The Bloody Exorcism of Coffin Joe (1974)

 

Director: José Mojica Marins

Screenplay: José Mojica Marins, Adriano Stuart and Rubens Francisco Luchetti

Cast: José Mojica Marins as himself/Coffin Joe, Alcione Mazzeo as Luciana, Ariane Arantes as Wilma, Geórgia Gomide as Lúcia, Joffre Soares as Júlio, Marcelo Picchi as Carlos, Marisol Marins as Betinha, Walter Stuart as Álvaro, Wanda Kosmo as Malvina

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

José Mojica Marins and his creation Coffin Joe, who came to be in cinema with At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul (1964), has been appreciated and preserved, both when Marins was still with us and after his 2020 passing. We are still missing one or two films however in his filmography, and one of the most prominent absentees is The Bloody Exorcism of Coffin Joe, which you would naturally presume would be a part of the Coffin Joe catalogue with all the others as, even if appearing in the end only, that character is central to its biggest selling point. If you are a fan of this character, then the set up for this is a tantalising one of Marins and Coffin Joe crossing paths. Marins as himself is first shown directing on a film set a home invasion going amiss for the robbers when they did not expect the young couple their targeted to become elderly ghouls, and calmly taking an interview in a nice green jumper and with even his trademark long fingers nails on display. This is his other film metatextuality poking at his legendary creation, if a pulpier crossover between creator and creation, less dealing with the character in the real world but imagining himself being terrorised by his own creation.

The first film which tackled this, Awakening of the Beast (1970), was a really metatextual production because Marins was tackling the growing notoriety around the Coffin Joe character in terms of backlash. That film is arguably more difficult to appreciate if you have not seen another film of his, as it is a commentary on the controversy over his morbid character and the success he was having in popular culture in Brazil. However, especially when it turns into a full colour wig-out with buttock faced creatures in Hell, it became more readily available outside his homeland and paradoxically a more sellable film for how bizarre it is even with context. Bloody Exorcism does get to the risqué content by the time of the Satanist cult torturing people in Hell in the final act, but this is a straightforward genre film. A lashing of haunted house/witch's curse premise is fleshed into this, all in setting up the meeting between Marins as himself and Coffin Joe as the ultimate antagonist against his own creation. There is moments where he gets to portray himself as a very intelligent man, who gets to comment with other characters about his beliefs on how horror works and is liked as it is, but he himself is not going to dissect his evil creation as a construction as Awakening of the Beast did, but have Coffin Joe scaring him instead.

José Mojica Marins is the director-creator going to an island where a friend lives with his family, all with the intention to plan his next script only to become embroiled with an evil aura terrorising the family. To his credit, the opening has an appropriately sombre opening of him travelling to the location by boat, set to haunting chanting in the score. This is also set at Christmas, with adds an amusing touch as things will start to turn amiss as soon as he gets there. First it seems merely mischievous, like a chair moving by its own will, then starts to become more an issue when the grandfather becomes the first person to get possessed, and it is established everything is (literally) going to Hell. It is cool to see Marins, whose films have been as much sold for their transgressive and blasphemous content over the years play with more traditional horror tropes. As much of the reason that he became as controversial as he was as a horror creator was that Coffin Joe the character is an atheist who thumbed his nose at religion and morality, and believed in finding the perfect women to breed the perfect offspring by any means necessary, even murder. This has Coffin Joe as a literal evil near the end that our protagonist, and has the director/co-writer take a shot for the first half of Bloody Exorcism at the classic horror tropes of haunted houses and curses, where even a toy piano being played by itself is ominous as is Marins himself being assaulted by flying books. Not even the Christmas tree is safe from snakes briefly materialising from it.

Though that side will appear later on, it may disappoint some expecting him to have the extremes that made him a controversial figure at this time do not really appear as prominently here, where there is the cute moppet daughter and Marins' film is entirely on the side on the good nuclear family, but it is interesting to see him go through this plot thread. Connected to an angry witch terrorising the family who he has wandered into the drama of, all because the wife requested her help to be able to conceive a daughter on condition the witch choose who she would marry as an adult, each member of the family becomes possessed, and sadly even the family dog is not safe, all whilst Jose is trying to rationalise the scenario. I wonder if The Exorcist (1973) came to influence this or not, or even got to Brazil at that specific time to even be able to do so, its slower pace and gleefully eerie tone suggesting this as initially a "safer" if still fun Marins film. The score certainly helps, and eventually the tone shifts into more extreme content.

