imprisoned, abused ("They enjoyed beating the shit out of me!") and sentenced to death, but was somehow able to get his hands on a sword and proceeded to slaughter everyone and escape. From there, it was off to a South American guerilla boot camp followed by a stint as a bodyguard for an Arabian prince (!) All of that was cut short after he was shot and wounded. Now, in middle age, he's decided he's had enough excitement for one lifetime and just wants to settle down with his girlfriend, Helen ("Mery Kerr" / Emma Quer), and start a family. Mementos of his past "glories" (?), including a stockpile of weapons and framed photos of him torturing captives (!) on the walls will just have to suffice. However, Frederick otherwise hasn't been completely honest with his new lover...

Unbeknownst to Helen, Frederick and his trusty maid, Ana (Montserrat Miralles), have been keeping his heretofore unheard of first wife, Elizabeth (Diana Conca), locked upstairs in a hidden room. Years earlier, he got drunk, crashed their car and ever since she's been a little loony. Make that a lot loony. The crazed Elizabeth manages to overpower the maid, sneaks downstairs, catches her husband and Helen lying in bed naked together, gets her hands on a large fork and then gouges out both of his eyes with it! Frederick is blinded and she's hauled off to prison. Though any sane person would be running for the exit doors screaming over all of this, Helen stays with him. Cuz love.

After the two are married, they're hit with some more bad news: Frederick is infertile. The couple decide to go to a sperm bank, where Dr. Gerard (Juan Zanni) and his nurse wife, Isa (Teresa Manresa), hook them up with a donation that meets the future father's strict criteria ("Caucasian, young and strong"). After the procedure, Helen finds herself with child and then this goes down an almost exact ROSEMARY'S BABY route, with her being stricken with debilitating pain, becoming depressed, craving raw meat, etc. Unbeknownst to the rest of the hospital staff, a Satanist named Leonard (Henry Ragoud) has infiltrated the clinic and swapped out the sperm of "Hans... a tall, blonde Germany guy" with that of Satan!

Thus far two other women have received the tainted sperm aside from Helen. Sick of all of the nasty side effects, the first, Eva, goes to an abortion clinic and terminates the pregnancy. Immediately after, Leonard and his pal, Olivier (Santi Pons), show up and use their supernatural powers to smash the female doctor who performed the procedure (Asunción Vitoria) to death with the operating table, send shards of exploding glass into Eva's face and slash her husband's throat with a razor. The other recipient, Emma, has already died by suicide by the time they reach her, so they briefly reanimate her corpse long enough for her to pull her grieving hubby into the coffin with her! And that leaves poor Helen...

Leonard and Olivier (who are often hilariously lit in red so we know whose side they're on) show up at Helen's home posing as priests working for the "Church of the Eternal Angel." They pretty much spill the beans about what's going on, tell her they now worship her and give her one of their bibles along with a special necklace. No, not with tannis root inside. Afterward, she feasts on raw bunny straight from the fridge and then chases the maid away with a butcher knife. More "help" soon arrives in the form of Sister Margaret ("Josephine Varney" / Concha Valero), a mysterious woman with short black hair who barges into their home unannounced and insists on staying. She's kind of like Miss Baylock from The Omen, except she doesn't even bother faking being well-mannered and polite. In fact, she issues her list of demands right away, starting with moving Frederick up to the attic so she can sleep right next to his wife in their bed! And the couple just goes right along with this!

Soon after Margaret's arrival, things start dying in the home, including all of their plants and a pet parakeet. There's also a worse change in Helen. She begins mocking her husband's condition ("Don't you see? Of course you don't! Are you blind?"), complains about her skin tightening all over her body and starts developing bruises and sores on her face. As for her tummy aches, it's nothing massaging in some fresh green frog's blood won't cure! Margaret keep promising she'll feel better after she has the baby. Meanwhile, psycho wife #1 manages to escape from prison, heads back to the house, sneaks back into her hidden room and plots to kill Helen with an axe in between attempts at seducing the husband.

Along the way we get a hilariously exploitative shot of a panty-less Helen thrashing around on bed in a short hospital gown, a ridiculous rubber-bats-on-strings attack, a real frog getting stabbed repeatedly with a knife, death by being forced to inhale car exhaust fumes, a stabbing in a parking garage, an impalement, an attempt to run over an 8-year-old with a car, stock footage of a forest fire, a hanging, a ghost (I think), a female postal employee whose uniform consists of denim cut-off short shorts, a plastic baby doll with horns glued on its forehead passing itself off as the newborn Antichrist and one of the worst, least exciting and most anticlimactic non-endings on record.

