(1970)
Overall: MEH
Continuing with his use of Coffin Joe into far more experimental terrain, José Mojica Marins' Awakening of the Beast, (O Despertar da Besta, O Ritual dos Sádicos), suffocates under its own self-indulgence and is only mildly amusing in the process. The first hour of the movie is tortuously boring as it follows a handful of zombie-like characters being high, horny, and weird, (not zombie-like in a macabre sense, but in a completely drab way), and then a bunch of panelists argue about pretentious nonsense on what is revealed to be a TV show at the end. Marins is one of the such panelists, playing himself and mostly remaining silent and smug as the rest of them prattle on about whether or not he is a genius. Then more uninteresting, random scenes go by that tell no story whatsoever and the last half hour switches to color so that Coffin Joe proper can show up to spout more wicked monologues. The usual weird visuals take over here, this time including a bunch of people with faces painted on their asses. While stepping way outside of a conventional story formula is fine, the pacing is laborious and Marins' does not seem to have any point besides really trying to appear smarter than everybody. His fiendish strengths are not nearly utilized enough and instead we are left with a ninety-odd minute, psychological venture about LSD and depravity or whatever with just a handful of ghoulish set pieces tossed in there to wake us up.
(1974)
Overall: GOOD
Going meta again with the Coffin Joe character while actually utilizing a plot this time, The Bloody Exorcism of Coffin Joe, (Exorcismo Negro), finds José Mojica Marins growing ever more ambitious with his blasphemous formula, thankfully in a good way. The movie takes a liberal amount of time getting to its final showpiece of utter debauchery and madness, but Marins sprinkles enough bizarre, unholy scenes before the third act to keep probably most viewers from growing too impatient. The story which consists of the Brazilian filmmaker playing himself and ultimately confronting his infamous, cinematic counterpart is quite on the nose as he struggles with writers block for his next film as well as with the concept that his creation is more famous than he is. While this is an interesting be it elementary angle that is wholly appreciated, being a Marins movie, it is generally about the strange, wretchedly evil atmosphere and visuals that he can bombard you with. In that regard, The Bloody Exorcism is no disappointment as Marins shows as little restraint as ever and continues to push his hedonistic vision into engaging terrain.
(1976)
Dir - José Mojica Marins/Marcelo Motta
Overall: MEH
The Strange Hostel of Naked Pleasures, (Estranha Hospedaria dos Prazeres), is somewhat structured as an Amicus horror anthology, minus the actual anthology part. Which is to say that it presents a scenario where José Mojica Marins/Coffin Joe can act as host to a bunch of damned souls; characters who have all sinned to various degrees and are oblivious to their doomed fate or current state of existence. It is a perfect premise for Marins to utilize, but it is also unfortunately a rather lackluster effort in its finished form. Utilizing the help of co-director Marcelo Motta, it is still unmistakably a Marins movie with the usual cacophony of sounds, fractured editing, and drug-fueled visuals that all of the man's films were unrelentingly full of. This time though, it plods along with large chunks of the movie going nowhere and despite the opening being the strangest sequence in the movie, it takes quite a long time for anything remotely interesting to transpire after that. When it does, it is more confusing than anything as Marins barely seems interested in telling any kind of comprehensible story and sadly the ghastly, optical elements that would usual cover for such a problem are more forgettable than usual.
(1977)
Overall: MEH
Not one of José Mojica Marins's better moments, the Coffin Joe-less Infero Carnal, (Hellish Flesh), is a bizarre and above all else, repetitive snooze-fest with one of the most asinine plots that the filmmaker ever utilized. What essentially turns out to be a long con game of infidelity comeuppance is annoyingly padded with the same claustrophobic, poorly lit montages over and over again and for the audience's sake, hopefully you are in the mood for hearing Marins yell "Rachel" and "Why?" several thousand times. Even working within the confines of minimal funds which was always the case for Marins' macabre movies, this is the worst that any of them ever looked with wretched cinematography and again, so many shots that are so dark as to be indecipherable. The story though is incredibly stupid and painstakingly drawn out to eighty-five minutes when eighty of those minutes could have easily been trimmed to get the exact same point across. Even though the ending has Marins' patented, gleeful cruelty and gore hounds will get a kick out of horrendous makeup and closeup eye surgery, this is still bottom barrel stuff.
(1978)
Overall: MEH
By the time José Mojica Marins had gotten to his final Coffin Joe film before he would at last retire the character for several decades, he was almost laughably scraping the barrel. Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind, (Delírios de um Anormal), is almost entirely made up of footage left on the cutting room floor from four of his previous Coffin Joe movies. Marin slammed all of these sequences together, inter-cut them at a frantic pace as usual, and then filmed only around thirty-plus minutes of new scenes to desperately put some kind of story together. In theory this works in that Marins' nightmarish visuals always came off so deliriously random anyway that throwing a hodgepodge of them from different movies together does not make their presentation any less bizarre. The problem is that we have seen all of these specific set pieces before and the story he frames all of his good, hellish montages around seems pathetically shoe-horned in there since that is exactly what it was. It shows a level of determination on Marins part to leave no stone unturned and to get absolutely as much out of his already filmed work as possible, but Hallucinations still cannot come off as anything but an utterly pointless, hail marry effort to unleash one last Coffin Joe movie on the masses before neither the funding nor interest was there anymore.
No comments:
Post a Comment