By that point, there is nude possession with inappropriate self use of a poker and Marins in a lovely pink suit being a bystander to the horrors he the director would shot throughout his career. As he finds himself in Hell with demonic worships and Coffin Joe leading them, it leads to his trope as a filmmaker of hiring extras of both genders, in general state of undress, with ghoulish carnival haunted house gore effects like a man having his tongue cut out taking place. In what could be best described as theatrical performance hellscape scenes, if you have seen other films of his, like Awakening of the Beast, and how he let these moments stretch out for their ghoulishness for minutes, this is the same thing here to escalate the film closer to his other work from the time. The crossover between character and creators is not as complex as Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994), where Wes Craven revisited Freddy Krueger as an entity terrorising the people who made his films, but here you at least have Marins forced to confront his creation. Bemused as a terrified bystander who only intervenes when a child is threatened, this is an example a good few decades earlier, involves the creator in actual debate with the figure he said he created directly. It also emphasises the idiosyncratic, even schism-like, knife-edge too in his work, between revealing in the anti-religious horror but also making sure it always win, which is prevalent even in mind to a politically tumultuous time in Brazil when these films were being made. Like Jose's friend being a Catholic who yet is studying parapsychology without any more issues, his cinema is curious in terms of faith and anti-faith, where he can make Coffin Joe almost a true anti-hero, even if he had to always lose, but also made a film like The End of Man (1970), a film which has Joe's total opposite, a virtuous man of miraculous gifts, even if with satirical edges mocking the world socially and politically around this character. José Mojica Marins certainly hated organised complacency in general, and if there is a sense this films seems a more safer film, it is and is probably one of the reasons it could be seen as a weaker film from the director, as it feels like a pure horror story without an edge to it even with the nastier content coming into it by the end.  He can prod at organised religion in the earlier films, and be more gruesome in Embodiment of Evil (2008) when he would be allowed to get away with it, but still create the kind of film here which have a happy ending to keep the audience happy or a twisted morality play for others, censorship or not. Certainly, as this review started with, it is strange this film is seemingly lost among those available beyond his homeland, especially as it is still a fun production among them.

Abby (1974)

Director: William Girdler

Screenplay: G. Cornell Layne

Cast: William Marshall as Bishop Garret Williams, Terry Carter as Reverend Emmett Williams, Austin Stoker as Detective Cass Potter, Carol Speed as Abby Williams, Juanita Moore as Miranda "Momma" Potter, Charles Kissinger as Dr. Hennings, Elliott Moffitt as Russell Lang, Nathan Cook as Tafa Hassan

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

We have William Marshall of Blacula (1972) in a lead role here, so we are good from the get-go, an actor who I wished could have had the huger filmography, one to match Christopher Lee's, as they both have the commanding voices, the gravitas and the sense no matter how ridiculous the film around them is, as with Abby here, they stood proudly within them. When I saw a retrospective screening of Blacula, as much as it was the cape that made him alluring, a younger woman in the patrons afterwards admitted to a male friend she found Marshall irresistible, one of those overheard anecdotes that make one glad to go to the cinema. Shame this is a role for him in a film viewed through an old sock depending on the version you can find, as this is a mostly all-black cast reinterpretation of The Exorcist (1973) which was sued off the screens. Warner Brothers may have forgotten to retract the suit, hence why it is difficult to see, alongside actually film prints. It's director William Girdler had no shame in following trends, with his most known film Grizzly (1976) if Jaws was replaced with a bear on land, but in the world of far more blatant Exorcist copies, especially the likes of the Turkish film Şeytan (1974), it feels cruel this idiosyncratic take, shot on barely a budget, was the one that got blocked from released, preserved through bootlegs or theatrical screenings of old prints.

Girdler himself is a distinct figure in American independent cinema, tragically dying in a helicopter accident whilst scouting for locations for a film. He was at only the age of thirty in 1978 when this happened, but he managed from 1972 to 1978 to make nine films. He is a regional filmmaker/producer who shot in various states - Abby shot in Louisville, Kentucky - and alongside how impressive that run is, to image what he could have do when the shot-to-video eighties era came in would have been tantalising in mind to a film like Abby, made in mind to a huge hit undeniably but having its own energetic spin to the material.  

