YMMV / The Day of the Beast

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: In a meta case of Your Costume Needs Work, the Devil at the end is not a bad Stop Motion creature, but a legless actor propped over fake goat legs with cables!
• Angst? What Angst?: José María doesn't react strongly to Ángel telling him that he accidentally caused his mother's death. Then again, considering how much she treated Mina more like a daughter and would harm José María if he got on her nerves, perhaps his reaction is justified, and he shows more concern for his grandfather's future in light of these news.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • If the "Clean Madrid" gang is led by the Devil, then murdering the newborn Antichrist seems counterproductive. Unless it's meant to show how the forces of evil are self-destructive. Or that killing the physical form of the Antichrist actually allows him to do his thing and the end of times is subtler. Or again, none of this is happening and the protagonists are just hallucinating on LSD and would've murdered the baby of a homeless couple themselves.
  • Although, when they're finally in front of the homeless couple with their wailing newborn, Ángel and José María seem unsure on what to do next, since Ángel was already starting to think that he could be wrong about everything, but Cavan is the one who insisted to continue and is ecstatic about having found the presumed Antichrist, perhaps he's suffering from some Sanity Slippage?
• Awesome Music: "El Día de la Bestia"
  • Apocalipsis 25-D
  • What little is used of Battista Lena's score is memorable, such as his cover of Ministry's "Scarecrow" for the opening titles sequence.
• Catharsis Factor: Antichrist or not, the gang of Kill the Poor extremists was real, and it's satisfying to see Ángel finally giving them the comeuppance they deserve after watching them clubber and set homeless people on fire thoughout the film.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • After a priest gets crushed by a giant cross, we follow Ángel as he walks though Madrid committing sinful actions, such as taking the money of a street beggar, harming a living statue and bidding a dying road accident victim to rot in Hell before stealing his wallet. And the movie has just begun.
  • The police immediately reaching for their guns and trying to shoot Ángel in a busy street without provocation? Horrific. Gunning down the actors playing the Three Wise Men while Ángel escapes? Hilarious.
• Cult Classic: The movie received a warm reception and is widely considered one of Álex de la Iglesia's best films. Expect this movie to be brought up in discussions about horror-comedy gems from around the world. At one point there were even talks of an American remake produced by Marilyn Manson.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: This won't be the last time Father Ángel's actor Álex Angulo stars in a movie about an elusive supernatural being with a goat-like half body.
• Mexicans Love Speedy Gonzales: The movie was a hit in Madrid (a city it portrays as a Wretched Hive) and among Spanish metalheads (who appear as violence-prone Satanists).
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Antonio de la Torre has a small appearance as a supermarket employee who tries to tell the head of security something before being told to leave his office. Years later he would have a main role in Álex de la Iglesia's The Last Circus.
  • Susanna's actress is Maria Grazia Cucinotta, before she played the "Cigar Girl" assassin in The World Is Not Enough and the eponymous character from The Sopranos episode "Isabella".
  • El Gran Wyoming, who cameos at the end as Cavan's replacement, was himself in a dry spell that wouldn't be broken until he was cast as the lead of the Spanish version of Caiga quien Caiga in 1996.
  • The "Clean Madrid" gang members include Jaime Blanch, Salvador in The Ministry of Time.
  • Future TV host Juan y Medio as the cop that tells José María to move his car.
  • Jimmy Barnatán (Chucky in Los Serrano) as the possessed boy.
• Signature Scene: The main trio's escape through the "Schweppes" neon sign.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • Almost everything by Álex de la Iglesia, who has a very recognizable style. The series 30 Coins is perhaps the one that comes closest, featuring a Satanic conspiracy to bring the end of the world, an old Badass Preacher in rural Spain bound to stop it, and all of it played straight instead of being a Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane affair.
  • Like many Spanish directors of his generation, Álex de la Iglesia makes a Shout-Out to the anthology series of The '60s Tales to keep you awake, with the movie's poster being recognizably patterned after its intro card. The satirical Horror Comedy of the film is also reminiscent of the series, except Tales... could never be as violent and irrevent to religion and police because of the censorship of the time.
