The opening sequence of Alex de Ia Iglesia’s kitchen sink, horror-slapstick comedy Witching & Bitching both transcends and replicates any ideal scene in a movie called Witching & Bitching: A pawn-shop heist carried out by costumed impersonators and orchestrated by a man dressed as silver-painted Jesus. Tightly edited and relentlessly energetic, Iglesia balances the gonzo surrealism, pitch black comedy, and mundane dialogue in such a manner that each moment featured in the scene builds upon the last in a gleefully manic snowball effect. The heist becomes a shootout, a shootout becomes a hostage crisis, a hostage crisis turns into a rapid car chase through the bustling streets of Puerta del Sol. Screenwriter Jorge Guerricaechevarria holds up his end of the sequence as well, introducing characters and setting up the plot in sparse moments of exposition always taking place as the stakes keep getting raised. While these first 15 minutes of the film provoke an absolutely insane bliss of craziness, they are also the foundation of the film’s greatest flaw: Iglesia and Guerricaechevarria have no chance of topping it.

        Where the opening felt like controlled chaos, the rest of the film is entirely reliant on weirdness and unexpected blatant sexism. As the jewelry thieves escape the city, they stumble upon a coven of witches in a spooky village. This immediately forces a thematic disconnect between the opening and the rest of the film, but there is still potential for Iglesia to use his new premise to create another spectacular sequence. Even though it’s completely respectable for Iglesia and Guerricaechevarria to abandon the action elements that defined their setup in favor of oddball comedy, what is deeply frustrating is their constant reliance of using sexist stereotypes of women and unjustified bizarreness as a goldmine for humor.

        The overall portrayal of women in this movie could make mens’ rights activists blush with embarrassment. Each woman featured in the film can be defined into one of three categories: The somewhat three-dimensional nagging shrew, the two-dimensional man-obsessive, or the one-dimensional shrieking lunatic. The role of the birthmother of a child held captive by witches could hypothetically have depth to spare, but Guerricaechevarria largely writes her a nagging ex-wife even in crisis. Every time a woman appears onscreen or is mentioned, the snowball effect returns under much more troubling terms. It appears that Guerricaechevarria and Iglesia are in a contest with an imaginary screenwriter and director to concoct the most politically incorrect feature, and the line of misogyny is crossed into far too unsettling territory for their efforts to be considered a farcical statement on a male dominated culture.

        As the film races towards its naked CGI witch laden conclusion, Guerricaechevarria and Iglesia attempt to move their story into even crazier territory with very little success. Scenes of witches crawling on the ceiling and bizarre torture methods are admittedly weird on their own, yet the stakes are strangely lowered as result of the lack of forward momentum. The characters lives are in danger, yet the inherent goofiness of the picture prevents any real scares from taking place. It’s also important to note that other than an innocent child who is also being held captive by the witches, the protagonists are unpleasant to the point where there is little to no emotional investment in their wellbeing. The momentum falls apart, and nothing on screen matters beyond wondering how the beginning could be edited into a separate short film.