Abby itself, alongside being a riff on the Exorcist, was also riding the wave Blacula was part of when "Blaxploitation" cinema grew in the early seventies, making films about predominantly black casts, and started touching into horror. I credit Girdler, a white filmmaker, just entirely devote himself even if in mind to the market to a mostly all-black cast driven film here, even if you do have to accept that the film might be seen as crass in its premise. I am not the right person to speak of whether the film can be defendable or not, but I could have seen something far more problematic in this premise, rather than what is over-the-top and not subtle in the slightest. Our Father Merrin stand-in, William Marshall, whilst doing humanity work in Nigeria goes on to research a site of Eshu, a trickster deity from the Yoruba religion, originating from south-western Nigeria. This is the one thing really that has not aged well, as you have an actual worshipped God of the past turned into an ancient evil that possesses his daughter-in-law Abby (Carol Speed), a young churchgoing woman with a priest husband who takes on the Regan place but somewhat differently. The deity is turned into a libidinous sex demon, which is broadly painting a figure of ancient worship as you could get and would be frowned on in the modern day, which is ironic because you could have even in a pulp film with this one's tone explored this idea of repressed sexuality and Christian faith much more.

It ultimately becomes an issue in that the film really has less interest in this figure of Eshu than to have the idea of a figure who will cause Abby to fall into being a figure who literally loves someone to death, literally steaming the car up to the point it erupts in smoke and burns up the person she was necking inside. It is more of an issue of you have the calm and saintly Abby contrasted by a demonic figure that is lascivious and has a demonic male voice which is broad in his comments. What really neutralising this, and makes the film more ridiculous than anything, is how absurd this goes. There is some unintentional humour, the demon coming up with memorable one liners, Abby tormenting an old woman to the point of a heart attack by slapping her around, or her offering sexual advice as a marriage advisor by offering to sleep with the husband. What is potentially problematic is crushed in its own alien take on The Exorcist, becoming its own take where there is no knock off Tubular Bells, but funk and monotone drones instead.

It is still, undeniable, with an eye on a huge hit, but this strips out most of the iconic aspects of The Exorcist, such as there being no Father Karras and his crisis of faith. It is as much budgetary reasons clearly we do not get some of the more elaborate scenes recreated, though we get someone floating by the end. It nonetheless is fun to witness, working with the bare essentials to its own quirks, such as the exorcism itself taking place in a nightclub and involves one destroyed disco ball. For a film in the context it was made in too, all the potential issues I have described do not thankfully have anything to them in regards to demeaning its cast, all barring one detective and minor figures an all-black cast, working actors who if you dig into their careers have films and television work which stick out. Our titular lead Carol Speed's career was sadly mostly within the seventies only, with films like The Mack (1973), but it took me by surprise to realise that, playing her mother, is Juanita Moore, famous especially for her key part in Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life (1959), an incredible film, whilst you have Austin Stoker from Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) too among others.

In terms of whether the film is actually "good" in terms of portrayals of these characters, rather than avoiding problematic stereotypes, one has to be blunt. It is in mind to whether you find Abby's foul mouthed, sex obsessed demon form against the saintly Christian archetype she begins as problematic or just ridiculous. It is, at its heart, openly cashing in on The Exorcist, and with the choice to spin it the way the film did, everything feels ridiculous instead. Everything feels unintentional in its mistakes than deliberately problematic stereotypes. It even attempts to bring in aspects of the Yoruba religion which, whilst not dealt with well, least gives us one good moment, with William Marshall mocking the demon, in a variety of languages between them, for pretending to be the real Eshu, and even moving into using non-Christian African religious rites to perform the exorcism. It is the scene that stands out as distinct even if one also wishes for a film which elaborated on this sequence more than here. If anything, it just makes me appreciate William Marshall more, who actually was not a fan of the film he was making¹, but still committed a powerhouse performance. I wish he was as well known as other cult horror actors as, with one of the better scenes in what is a silly film made on a very low budget in that example, the comparison to Christopher Lee is perfect. He was someone who could have been incredible in so many films if he had the wider length of filmography as the later did. As with the rest of the cast, and Girdler himself as producer-director, I wish this had not been stuck in this lawsuit situation, as alongside the pointlessness of this when most of these films are clearly not like the big hit, which feels like a power game in committing to the lawsuit, Abby within the light of day cannot be taken seriously. It becomes instead a fascinating item from the past with figures involved within it who shine in spite of criticisms of the film itself.

 

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1) Abby (1974): A Unique Blaxploitation Horror or Nothing More Than an Exorcist Rip-Off?, written by Neil Gray for Horror Obsessive and published 29th September 2022.