Oi, beleza? Justin here, and today we'll be looking at a double feature of Brazilian horror movies both featuring writer/director/actor Jose Mojica Marin's iconic baddie, Coffin Joe.
At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul
The first film in the trilogy of official Coffin Joe movies is At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul from 1964. In preparing to write this, I've been trying to figure out an American analogue to Coffin Joe. The more I thought about this, the more pointless I decided it was. There is nothing remotely close to Coffin Joe in American film. Coffin Joe is an undertaker and wears a stove top hat and has long fingernails. In this movie he's working on a unibrow. Joe is extremely judgmental according to a strict and strange code. He goes around intimidating the local townsfolk and spreading his ridiculous personal philosophy. As soon as the movie starts, the differences between Joe and an American supernatural baddie are apparent as he commits the unthinkable sin of eating meat on Friday, something frowned upon by Catholics.
Before you get the wrong idea though, Coffin Joe is not meant to be an evil character, rather he is supposed to be amoral. He represents a morality that's certainly not in line with Brazilian Catholic values. The amorality is best represented in a scene where Coffin Joe happens upon a young boy being smacked around by his father. Joe breaks it and lectures the dad about how he shouldn't hit the kid because he's part of the dad's “continuity of blood.” Had the boy been a girl though, Coffin Joe probably would have given him whatever the Brazilian equivalent of a high-five is. The main conflict of the movie is that Coffin Joe is looking to father a son but needs to find the right woman to submit to him. He's pretty evil though, so he kills a fair few people, women and men, in the process.
This all comes to a head when Joe decides to walk the streets late on Dia de los Muertes. Coffin Joe is cautioned on this but decides to ignore that. He soon meets the procession of dead and they carry him away.
What makes this movie worth watching aside from how different it is is that it embodies the awesome DIY spirit of 1960's Brazil. I'm a big fan of a lot of the tropicalia music that came out of this scene. My personal favorite among those is psychedelic rock group Os Mutantes – in their debut album, they even name drop Coffin Joe. Os Mutantes found interesting ways to make up for their technological and financial limitations. Famously, they used a can of aerosol spray on a recording to affect a swizzle cymbal. Similarly in At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul, the ghost that finally does Joe in is supposed to glow. To make this affect, Marins literally glued glitter onto the film stock around the actor. Throughout the movie, a lot is done with a little. Jose Mojica Marins' Joe is very entertaining to watch as well. In the end, he comes off less as evil incarnate and more as a major asshole.
Awakening the Beast
Between At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul and Awakening the Beast is another movie, This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse – unfortunately that one is unavailable on Netflix right now so I skipped ahead to the third movie, Awakening the Beast.
Awakening the Beast is one of the weirdest movies I've ever seen - maybe in the top three. The movie starts with a series of vignettes that are various people taking drugs and engaging in deviant sexual behavior. Here's a quick cross section: a woman strips in front of a few business men and then poops in a chamber pot, another girl smokes some weed and lets a bunch of hippies play with her, a stern looking older man has three ladies strip and then kicks them each in the butt, and so on and so on. This part went on way too long. In between these vignettes, a panel of psychologists talk in a dark room about the problems with drugs. One of the people here is Jose Mojica Marins, presumably because drug addicts like Coffin Joe.
The belabored point of all the ridiculousness in the beginning is that one of the doctors wants to round up 4 random subjects and have them all take LSD so he can record the results. The subjects were people from the opening shorts. After an initial experiment, they all find a weird attraction to Coffin Joe and decide to trip while looking at a poster of him.The movie is in black and white up until the trip, at which point it switches to color. The 4 people share the same trip and it all involves Coffin Joe. We're in some sort of technicolor Hell lair with half-naked servants everywhere. Marins plays around with jump cuts a lot here as Joe and the others pop in and out of frame. Each person sees visions that reinforces Joe's philosophy of male superiority. He strips and bloodies one of the women, the guy who kicked the ladies ends up with a bunch of women at his feet, and another guy ends up looking at the butts of five or six women that have all been painted to look like Coffin Joe's face. It's extremely weird to say the least. Joe gives a sermon which is just several variations of him saying, “Throughout the history of man, women has always been submissive to man!” Yeah, he's a total asshole.
Again, I'd say that Awakening the Beast is worth watching because it is totally unlike any other movie that I can think of.
FIM