30 Coins

 HBO's 30 Coins is an example of the Spanish Baroque that makes pictures by Pedro Almodovar and Guillermo del Toro seem tame by comparison, sedate, genteel, and placidly neo-classical.  The supernatural thriller begins with a flourish:  three crosses loom over a sun-blasted escarpment while a storm boils in the sky; a centurion flogs Jesus viciously and, then, we see nails pounded through the Messiah's hands.  The cross thuds into a hole, upright, while gangs of grotesque figures grimace and howl with laughter (the people have zombie-white eyes and hooked noses and chins and they look extras from Brueghel or Bosch painting of the Passion).  Jesus glares down at Judas and, then, laughs at him.  The spear that pierces Christ's side releases a hydraulic spurt of gore that fountains up out of the frame.  Judas flees through the wilderness.  The mob raises barbaric-looking effigies agamst the turbulent sky.  Ants overrun a skull with its jaw propped open.  Judas hangs himself while a phalanx of centurions blow trumpets that shatter into pieces a huge marble angel.  Thirty coins lie in the trampled dirt.  These images comprise merely the show's grandiose and brutal opening titles -- more blood in the credit sequence than in the entirety of many full-blown horror films.  Things get even more operatically melodramatic as the show gets underway.  In remote Spanish village, perched like Toledo above a stony gorge, a cow has just given birth to a human baby.  The town's Mayor, Paco, a ridiculously handsome, specimen of male pulchritude runs the boutique hotel in the ancient village.  His shrewish wife, Mercedes, ("Merche") also runs an abattoir -- more gallons of blood in the slaughterhouse and gurneys pull of gloating pig faces hacked from the skulls of slaughtered swine.  Paco is in love with a comely lady veterinarian who is, in turn, intrigued by a wealthy cosmopolitan playboy.  The lady vet's husband has vanished (we find out that he's been murdered and, also, somehow turned into a gaunt scarecrow standing in a arid field outside of town.)  The local priest, Father Vergara, is a heavy-set former boxing champion, fled to the town in the wake of a failed exorcism in which the victim of this demonic possession has ended up dead.  The cow's baby boy turns into a forty-foot spider that dashes around town tearing people to pieces.  Meanwhile in the Vatican, a cabal of evil cardinals is hunting for the 30 coins that Judas was paid for betraying Christ.  Once these coins have all been gathered, demonic forces will be unleashed on the earth and the some sort of apocalypse will devastate creation.  The cardinals wear gorgeous red robes and they meet in sinister conclaves to plot the massacre of innocents that will occur when the 30 coins have been gathered and deposited into some sinister Vatican reliquary.  In one alarming scene, a group of spelunkers garbed in HazMat suits descends into a shaft from a subway tunnel.  A thousand feet below the earth in a vast dripping cavern an enormous crucifix dangles upside down like a colossal  perverse stalactite.  The HazMat spelunker ascend to Christ's inverted face, drag open his eyes, and yank one of the 30 coins out of his eye-socket.  In other scenes, zombies seeking the coins hack people to death and are riddled with bullets but, nonetheless, stagger away in fountains of blood to hand the purloined coins to their demonic handlers.  During the botched exorcism, the possessed lad is afflicted with one of the accursed coins that slithers around in his flesh like a flesh-eating beetle and, then, erupts through his skin.  The victim of this possession dies but his waxen corpse makes cameo appearances from time to time in later episodes to either excoriate Father Vergara or comfort him.  The series' frantic action involves scenes at the Vatican, including within its library where all "the books in the world" are shelved; Hasidic Jews in the diamond business are slaughtered in New York City (their jewelry shop has one of the coins); a demon-priest shoots up a posh restaurant in Paris's Place Vendome, and Father Vergara, for inexplicable reasons, sojourns in war-torn Syria where he is tortured by various factions of the regime (or resistence- -- who knows?)  The hysteria achieves a delirious intensity when another priest from Hell (this guy looks like Jack Palance) pours maggots into the city sewers, enlisting the services of a local witch, causing the whole town to foam up with clouds of impenetrable fog -- it's like someone has used the Drano from Hell (literally) in the town's plumbing.  Then, the demon drizzles some sort of black goo (apparently edible if you're a fiend since he gulps big fistfuls of the molasses-colored syrup) all around the edges of town.  The goo magically installs clear plexiglass barriers enclosing the village and preventing the inhabitants from escaping.  The witch goes around town nailing pig faces to doors.  From below the stark cliff where the town is built, the whole village in encased in frothy pillars of fog much to the dismay of local gendarmes.  Somehow, Father Vergera has returned and, opening a secret chamber in the church's sacristy, he exposes an armory of automatic weapons.  Before the end of the penultimate episode, we see him liberally dowsing the bullets in holy water.

Thirty Coins is ridiculous but it has the courage of its crazy convictions.  Spanish shows are exquisitely cast.  (I recognized several of my favorite actors from Money Heist another excellent Tv show from the country.)  The villagers are variously ridiculous and some of them so ugly as to be actually cute.  Spanish TV also  features astonishingly gorgeous women, often nude or semi-nude, and so the show is replete with Majas (clothed and unclothed).  This commitment to what is sometimes called "eye candy" isn't an appeal merely to male viewers:  the men in the show are also lavishly handsome and athletic (and, also, generally traipsing about shirtless).  Some of the imagery is Goyasque -- particularly friezes of terrified villagers pressing their grotesque snouts up against the magical plexi-glass in their vain attempts to flee the demonically possessed town.  It's all idiotic but convincingly presented with high production values.  So, despite the better angels of my judgement,(so to speak) I am cautiously a fan of the series.