Coming off the very productive 1970s, Spanish horror film production was virtually cut in half the following decade when it should have been booming due to the home video market. I'm not sure exactly what happened there, but most of their 80s output was downright awful! Some of the all-time worst slasher films, alien films, cannibal films and zombie films were produced in Spain during this time and now we can add one of the worst Satanism / occult films with this title. Thankfully, Bloody Sect sucks in all of the right ways to make it enjoyable. It's fast-paced, busy, stupid, cheesy, sleazy and filled with cheap, bloody gore effects and nudity. What really tips it over the edge into SBIG territory though is the hilariously awful dialogue and insane, bug-eyed overacting from much of the cast.

The director / writer had been active in the Spanish film industry since the mid 1930s and amassed well over 100 credits, which is quite surprising given the amount of ineptitude on display here! The bulk of his early career consisted of comedies and dramas. In the 60s he switched to spaghetti westerns and then, after the loosening of censorship in Spain, he delved into more exploitative fare, primarily soft-core erotica. This appears to be his only straight-up horror film, though a few other titles (namely Aborto Criminal and The Dawn Rapists) may be borderline. Having slightly more experience in the genre was the film's co-writer, Juan Bosch. He'd previously written and directed The Killer Wore Gloves (1974) involving a slasher-killer, and EXORCISMO (1975), an awful Exorcist copycat starring Paul Naschy.

Prior to the 2019 Vinegar Syndrome Blu-ray release, this only had a single VHS release in the 80s in Spain. The BR doesn't have many notable features, nor any material from any of the people involved in making this. Instead they throw on a commentary track from Kat Ellinger.

SBIG

Variola vera (1982)

... aka: Вариола вера

... aka: Small Pox Virus

Directed by:

Goran Marković

With the last known case having been reported way back in 1930, smallpox was thought to have been completely eradicated in Yugoslavia for decades. That was, until it reemerged again in 1972. A Muslim pilgrim named Ibrahim Hoti returned to his home in Kosovo after going on a Hajj to the Middle East and brought the disease back with him, which led to another outbreak in the country. While there was some fumbling around by health professionals who misdiagnosed some of the earlier cases and thus enabled the virus to spread (one patient was bounced around to three different hospitals), the government was quick to respond, bringing in experts from the World Health Organization, instituting martial law, quarantine and a mandatory re-vaccination of the populace. The epidemic was soon back under control and life returned to normal a few months later, though there were around 175 infections and 35 confirmed deaths in total. While not an accurate account of these events, Variola Vera ("variola" being the virus that causes smallpox) does infuse many real details from the 1972 outbreak into its story.

It's clear from the get-go that this is hoping, at least in part, to shine a spotlight on systemic failures within society. The hospital where most of the film takes place is a disorganized, chaotic, loud environment filled with impatient or downright confused patients filling hallways and stairwells, gossipy staff, outdated pipes, a busted heating system and worse. The staff are primarily caught up in their own personal dramas and / or hospital politics while going through the motions of their job in a rather disinterested fashion.

Our proposed "hero," Dr. Grujic (Rade Šerbedžija), is an arrogant womanizer who's been sleeping with an emotionally vulnerable nurse named Slavica (Vladislava Milosavljević) and wastes no time hitting on new hire Dr. Danka Uskokovic (Varja Đukić), who's fresh out of medical school and still at the point where she's actually trying to take her job seriously. One of the patients is being treated for gonorrhea that he claims to have caught from sleeping with one of the hospital's female employees (!) and another nurse is a morphine addict who helps herself to the pharmacy. And then there's a scumbag married hospital superintendent named Chole (Rade Marković), who's also having an affair with Slavica. Though she's fallen in love with him, he's just using her for sex and has no interest in leaving his wife nor jeopardizing his reputation / upper crust social circle to be with her.

Considering everyone's preoccupations, it comes as no surprise that Halil Rexhepi (Dzemail Maksut), the Typhoid Mary of the story, is not attended to in the way that he should have been. After having been infected with smallpox while on a trip to the Middle East, Rexhepi shows up at the hospital already extremely ill. A doctor escorts him into the crowded lobby and sits him down, where he's forced to wait for care and eventually just wanders off somewhere else, leaving a trail of contaminated blood in his wake. A nurse later happens upon him lying on the floor in the women's restroom in a semi-conscious state. He's then taken in front of the staff and medical students, where Chole offers his (incorrect) prognosis: an allergic reaction to penicillin. He's treated for that instead of smallpox (which also happened in the 1972 incident) and is placed in a room with another patient to recover.

As the staff joke around in the hallways and go about their various dramas, the parched, increasingly-sicker and neglected Rexhepi has to be tended to by the other patients, including a young boy. The boy even tries to escort him to the bathroom, but he starts puking up blood in the hallway before even making it in there. A repairman gets on his hands as he tries to help. Later, Rexhepi awakens again and again tracks blood all over the hospital corridors before passing away in an elevator. Due to the deceased's religious beliefs, his family take the body home with them and refuse to let the doctor's perform an autopsy. Even at this early stage, the virus has clearly spread around to most of the staff and other patients, some of whom then return home for the night to no doubt then expose their friends and families before returning to work the next day.

