At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul

A 1963 Brazilian horror movie, "À Meia-Noite Levarei Sua Alma". Directed by and starring José Mojica Marins, aka "Coffin Joe". Recently aired on IFC and available on DVD.

There are far better breakdowns of this film than I could offer you, obrigado. But in a nutshell, Coffin Joe is a mortician who's got the devil in him! It grinds his gears that his wife can't bear him a child, so he goes out and starts acting like the biggest douchebag Brazil has ever seen.

In the end, he gets his comeuppance. Sort of. Weird ghostly karma shit happens, he suffers an existential crisis. Which leads into...

A 1967 Brazilian horror movie, "Esta Noite Encarnarei no Teu Cadáver". (This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse.) The sequel picks up right where the first film ended. Coffin Joe... erm... recovers from whatever the fuck happened to him at the end of the last movie. Does he correct his evil ways? Fuck no. He takes his misogyny and kicks it up a notich: BAM! Goes on a torture-kill rampage trying to find a woman who can give birth to his PERFECT CHILD.

At a certain point in this one, he gets sucked into Hell which -- like the Land of Oz -- has price breaks for color film. In Hell, everyone speaks Portuguese. And there are a lotta screaming, nekkid women.

The violence is telegraphed and filled with slow, operatic facial contortions. The women line up to be with Coffin Joe coz they like hooking up with assholes who put big spiders on them while they sleep. And all throughout, this film and the first film, Coffin Joe drops into extended, tortured soliloquies about the nature of life and death. Leading into...

A 1969 Brazilian horror movie, "Ritual dos Sádicos, O". (Awakening of the Beast.) The final of the initial trilogy of "Coffin Joe" films, concerning a psychiatrist's experiments with LSD's effect on 4 volunteers, to investigate Coffin Joe's influence over them. Suffice it to say, things get stranger. And nuder. And way more meta-.

I like that this series was inspired by a fever dream this guy wrote out one day. The movies ooze cult status. Not easy to sit through if you're not in the mood for this type of thing. A lot of it can be quite ponderous. But there are sparks of surreal beauty. And it's kinda cool/sad that this geezer's still trying to squeeze some mileage out of this character.

It's all about the Benjamins, baby!

"Man will only find truth when he searches for the truth..."

FIM