Review: THE NIGHT OF THE VIRGIN Drags On, Then Barely Delivers As WTF Genre Cinema

Roberto San Sebastián’s The Night of the Virgin (aka La noche del virgen) is one of those genre films that, since early on, you know it’ll be all about the execution of its climax.

The basic setting goes like this: nerdy young man Nico (played by Javier Bódalo, one of the child actors from The Devil’s Backbone) is visibly the only one of a group of friends who’s not having a blast during a New Year’s Eve party, though his luck changes when older lady Medea (Miriam Martín) puts her eyes on him and eventually invites him over to her house to continue with the celebration.

The objective of Nico is to (finally) get laid, yet the creepiness of Medea’s attitude and apartment is evident since the very beginning… therefore we know it’s only a matter of time for Nico to “enjoy” a night that’s going to be unforgettable but not for the right reasons.

The Night of the Virgin takes its time to reveal what’s really going on inside the mind of Medea, a woman who, we learn, spent time in Nepal and firmly believes in some legends and feminine figures from said Asian country. The Night of the Virgin constantly reminds us that something is off at Medea’s place, through, for example, gimmicky scenes that turns a ringing phone into something that should upset us, or a more direct glimpse to the disgusting scenario, where cockroaches and a bucket of blood inside the bathroom might turn the young dude off.

In that sense, the film is constantly trying to be both gross and funny, and while it works at times -- and is certainly understandable that it doesn’t go straight to the point -- it does drags on during the first hour, specially once Nico decides that he has had enough of Medea’s creepy apartment and that it’s time to leave. What comes next is, quite simply, an example of a script that must come up with a situation to maintain its protagonist inside the only main location; the surprising appearance of Medea’s enraged boyfriend (Víctor Amilibia), and how he never manages the break the door and enter the apartment, despite wanting to beat the crap out of Nico, is enough to realize The Night of the Virgin is overlong and, like I said, will depend completely on its climax.

Predictably, there’s bigger, crazier things at stake than a mature woman wanting to start the new year in bed with a younger guy, but mythology-wise this is as flat as it gets when it comes to genre cinema. So, what about that promising culmination? The Night of the Virgin delivers as a pure WTF curiosity, but not entirely. It’s, at the same time, violent, weird, vulgar, gross and absurd, as if the Troma of Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead did their own fucked up version of a childbirth. But that’s just a couple of sequences inside a 100-minute flick; hell, the deranged climatic ritual is not even completed, in favor of more messy interaction between the three characters. Thus, the climax of The Night of the Virgin is barely worthy, while the rest is pretty much disposable.