  • Santiago Segura's own pop culture-heavy Action-Comedy series Torrente. Particularly the first from 1998, which is also set in a Madrid working class neighborhood and has Segura playing a character what is essentially an older version of José María that shares his mother's sociopathy and right-wing beliefs. Torrente also lives with his Scatter Brained Senior father (who dies after accidentally taking drugs) and has a delusion of being an action Cowboy Cop that he passes to a younger pupil he takes during the movie.
  • The Heart of the Warrior (1999) is a very similar story, just changing Satanism for High Fantasy and the delusional trio of a priest, metalhead, and Occult Detective TV host for a delusional trio of a LARPer, prostitute, and TV Phony Psychic (the latter played by Santiago Segura).
  • Critics have called this film a modern version of Don Quixote, due to its contemporary pop culture references and satirical nature, born of contrasting a man consumed by his belief in a fantasy (if Ángel's quest is seen from a pure Atheistic perspective) and a merciless, realistic-ish fractured modern setting, as well as its Hourglass Plot as Ángel drags Cavan, a skeptic in the beginning like Sancho Panza, and turns him into his believing companion while Ángel himself wakes up to reality. José María remains in the middle in this case, filling for Don Quixote's Leeroy Jenkins impulses and physicality, and Sancho Panza's Undying Loyalty to his new master regardless if he actually believes him to be right. Finally, both works were a Sleeper Hit and a Genre Turning Point for Spanish cinema and literature in their respective times.
• Tear Jerker: The ending. Cavan firmly believes that they saved the world, but the look on Ángel's face as he mourns José María makes it evident that the former priest regrets everything that happened and believes that all collateral damage, deaths, and ruined lives he provoked were very likely pointless.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Setting aside the fact that it is explicitly set on December 24-25, 1995 (two months after the movie's release), that is:
  • The one that will surprise modern viewers the most is the Gate of Europe towers appearing finished from the outside, but empty and still under construction on the inside. This was indeed the case between 1992, when a economic downturn forced to suspend construction, and late 1995, when work resumed to be finished in early 1996. In this way the movie turned out to be narrowly inaccurate.
  • Likewise, the shopping mall featured several times in the movie is the original Galerías Preciados building, which was sold to Fnac in 1993. The company itself disappeared after it was bought by El Corte Inglés in 1995.
  • Professor Cavan is a expy of Professor Jiménez del Oso, an Occult themed TV host popular in Spain and Latin America during The '70s and The '80s (several of his productions were called "Magic [Place]", like "Professor Cavan's Magic World"), with a smidge of TV psychics from the early 90s like Antena 3's Carlos Jesús and Tristán Braker, and Telecinco's Italian producers and imported formats (all of whom were considered part of a race to the bottom by Spanish private-owned TV stations, which had only started airing in 1989-1990).
  • The "Clean Madrid" gang echoes a minor leftist panic about upper-middle class neonazi/far right gangs who were supposedly prowling large cities and killing homeless, immigrants, and leftists with impunity, emboldened by the economic downturn of the early 90s, declining popularity of Felipe González's socialist party (in power since 1982), and ascent of an openly right-wing party for the first time since the end of the Franco dictatorship (PP, which narrowly lost the 1993 elections and would win the 1996 snap election).
  • The general depiction of the city as a crime-ridden Wretched Hive is a showcase of the 80s and early 90s, when there was a petty crime wave caused by successive heroin and cocaine epidemics, and there were many rumors about people finding used syringes in public spaces or being assaulted by drug addicts armed with AIDS-filled syringes (hence Rosario's mention of drug addicts and thinking of one entering her place with a syringe).
  • While Madrid's architecture has not changed meaningfully, the Christmas lights (that were the real ones in place for Christmas 1994) feature abundant crosses, when in the modern day they are deliberately non-denominational.

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