If I’m being honest, I lost track of following the career of Spanish genre hopping director, Álex de la Iglesia, pretty much after he released the devilishly funny El día de la Bestia (The Day Of The Beast) back in 1995. It was a weird lapse of judgement from me as not only did I thoroughly enjoy the coal-black humor of Beast, I also liked his rough-as-arseholes debut, the scrappy sci-fi comedy, Accion Mutante and his spiteful thriller, The Bar which I found completely by accident in Netflix.
Well, now I feel that I’ve paid some of my negligence back by sitting down and finally catching up on 30 Coins (30 Monedas), a show on HBO Europe that deals with satanic conspiracies, gloopy monsters and some pretty trippy shit which de la Iglesia helmed every episode himself.
Gearing up with a defiant, no holds barred attitude (the opening credits depict the crucifixion and Judas’ subsequent suicide for crying out loud) the director obviously hopes to offload a heap of fucked-up stuff onto our hungry eyeballs on a weekly basis – and judging by the first episode, he’s only gone and bloody done it.
We begin in a Genevan bank as a man wielding a gun strides confidently into the foyer while calmly picking off guards like he’s heading out to grab the morning paper, but after failing to let a small inconvenience such as repeatedly getting shot slow him down, he liberates a lowly coin from a safe deposit box and obediently delivers it to a waiting priest.
It’s quite an opening, but that nothing compared to what happens next as we suddenly switch scenes to the insignificant little Spanish town of Pedraza where veterinarian Elena struggles to help a cow give birth during a stormy night on the Alonso farm. However, things rapidly start setting bizarro alarms a’ ringing when the heffer gives birth to a human baby and everyone rushes to the young Mayor Paco for some much needed advice. As he is desperate to put the town on the map and his status-hungry wife, Mercedes, thirsts for some good publicity for her new slaughterhouse, the put-upon Paco declares a media blackout and all involved herd over to discuss the matter with the local Padre, Manuel Vergara.
The padre – a bearded, grizzled man of the cloth who not only is an accomplished boxer, but also has a bit of jail time under his belt thanks to a botched exorcism – claims it’s all some sort of scam and the baby is temporarily entrusted into the care of the Alonsos who once lost their own child years prior. However, as time goes on, both Elena and Paco discover that a lot of things are far more complicated than it first might appear. Not only is there something disturbingly iffy with a baby that grows to four feet in height in two days while still remaining a baby, but Vergara’s staunch insistence of realism in the face of obvious, supernatural happenings stinks to high heaven. As matters rapidly get out of control and possession, guns and monstrous baby-faced spider creatures enter the mix, it all seems to centre around a single coin that the padre has in his possession.
Probably not since the much-missed days of Ash Vs. Evil Dead has a pilot of a horror show given us so much to process in a single, opening episode. After being let loose on a television show that gives him a greatly expanded canvas, De la Iglesia seems to make it his solemn vow to gleefully hurl everything he can at the wall in an attempt to make it stick and luckily enough, most of it does.
The random selection of main characters are varied as they are intriguing with Megan Montaner’s dogged and fiercely independent vet proving to be an unorthodox, but utterly beguiling lead. Elsewhere, Miguel Ángel Silvestre’s dashing Paco plays against type as a nervous, hen-pecked mayor whose first thought at the news of cows birthing humans, attempted infanticide or demonic possession is to immediately plead with everyone not to post it on Facebook. However, most intriguing of all is Eduard Fernández’s shaven-headed padre who legitimately looks like he’s seen some shit and while he plays the world-weary, faith-lacking holy man on the surface, it’s already apparent after the events of the episode that 90% of what comes out of his mouth is pure, undiluted horseshit.
But what are those events that I mentioned? Well, this first episode is so crammed full of mysterious incident, that I’m not sure I have enough space in a single article to cover it all, but this is obviously exactly what de la Iglesia is shooting for and the deranged and twisted revelations come thick and fast. While Vergara promptly denies the cow/human birth as fake, that doesn’t stop local town idiot and religious nut, Antonio, from stealing the child in an attempt to snuff its “evil” by dangling him from one leg from a tower. Genuine heart in your mouth moments like this aside, things impossibly get even weirder when the child, once rescued, not only grows to the height of your average Danny Devito while remaining a baby, but his adoptive mother, Carmen Alonso, obviously is brought under the murderous influence of a demonic force as she starts knitting large, swollen cobwebs all over her house, feeds the “child” raw liver and murders her husband with a knitting needle when he speaks out.
However, the true showstopper is when the child develops into a spindly spider-creature with a child’s face lodged in its toothy maw and attempts to rip Elena and Paco limb from limb.
However, at utterly fucking cool all the horror stuff is, what makes you instantly want to return to the shithole known as Pedraza as soon as possible to start unraveling the dozens of secrets that lurk within the episode. It’s already easy to figure that the titular coins are the thirty pieces given to Judas for his betrayal of Christ, but how has one got here, what’s the benefit of owning them and who is the priest manically sending people on suicide missions to collect them. Beyond that, what is the connection between the exorcism that saw Manuel sent to jail and the demon that possesed Carmen and why is he so reluctant to admit that Satanic shit is obviously at work? Finally, what is the significance of Elena’s missing husband who seemingly up and vanished one day and what will befallen her now that she has Manuel’s coin in her possession – one that seemingly sprang from the arm of a possessed young man who then died of a heart attack in Manuel’s arms?
If 30 Coins can keep this rate of outlandish horror imagery and tantalising conspiracy moving at such a furious, batshit pace then I am sold – and all its cost me is thirty little coins…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
We Have Issues 