Many Brazilians of a certain age are very familiar with José Mojica Marins and his character Coffin Joe (Zé do Caixão), who first appeared in the 1963 film At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul. Marins was an unknown quantity to most of the world until the release of his films on VHS cassettes by Something Weird in the early 1990s. The release of these films was revelatory.
The Coffin Joe character, a grave digger by trade, is some sort of Nietzsche-like misanthrope who takes delight in causing misery everywhere he goes. The early black and white films are steeped in the familiar components of early United States and European horror, including the charismatic evil doer (Coffin Joe) with a hunchback assistant (Bruno) and an endless supply of diabolical schemes. Unlike horror films from the U.S. and Europe, the Coffin Joe films have an exotic vibe. The stories are overtly anti-religious, the sexual element is aggressive, the faces are ethnic, and the geek show antics (blood, guts, live snakes, spiders, frogs, rats, and roaches) go further than similar fare of the time. Marins' later films are really off-the-map, and includes works like the ultra-bizarre full-length compendium of freak out sequences entitled Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind. The genuine "otherness" of these films puts Marins more in league with Luis Bunuel, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Fernando Arrabal than regular horror directors.
Some decades after the last Coffin Joe film, Jose Mojica Marins has created a new entry in the cycle: Embodiment of Evil (Encarnação do Demônio). The film played at Brazil's RIOFAN Festival earlier in the year but is now set to screen at a most unexpected venue: the Venice Film Festival. What Venice audiences will see on August 29th and 31st, 2008 is a mix of blustery philosophizing and gory surrealism that will appeal to the Coffin Joe faithful but will probably leave everyone else confused.
Embodiment of Evil is presented as the third part of series that began in 1963 with At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul. The original film is a stunning bit of black-and-white subversion in which Coffin Joe seeks out a woman who will give birth to his child. Coffin Joe commits a series of atrocities, which range from eating meat on holy holidays to molesting potential bearers of his kids. The story picked up again in 1967 with This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse. In this film, Joe seduces women to join him in his quest for a child, and chooses them based on their rebellion against the Church and religious values. Joe impregnates a woman but he eventually drowns in a swamp after being hunted down by the town's jealous men.
Embodiment of Evil begins by showing Joe leaving a jail cell, where he was imprisoned for 30 years. Although he drowned at the end of This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse, a flashback sequence shows him rising from the swamp to kill a priest. Joe immediately meets up with his well-worn pal Bruno to continue his bloody-minded quest to sire a child. Joe quickly assembles a gang of modern primitive slaves to help him, including attractive young women who would kill for the chance to have his kids. His powers over humans must be strong because its hard to imagine that a regular 60 year old man with authentic finger nails longer than railroad spikes would attract such a squadron of ladies. Joe's gang of tattooed, hoop-eared fiends are sent to gather women from across the ethnic spectrum so they may serve as love slaves. Joe is also haunted by the ghost of a pregnant woman he killed.
Technically, Embodiment of Evil is Marin's most accomplished work. The cinematography is unexpectedly crisp, and the colorful visual schemes (i.e., a psychedelic orange purgatory) are very good. The direction is workman-like with some very flashy sequences to keep things interesting. No Coffin Joe film is complete without grody effects, and Marins attempts to out-do his prior works in this area. The bugs, snakes and rats are back in full force as is the usual battery of degradation and humiliation. Marins also throws body suspension, cannibalism, electrocution and torrents of blood into the mix. Perhaps the best gag is a live woman emerging from the belly of a split pig, which looks like something Herman Nitsch or Fernando Arrabal would have tried at one point in time.
Embodiment of Evil has some unsatisfactory aspects that should be highlighted. First, there is not enough context to help new viewers to fully connect with the Coffin Joe legend. The numerous flashback sequences, which are a mix of new footage and scenes from the original films, are more confusing than helpful in this regard. Second, the performances are generally stilted, and ruthless editing could have fixed some of the awkward line delivery. Luckily, Marins' performance is fine in the film. His style is not as manic as in the early works but age adds a gravity to his philosophy talk that did not exist in his youth.
In sum, Embodiment of Evil has some problems but the film still has much to offer. The return of Marins to the director's chair is a welcome event under any set of circumstances.