INSIDE THE MIND OF COFFIN JOE
Top hat and overgrown nails
RELEASED OUT NOW! 1964-2008 | 18 | Blu-ray Director José Mojica Marins Cast Various lumpy Brazilians
Brazilian director José Mojica Marins is a saint of psychotronic cinema, but his output is more known of than it is seen. This eye-opening set of immaculate 4K transfers should help to change that.
His most famous creation was Zé do Caixão, aka Coffin Joe: an undertaker who features in five of these 10 films. An iconic figure, with his stovepipe hat, cloak and talon-like fingernails, he considers himself a Nietszchean superman, and spurns morality, happy to drown his best friend in the bath (At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul), or pour acid on a woman’s face (This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse). He’s a monster – but one whose anti-authoritarianism and total liberation hold some appeal.
Marins’s films share many common attributes. Expect orgiastic abandon and bellicose rants, with our anti-hero mocking faith and denying God. Women fare badly: beaten, tortured and molested. Sets can be crude, tombs made from flats with painted stone patterns. Non-diegetic sound effects blare out: screams, wind, tolling bells; the soundtracks can be so cacophonous that closing your eyes is no escape. Other hallmarks include luridly coloured lighting, tarantulas, whips, suicide and voyeurism – all the good stuff.
Above all, Marins loves to poke his fingers into taboos; even when he’s not graphic, he’s conceptually transgressive. Across its three tales, anthology The Strange World Of Coffin Joe indulges in rape, necrophilia and cannibalism. The Awakening Of The Beast – a string of set-pieces of deviance – peaks with a hippy gangbang going south as a guy dressed like Jesus does unspeakable things with a staff.
The four films mentioned above are unmissable, the rest are less essential. More of a black comedy, The End Of Man casts Marins as a mystery man whose gnomic statements see him treated as a prophet. Sequel When The Gods Fall Asleep comes as close as Marins gets to a realist portrait of Brazil, with its gritty footage of locations like a São Paulo favela.
Hellish Flesh concerns the aftermath of a woman throwing acid on her husband’s face, while The Strange Hostel Of Naked Pleasures visits a limbo-like inn; both feel like hugely overextended anthology show episodes.
Hallucinations Of A Deranged Mind is essentially a Greatest Hits package repurposing old clips, while 2008’s Embodiment Of Evil is to At Midnight what Mother Of Tears is to Suspiria – one for completists only.
After watching all 10, you may emerge pale-faced and shaken. A character in Strange World sums it up: “Only a really sick mind could conceive such monstrosity!”
Extras Alongside a couple of general appreciations (24 minutes), there are six short video essays and talking heads (138 minutes) which discuss Marins in relation to various figures or phenomena: de Sade, TV horror hosts, Brazil’s Marginal Cinema movement, etc. Some, like a piece which compares Marins to surrealists like Luis Buñuel, are cogently argued; others, like a “neurodivergent perspective”, stray off the point or fail to make much of a case.
A piece on the “surprisingly complex” sexual politics of his films becomes simply a stream of synopsis, while a discussion of Nietszche prompts a chuckle by using the phrase “elitist bourgeois film culture”. Oh, the irony. Thank god for Stephen Thrower; at 87 minutes, his talking head is overlong, but he steadfastly resists pathologising Marins, or suggesting that the connections he sees are anything but guesswork.
After all this highfalutin’ analysis, it’s a relief to hear from the man himself. In 2001 doc Damned: The Strange World Of José Mojica Marins (65 minutes), he comes across as articulate and likeable… until talk turns to shooting a porno where a woman had sex with a German Shepherd. Try writing a video essay on the complex gender politics of that.
The late director also features in six commentaries. Plus: a 1948 short and excerpts from two other early films; footage of a trip to Sundance; a comedy short about Coffin Joe going on a date… we could go on and on. The set also comes with a 92-page book, a poster and 12 art cards. Ian Berriman