When the government gets word about what has occurred and an elderly infectious disease expert who was around during the 1930 smallpox outbreak demands martial law and quarantine as a means to contain it, the military immediately step into action. The hospital is marked as ground zero, armed guards are posted everywhere, windows are boarded up and no one is permitted to leave. The phone line is cut so they're unable to reach the outside and officials are initially forbidden from informing the press about what's going on as not to create a citywide panic. Another high ranking official seems mostly concerned about the plague costing the city tourist season revenue.

Not surprisingly, the government barely has any smallpox vaccine in stock since it's been over 50 years since that's been an issue, which means the hospital staff are left to their own devices to decide who will and who will not get a shot. Dr. Dragutin Kenigsmark (Erland Josephson) insists they "prioritize" what they do have, which means those who were in direct contact with the initial victim are first in line. Exposed or not, those with certain illnesses, like Dr. Markovic (Dušica Žegarac), who suffers from a heart condition, are unable to even take a vaccine. Some get sick and recover while others get sick and die. Some can't handle the stress and either go crazy or commit suicide. Bodies are taken outside, wrapped in cloth, covered in sawdust and then placed in a metal coffin, which is then welded shut.

The grim, high stress situation brings out both the best and the worst in the characters. Due to her well-connected politico uncle, Dr. Uskokovic is given the opportunity to sneak out of the hospital, but instead passes because she's needed there. Meanwhile, Chole hoards medicine, locks himself away in his office and refuses to leave. A UN epidemiologist (Peter Carsten) who spent two years in Africa trying to contain a similar smallpox outbreak, shows up in his gas mask and hazmat suit to dish out advice and administer care, though he's just one man and unable to do all that much, especially since the majority of the hospital staff refuse to risk their own lives to help.

Bleak, depressing and highly unpleasant, this isn't going to be for all viewers or moods. However, compared to glossy, big budget Hollywood takes on similar material, like Outbreak (1995) and Contagion (2011), this is much grittier and more effective, and feels more realistic. While the expensive blockbusters are busy showing international superstars trotting around the globe like action heroes, this places its focus almost entirely on its one hospital setting, which not only acts as a microcosm of society to illustrate how different people react to stress-inducing crises but also creates a suffocating atmosphere. That, mixed with the grainy photography, low light settings and creepy music score (by Zoran Simjanović), help the material frequently cross into the horror realm, though as a whole it defies easy categorization. Structural corruption, from the highest levels of government right on down to the inner workings of the single hospital, seems to be the most prevalent theme here.

In a brief interview with Dejan Ognjanovic (which can be accessed right here), the director said he was inspired to make the film by the concealment of information by the Yugoslav government during the 1972 epidemic, which he insists is tantamount to "some kind of cover-up." Marković also states he was intending to "place doubt on the validity" of our "sick society." While that all comes across fairly well here, and there's no doubting that governments do indeed hide many things from the general public, I do have mixed feelings about that kind of commentary being applied in this particular case. This is only because of how quickly and efficiently the '72 epidemic was contained by world health officials and the government after it was discovered to be smallpox.

Viewing this also made me realize that we absolutely need another virus / plague film covering similar territory; one that's updated for the times. Recently we've seen the drastically different ways various world leaders, the press, the business world and regular everyday citizens reacted to the COVID-19 pandemic. What they didn't have in 1982 was gov't-sanctioned psyops / online disinformation campaigns and various conspiracy-addled loons, amoral grifters (sadly including several disgraced former members of the scientific community) and, well, just not very bright people, banding together to actually help spread a deadly virus with their social media bullhorn. There's certainly a fascinating movie that could be made taking this new angle into account. Of course, it should be a horror film, because observing some of this shit go down over the past few years has been rather disturbing.

In January 1983, Variola Vera was chosen as the best Yugoslavian film of 1982 by a poll of thirty top Yugoslavian critics and publicists conducted by the Sarajevo-based daily newspaper Oslobođenje. In 2016, the film was also selected by historians as one of the top 100 Serbian films from 1911 to 1999. The director also made Već viđeno / REFLECTIONS (1987) and Sabirni centar / "The Meeting Place" (1989), both of which also made the Top 100 list.

The only official home video releases I was able to find for this title are a Serbian VHS release and a 2003 DVD from the company VANS, which is in Serbian with no subtitles. However, English fan subs are available for this title, which are also used for the various unsanctioned DVD-R releases from grey market dealers.

★★★