Coffin Joe redux

José Mojica Marins and Rui Rezende in Encarnação do Demônio (Embodiment of Evil), dir­ec­ted by Marins, 2008

I’ve quoted this pas­sage from Caetano Veloso’s mem­oir, Tropical Truth, before: 

In 1967, people were talk­ing about a Brazilian B movie that Glauber Rocha had liked, A meia-noite levarei tua alma (I’ll Take Your Soul At Midnight), dir­ec­ted by the Paulista José Mojica Marins. In him Glauber sensed a prim­it­ive Nietzsche, although the pro­duc­tion was a hor­ror movie made on the sort of pre­cari­ous budget typ­ic­al of a small-town Brazilian cir­cus. The dir­ect­or went around wear­ing the same black cape and long nails of the char­ac­ter he had cre­ated in the film (and in oth­ers after­wards). Marins was—in every sense—popular. In the film, he both exposed our poverty and attacked the reli­gious con­ven­tions that were inim­ic­al to a bold indi­vidu­al will. The Catholic ima­gin­a­tion appeared mixed with the por­no­graphy of ter­ror, laugh­able visu­al effects, and dia­logues on the edge of street lan­guage. Torquato [Neto, Brazilian journ­al­ist and poet] insisted that it was pure charm on Glauber’s (and my) part to show aes­thet­ic interest in such a pile of trash. He did not believe that I could see in the film a rad­ic­al ver­sion of what Glauber had tried to do in Land of Anguish. But it was truly dif­fi­cult, at that time, to admit to a crit­ic­al pos­ture that, soon after, would become com­mon­place. (It would be inspired again by the old black-and-white ver­sion [sic] of The Fly, Freaks, and The Incredible Shrinking Man, all of which delighted me at the Electric Cinema when I arrived in London in 1969; and Torquato him­self to this day is remembered for his par­ti­cip­a­tion in Nosferatu no Brasil [Nosferatu in Brazil], a film made in the sev­en­ties by Ivan Cordoso, which gave rise to a cult of Mojica Marins and kindred figures[…])

I’ve been think­ing of Mojica Marins and Ze de Caijao (Coffin Joe), about whom I first wrote for this blog here, because I just got the Synapse Films Blu-ray of 2008’s Encarnação do Demônio (Embodiment of Evil) Marins’ rather improbable-seeming comeback film for the char­ac­ter. Or at least I figured it was improb­able, in large part due to the fact that Mojica Marins, 14 years after that 1994 Chiller theatre Expo appear­ance, was rather likely to cut an even less-imposing fig­ure than the not-very-formidable one he did then.

But I under­es­tim­ated Mojica Marins’ intel­li­gence, not to men­tion inspir­a­tion. At the begin­ning of Embodiment, just as Coffin Joe is about to be released from pris­on after a 40-year term (and this indeed syncs up nicely with the con­clu­sion of the last “prop­er” Coffin Joe film, ’67s Esta Noite Encarnerai no Teu Cadaver [This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse]—if I’m not mis­taken, while Mojica Marins appeared as Coffin Joe in many sub­sequent films, those pic­tures were about the char­ac­ter­’s impact as a pop cul­ture fig­ure rather than install­ments in his saga, so to speak), one of the many offi­cials who’s balk­ing at his pro­posed release ration­al­izes things by insist­ing that the guy is just “a crazy old man.” And indeed, except for those weird-ass long fin­ger­nails, there’s noth­ing par­tic­u­larly fear­some about the guy; the top hat, cape and medal­lion all pro­duce a vaguely com­ic effect. Waiting for him at the pris­on gate is his wide-eyed Loyal Henchman, who is actu­ally called, pace Woody Tobias Jr., “Bruno,” and played with dis­quiet­ing con­vic­tion by Rui Rezende. Quite the ana­chron­ist­ic­ally ridicu­lous  pair the two make, prowl­ing the streets of Sao Paolo by night. But in the shot from which the above screen cap­ture is taken, the two char­ac­ters are about to stop and behold a couple of street urchins, each no more than ten years old each, sit­ting in a door­way huff­ing glue from paper bags. “He exposed our poverty,” Veloso recalled. “Ain’t a damn thing changed, ” Method Man said. Such is the atmo­sphere in which Mojica Marins’ deranged char­ac­ter, obsessed with propagat­ing, as it were, the “pur­ity” of his “blood­line,” thrives. And when he’s returned to his long­time lair, he finds that Bruno’s got a small cadre of pierced and tat­tooed young people ready to earn the fruits of Coffin Joe’s weltan­schauung, such as they are and such as it is. 

“Nothing can affect a mind that believes noth­ing,” a wise and beau­ti­ful young gypsy woman advises Joe dur­ing the ensu­ing orgy of blas­phem­ous hal­lu­cin­a­tions and appalling tor­tures. You’d think after Fear Factor that scenes in which young love­lies have their heads dunked into large bowls full of squirm­ing live insects might lose some of their punch. But as it hap­pens the film has a lot of the crude power that the older pic­ture has, and Mojica Marins takes full advant­age of what he can get away with. Which is to say, don’t be fooled by the crazy old man bit—this is “authen­t­ic sad­ist­ic cinema” to the bone, not “funsy” stuff. You have been warned. But for those with the stom­ach for it, there’s some­thing in Embodiment of Evil that is genu­inely rad­ic­al in a way that the cre­at­ors of such mere­tri­cious gunk as the Hostel and Saw films can­’t even con­ceive of. What’s that thing that Lynne Gorman’s char­ac­ter says in Videodrome? “It has a philo­sophy. And that’s what makes it dangerous.”

The disc is released on March 29; on Monday, March 21, the ReRun Gastropub Theater in Brooklyn will be host­ing a free pre­view screen­ing of the Blu-ray, tick­ets for which can be acquired here.