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Directors: Marcelo Motta and José
Mojica Marins
Screenplay: Rubens Francisco
Luchetti and José Mojica Marins
Cast: José Mojica Marins (as Zé
do Caixão)
A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #32
Coffin Joe, aka. José Mojica Marins, is very much a
"psychotronic" film figure. The term defines a certain type of cinema
that can be found in the mainstream but is much more a term of for the
outskirts of movie making. Admittedly the term comes from an English speaking
origin, which could easily label a legendary Brazilian film maker and cult figure
as inherently psychotronic, the bogeyman that went to become a pop culture
figure with his elongated fingernails, top hat and cape, and Marins' tremendous fire-and-brimstone
voice, if the term was used as an anthropological one meant to explore and
celebrate other cultures. However if you define the term as its meant to
regardless of the country of origin of the films, usually low budget genre
films which have a distinct uniqueness to them, Marins work is a perfect example of it because of how he became a
legendary figure in his home country only to find himself a transgressive
figure against a dictatorship in the later sixties and seventies, how he'd made
the films on very low budgets with inventive methods to create them, and how
frankly bizarre and lurid quite a few of them are.
Also once you leave the key Coffin Joe trilogy - At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul (1963),
This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse
(1967) and Embodiment of Evil (2008)
- which are already distinct and likely to surprise and awe new viewers to
them, the other films that can be found from his filmography easily manage to
raise the bar higher in terms of their strangeness but with acquired taste a
necessity. A combination of even more lower budgets, the effects of censorship
of his work by the dictatorship that took over Brazil at the time, and his potpourri
of sexploitation and horror into the late seventies leads to some very peculiar
work that won't appeal to everyone. Admittedly part of this includes a
willingness to repeat footage and combine shots into collages that takes on an
extreme in some of his films, exemplified by a film like The Strange Hostel of Naked Pleasure's near ten minute prologue,
before the narrative proper starts, of Coffin Joe appearing out of a coffin to
introduce the story. Back in the day I hated the film for this type of elongation
of scenes, but there's a delirium clearly Marins'
own, despite the fact this is technically directed by Marcelo Motta too, with
the prolonged and repeated shots of a mass ritualistic dance by scantily clad
women to summon him from the coffin, what can only be called troglodytes
(actors in black clocks, fake plastic masks and breasts, one with a literal
plastic front bottom) squeal on in horror at the dancing taking place.
The film proper is more of a prolonged
mood piece, an obvious plot signposting its twist at the beginning and far more
concerned with being a strange cacophony of sex and chills with religious
undertones. Marins is a mysterious
owner of an inn, sinister with cryptic monologues which he tells to guests as
he selectively chooses who gets what room - a giant clan of hippies, a gigolo
and his older female lover, four gamblers planning to play cards, a homeless
man who gets brought in as Marins
snubs a rich man and is given bikini wearing women to fed him fruit and wine amongst
those introduced. The inn is immediately in another realm at night, a faceless
clock on the wall in the entrance area with oppressive colour lighting
everywhere. Clear warning is to be found when one of the employees, an older
woman, sees a wallet on the floor only for it to turn, by jump cut, into a
spider as she stares at it crawling with bafflement. It's blatantly clear what
the twist is but you'll be more concerned with the concoction of images that
take place onscreen instead.
The result is a barrage of raggedly
edited moments of characters in various activates that last for most of the
film, including a lot of the same shots of the hippies dancing in a room and
getting naked that'll bring out an entirely new perspective of the female form
for viewers, juxtaposed with Marins'
eyes glaring in extreme close-up. He constantly repeats moments until a new
piece is added each time, either depending on your mood padding at its most
ridiculous to be feature length or a hypnotic loop. By the end the religious
and ominous undertones become more intense as the music blares at unsuspecting
viewers, the supernatural nature of the inn already known and getting more
macabre as it goes. Barring one sequence which is problematic depending on how it was actually done - when animals like
mice and crabs suddenly flinch and spasm on their backs whenever Marins passes
them through the corridors - it becomes a slow, absurdly soporific experience
which can be utterly frustrating at points but madly compelling, more so as the
extremely damaged print the UK DVD release used adds to this with its scratches
and pops, an eclectic blend of choir chorus, psychedelic and exotica in the
score exceptionally diverse and keeping you on your toes.
The really interesting aspect of
the film beyond this, alongside the rest of Marins'
career, is how he was a purveyor of lurid horror and sex films yet he has an
obsession with morality and religion that borders on incomprehensible at times
with some of the monologues in The
Strange Hostel... but sound utterly sincere and are fascinating to hear and
read in the subtitles. Before the story of the inn even starts, you get a
diorama of the cosmos, with asteroids on strings, as Marins narrates about the infinite nature of the universe, a
bizarre tangent in a film that'd get even more bizarre later on in its short
eighty or less minutes length, its existence still compelling in the oddly
mystical weight it adds despite how vague his proclamations can be. The Coffin Joe trilogy is the best example
of Marins' philosophising as he has a
fascinating character he plays in Joe - a nihilistic atheist influenced by the
creator's issues with the hypocritical nature of religion but also an extreme
parody of masculinity in Joe's obsession with continuing his bloodline by
having a child in any way he can - but the scraggier films in his career like The Strange Hostel... are just as
curious in their attempts at profoundness. Especially as the ending of this
film manages to be incredibly macabre and eerie, from the scene of a naked
woman wandering out the inn through the gates to salvation to its final shot,
his obsession is still as compelling to see here as with the more successful
attempts.
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Abstract Spectrum: Mindbender; Psychotronic; Weird
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium
This will not be the last time Marins will be on this site - ever since
he created the mind-blowing hell sequence in colour in his black and white
sequel This Night I'll Possess Your
Corpse he decided to try to top that sequence and did so many times after. His
tendency later on to almost stitch his films together from what materials were
available, as far as create a film (Hallucinations
of a Deranged Mind (1978)) from censored scenes with a new narrative around
them the most extreme example, added to this habit of creating mad moments of
cinema alongside the repetition and juxtapositions. His fingerprints and vision
are smothered on this particular film even if others created and wrote it with
him in the centre. To paraphrase Carlo
Carrà's The Painting of Sounds,
Noises, and Smells (1913), you won't find " the rrrrrreddest
rrrrrrreds that shouuuuuuut" like you find here in Marins' films, from a woman's lips let alone the coloured lighting
in his films, anywhere else barring animation or Kenneth Anger. The music is as unpredictable as the visuals as Marins' personal mythology is vague and
yet compelling at the same time, able to get away with the same shot of actors
rolling around naked on a bed because on how it feels like you've just taken a
narcotic and are feeling the effects as the scenes play out. It's an extremity
of genre cinema that's absolutely not for everyone, scratched to shit in the
version available to me with burnt on subtitles and muffled sound, but is
unique in how it whittles down sex and horror to its basics, a wallet left on
the floor suddenly turning into a spider turning out to be the sanest moment in
the entire film.
Abstract Tropes: Repeated Footage; Monologues about the Cosmos and
Fate; Sexploitation; Wanton Nudity; Excessive Coloured Lighting; Supernatural; Eclectic
Music Cues
Personal Opinion:
An acquired taste of the most
extreme but utterly compelling.
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