By I love gross movies. There’s something about watching a weird monster with a tree dick chase a noble woman through a forest while spilling an endless stream of sperm or a grease-covered sociopath squeezing the eyeballs out of a man’s head that brings me endless joy. The absurdity of these displays is cathartic and exciting, and I will never for as long as I live get enough of stupidly disgusting art.
The Night of the Virgin is stupidly disgusting. I enjoyed it. You might not.
The Night of the Virgin
Director: Roberto San Sebastián
Rated: NR
Release Date: June 12, 2018 (VOD)
Nico (Javier Bódalo) is a virgin. He’s clearly a virgin from the second you see him. He has the look of a punchline nerd from a National Lampoon movie with his huge teeth, garish glasses, and shitty tuxedo. Whenever he looks at a woman he raises his eyebrows in a way that would turn anyone’s sex organs into toxic waste. Bódalo mugs for the camera, breaking the fourth wall every now and again, perfectly aware of how grungy he looks. He’s having fun, and he’s a great way to disarm and lean into the ridiculousness of the movie.
The basic plot is that he wants to score on New Year’s Eve but strikes out. All of a sudden, though, he meets this older woman at the party who brings him home.
Medea (Miriam Martín) is as sexually aggressive as a cartoon character, licking his bare knee when he bumps it and draping her legs across him on the couch. But she’s often the sinister counterweight to Nico’s shtick. She speaks of an ancient goddess and the evils that come with stepping on a cockroach (which Nico does because her house is crawling with cockroaches), all with a gothic severity that plays nicely with this haunted house ride of a film.
Of course, for Nico there are a series of red flags that should have gotten him out of the house long before any of the weird shit goes down. The first being that she wanted to have sex with him. Come on, kid. The second is the cockroaches falling out of the fucking walls, and the third is the cup of menstrual blood in her bathroom with a cotton swab standing in it. He has a chance to leave, while she sleeps, but instead he searches the house for something to masturbate to and does his deed with her panties to his face. Classic.
Needless to say, he doesn’t get out in time, and soon Medea’s boyfriend, Spider (Víctor Amilibia) is banging on the door and screaming at them. Now, he can’t leave, and as he inadvertently mixes his semen with her menstrual blood, the wheels come off, and an unholy ritual is about to take place.
And it gets gross. Is it the grossest movie I’ve ever seen? Nah. We’re not talking The Taint here, but this does have a prolonged scene of someone shitting a baby out with close-up shots on the action, so it’s not for the faint of heart, either. Also worth noting is that the effects work is quality. The house, blood, and other fluids all look dingy and grueling. This isn’t some no-budget sleeper that only promises but lacks the resources to show any of its big gross-outs. This movie delivers, but only up to its end.
The Night of the Virgin gives the feeling of a movie where whatever is said will happen is going to happen, but once its conclusion closes in, the script begins to pull punches. Like, when a little demon baby demands to have someone’s dick cut off so it can eat it, you kind of want to see that. Anything less will disappoint. In a rush to wrap the story up, the climax stumbles, and the film ends on a dry note. What we get, then, is a very grindhouse horror that’s amusing and a lot of fun for people who don’t have a weak gag reflex, but it’s also every bit as disposable as it tries to be. You’ll have a great time splashing fluids for a night, but you might not remember its name in the morning.
