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.

Halloween 31 For 31: The Strange Hostel of Naked Pleasures (1976)

From https://horrorpediadotcom.files.wordpress.com/
2014/06/oophv7fhlgrq4jefrccbsomkypv.jpg

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.

From https://horrorpediadotcom.files.wordpress.com/
2014/06/a-estranha-hospedaria-dos-prazeres-1.jpg

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.

From https://horrorpediadotcom.files.wordpress.com/
2014/06/a-estranha-hospedaria-dos-prazeres-56.jpg