Una Vela Para el Diablo, or the rather more poetic if pointless A Candle for the Devil as it's more commonly known amongst English speaking audiences, is set in a small Spanish village where American tourist Laura Barkley (Judy Geeson who is in fact English) is trying to locate her missing sister May (Loli Tovar) who is a photographer. Laura tries the small guest-house where her sister was staying, it's run by two elderly sisters Marta (Aurora Bautista) & Veronica (Esperanza Roy) who claim that May left that morning but who in fact hide a terrible secret. As Laura investigates her sisters whereabouts she learns Martha & Veronica lied to her & when another young attractive tourist named Helen Miller (Lone Fleming) mysteriously disappears Laura is convinced all is not as it seems at the guest-house...<br /><br />This Spanish production was co-written & directed by Eugenio Martin & is a pretty lousy way to spend 85 minutes of your time. The script by Martin & Antonio Fos takes itself extremely seriously & is a bit patchy, character's come & go with little regard for flowing narrative, people's actions & motives are questionable to say the least, the dubbed dialogue is poor & I'm not really sure who this will please. For a start the body count is low, there's no mystery elements or interest in whodunit as that's made perfectly clear from the start, the exploitation levels are virtually zero & to try & spice things up a bit there are a few unpleasant sex scenes, I mean if your going to show a sex scene at least have a decent looking actress rather than a near old age pensioner. It seems that a short 68 odd minute version is more readily available than the 83 minute version I saw, personally I'd be glad that it runs for 15 minutes less as that's 15 minutes of your life you don't have to waste watching this poor excuse for a film. I also have to mention the ending which is one of the worst endings to a film I've ever seen, basically Laura is trapped in the house with the mad sisters & looks out the window as a angry mob of villagers approach & then it just finishes as if they ran out of film or someone forgot to include the last reel!<br /><br />Director Martin does OK, he captures a certain feel of the Spanish locations but I'm not sure what. There are a couple of sequences approaching horror but it's not scary, there's no tension & it lacks any suspense. If your looking for gore forget it, there's a couple of stabbings, an eyeball in a meal, a decapitated head & some blood splatter but generally speaking this is very tame stuff. Things fare better on the nudity front but the actors used aren't exactly model material, unusually there is full frontal male nudity although I only mention it because it is unusual & not because I'm gay or anything.<br /><br />This was obviously a pretty cheap production & it shows, it's quite well made for what it is I supposed & at least it was shot on film & on location so that also gives it a cinematic look. It's always difficult to comment on acting when people have been dubbed, here the English dubbing is pretty terrible although maybe Geeson spoke English on set.<br /><br />Una Vela Para el Diablo is a rubbishy piece of Euro crap that's not really sleazy or exploitative enough to satisfy me & I'm sure there will be many out there who feel the same. I wanted to like it but I didn't, disappointing.