(1971)
Overall: MEH
José Mojica Marins steps away from his blasphemous Coffin Joe persona into that of an aloof messiah figure with The End of Man, (Finis Hominis). Amusing at times yet consistently aimless in its low-budget surrealism, it is told in arbitrary vignettes instead of adhering to any sort of plot, where Marins' mysterious quasi-guru occasionally appears while nameless characters are sometimes confused, sometimes fascinated, sometimes worshiping, or sometimes seeking his willy-nilly wisdom and supernatural powers. Marins enjoyed casting himself as some sort of revelatory prophet who could change mankind, but whereas Coffin Joe had a consistent and fully-formed agenda of Crowley hedonism in order to find the perfect woman to perpetuate his seed, here he just wanders around without saying much. When he does open his mouth, it is nothing but brief, nondescript platitudes of enlightenment that somehow captivate the entire populous by film's end. He disappears for large portions of the running time, and perhaps intentional, perhaps unintentionally goofy moments are interjected, like a wheelchair-bound woman spontaneous getting up and running away from his naked frame, certain scenes presented in black and white, an injured child covered in chocolate syrup blood, a woman crying tears of Vaseline while getting fucked over an open casket at a funeral.
(1972)
Overall: MEH
Picking up immediately where he left off with the previous year's rambling The End of Man, José Mojica Marins's When the Gods Fall Asleep, (Quando os Deuses Adormecem), is a more sluggish and uninteresting variation of the same vague themes. Marins is taking the piss out of much here, from institutions, to new age enlightenment, to generic hippy culture, to messiah complexes, to impressionable guru worshipers, to society's ills breeding morally vapid degenerates. All of it is thrown into a minuscule-budgeted stew, but it comes off as a lack of vision instead of a razor-sharp satire, if such a thing was even the agenda. Marins still only sporadically pops up as his Finis Hominis alter-ego, who we find out may just be a metal asylum escapee or the financial patron of said asylum, or both. We are treated to long sequences of knife-happy and perverted gypsies getting down, knife-happy perverts in a restaurant except in black and white also getting down, and a Satanic ceremony where cult members writhe around eating live chickens only to proclaim that Satan is not real once Marins shows up to scold them. Some of the set pieces are funny in their dingy sloppiness, but the pacing is horrendous, and the whole thing fails to justify its existence.
(1977)
Overall: MEH
Not one of José Mojica Marins's better moments, the Coffin Joe-less Inferno 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 and poorly lit montages over and over again. 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 dark enough as to be indecipherable. The story itself is 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 that 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 the presentation any less bizarre. The problem is that we have seen all of these specific set pieces before, and the story which he frames all of his good, hellish montages around is pathetically shoe-horned in there. It shows a level of determination on Marins' part to leave no stone unturned and to get as much out of his already filmed work as possible, but this still cannot come off as anything but a pointless hail marry effort to unleash one last Coffin Joe movie on the masses before neither the funding nor interest was there anymore.
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