“There is always… Santana.”

Justin’s rating: Hey, I was told that there would be Terminators here! And morphing!

Justin’s review: While touring through Mexico, two Americans — Charlie and Pete — get impatient when their bus breaks down and they have to wait, like, two or three whole hours. Forget that, they figure, they might as well follow the creepy veiled lady who wants them to go to a town called Santana. Ignore the panicked warnings of the bus driver who even offers them free beer to stay!

If all the foreboding in the world wasn’t enough to steer them clear of this out-of-the-way burg, then Charlie and Pete deserve whatever’s coming their way next. And wouldn’t you know it, this happens to be the very day when Satan returns to his namesake town to claim a giant bounty in souls for curing the plague some 300 years prior.

So now these two idiots are trapped in hell’s backyard of their own accord, trying to avoid getting carted off to the wrong side of the afterlife’s railroad tracks. As night falls, strange men with whips on horseback start riding around and beasts prowl the roads. Charlie and Pete flee to a mansion where the owner, Octavio (Caesar Romero, Batman the Movie) offers them shelter until the morning. But are they really safe there?

Judgment Day falls into that oddly populated category of “Tourists Get Trapped in a South/Central American Deathscape.” See films like The Ruins and the like. It’s an effective way to induce a sense of dread, because we all-too-easily imagine being trapped in a foreign country at the mercy of strange customs and stranger threats.

Suffice to say, with a low budget — I think about half of it was spent on fog and torches — this movie has to settle for being a slow burn that relies more on atmosphere than special effects. So it all comes down to whether or not this vibe gets under your skin in a creepy way or if it all seems patently ridiculous.

I like the concept here, even if the logic makes no sense (doesn’t Satan get tons of souls every day without having to set up a 300-year long con?). But it didn’t really do it for me in the execution. It leans too much into the “people having discussions about how scary things are and how they should leave” with a minimal payoff.

Maybe if there was a little better effort put into the world building and a more driven plot, I could recommend it, but I’m going to have to reserve my praise for another day.

Intermission!

• Judgment Day only got a VHS release and remains a very hard-to-find film. A low-quality version is on YouTube, but that’s about all I could dig up.
• The super-cheesy studio logos for these obscure outfits makes me so happy, I can’t even tell you
• High-pitched recorder = worst theme song ever
• Always trust people in heavy veils to give you travel advice
• Veiled lady VANISHED! Ooooooh!
• When a really well-meaning guy warns you that Satan is coming this evening, maybe take a cue from that and hightail out.
• “He’s more loco than you are. He’s got leprechauns running through his head!”
• Harpsichord time! The music in this film keeps getting better and better.
• Octavio is a slave master? What now?
• More whipping in this movie than all of the Indiana Jones series
• “Don’t you understand, you stupid jackass? This is hell! This is hell!”