Inside the Mind of Coffin Joe (1964-2008) The Man, His Myth and The Legend that made him (Review)

Arrow jumbo boxsets are always aptly titled. Their collection of filmmaking’s Florida Man (Herschell Gordon Lewis), spanning fourteen films all dedicated to gruey gloop, was emblazoned with the word Feast. Their recent Enter The Video Store set let you literally take the lid off a miniature video store to select your film. And now, the collector in us all will be thrust Inside The Mind Of Coffin Joe with an expansive ten film retrospective of Brazil’s foremost cinematic sadist and political firebrand, Zé do Caixão (Portuguese for ‘Coffin Joe’). 

The creation and on-screen avatar of the late exploitationist José Mojica Marins, Zé is a top hat-sporting, cloak-swishing undertaker whose attitude towards his neighbours can be summed up in his “I’ll charge double to bury anyone I kill” policy. A nihilist who believes in nothing but the existence of life and death, he’s determined on making the perfect baby with the perfect woman to carry on his perfect legacy. With a slick beard and curled fingernails, Coffin Joe’s iconic presence as what Richard Whitaker of The Austin Chronicle describes as “Brazil’s Freddy Krueger” spans across multiple perspectives on the character, some intimidatingly intimate in illustrating his worldview, and others experimentally strange in their abstraction of him as an undying figment of his creator’s imagination. Inside The Mind of Coffin Joe we go, indeed…

The first two films in the set are the amazingly-titled At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul and This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse, in which Coffin Joe enacts his sick plan to plant his seed in a revolving door of unfortunate women who are prey to his heinous actions. At Midnight is a short and sharp slap in the face, nearly 60 years old and still totally startling in its monochrome bleakness. This Night is the bigger and badder of the two, unleashing Joe upon a new town after a technicality absolves him of his crimes in the first film, and Mojica Marins’ brilliant vision bursts into life. After an hour of sadism where the weapons of choice are snakes, spiders and swamps, the first sign of Joe’s guilt cleaves the film in half with an explosion of colour as a shadowy gimp drags him to Hell. Nobody shoots with the vibrancy of Mojica Marins, and his switches between black-and-white and colour throughout his career have a truly hallucinatory expression, his sickly neon hellscapes threatening to scorch your eyeballs as his horror becomes just that little bit more real. It’s a film as rich in its style as it is its philosophy, taking a very damning stance against Joe’s own staunch nihilism and his victims’ fervent Catholicism with a finale that shows that maybe no one is capable of forgiveness and we’re all as cold and unloving as our worst enemies. As a statement of intent from one of cinema’s most merciless voices, the first two films of this boxset are a crown jewel of cruelty, and hold their own as a duo of the nastiest pieces of cinema from the 1960s. 

Viewers hoping for a coherent continuation of Coffin Joe’s escapades will be sorely disappointed with the next seven films in the set. Yet those who are interested in how horror villains can live on outside the constraints of conventional narrative will find many delights in Mojica Marins’ remixing of Joe’s image (and his own). Movie #3 is The Strange World of Coffin Joe, an anthology of three short films introduced by Mojica Marins in character, reminding us of Joe’s imperious and contradictory worldview in a preachy introduction before being subject to tales of sexual violence and mutilation, stalking and necrophilia, and finally philosophy and cannibalism. Each has their own non-narrative rhythm that reeks more of straight exploitation than traditional spooky thrills, and many may want to get off the Coffin Joe train here. 

But their patience is rewarded almost immediately with Awakening of the Beast, Mojica Marins’ first of many self-aware works where he hauls the image of Coffin Joe over the coals as a way of examining the hypocrisy of modern society. He once again switches generic tack into a fictional drug PSA, where Mojica Marins himself and a group of psychiatrists discuss the effects of drugs on different sects of the population. They are all shocking situations drawn out with countercultural verve, including a hippie orgy that goes too far and numerous crimes of passion fuelled by the hard stuff. The film gradually shifts towards one of the more liberal-minded of the group, Dr Sergio (Sérgio Hingst), who conducts a study of four diverse individuals who will be given LSD and placed in front of a movie poster featuring Coffin Joe. Then, it’s off to the races with another explosion of colour from Mojica Marins, also taking great delight in front of the camera in torturing his cast with his talons and new-found supernatural abilities. Awakening of the Beast feels unlike many other films full stop, taking more inspiration from Jean-Luc Godard than Hammer Horror, and marks a significant turning point in Mojica Marins’ career, not just a horror icon, but a filmmaker aware of the dangerous, incendiary effect of his work. 

Mojica Marins then walked away from Coffin Joe’s big-screen appearances for six years, but his next works still have his villain’s arrogant spirit running through them. End of Man and When the Gods Fall Asleep form a satirical diptych that follows a mysterious man (Finis Hominis, played by Mojica Marins, of course) who emerges naked from the sea, strolls into town and finds some extravagant clothes that give him the air of a sultan. His moral quest to right the wrongs of society begins, and these two films settle into an episodic structure of groups of people committing transgressions that balloon into violence, only for Finis Hominis to interrupt at the last second, point a gnarled finger at the problems (and the people) and leave them to kiss and make up. It’s another strange direction in which to take his distinctive image, and although the bright vibrancy of Finis Hominis’ dress sense may make him the polar opposite of Coffin Joe, it nonetheless feels like he’s living in a utopian world where people are saved by the same level of egotism as Mojica Marins’ other famous character. Dramatically, these two are challenging, functioning as little else other than more fuel in the tank for Mojica Marins to take another ego trip, albeit one where the destination is more hopeful and the grass greener. 

The only missing link in this boxset is between When the Gods Fall Asleep and 1976’s The Strange Hostel of Naked Pleasures, and it’s a real shame that 1974’s enormously fun and sly The Bloody Exorcism of Coffin Joe is not included in Arrow’s otherwise comprehensive collection. This chapter is maybe the most narratively-straightforward of Mojica Marins’ entire work, with him once again playing a friendly version of himself off to spend Christmas on a creative retreat at a friend’s house. He’s like a friendly uncle to the family’s daughter, and the adults in the group treat him with respect for what he’s done to Brazilian cinema’s politics. After a little amount of backslapping however, the family are possessed one by one by a demon who appears to be Coffin Joe himself, officiating a black mass to bring his misogynistic plan into frightening reality. Mojica Marins must face his own creation and deny his existence, wrestling with the terrible nightmare of losing control of his dark alter-ego. The key to understanding the complexity of this one lies in an interview early on in the film where a journalist asks Mojica Marins why he doesn’t clip his fingernails. He smiles and remarks “it’s all about authenticity”, and continues to wear his three-inch talons when acting as a normal man encountering the hideous mirror image he’s made for himself. The ghost of Coffin Joe will forever haunt Mojica Marins, whether that is when he’s recognised on the street, trying to sleep at night or making an entertaining Exorcist rip-off like The Bloody Exorcism of Coffin Joe. 

The wider Coffin Joe cycle begins again in the Arrow boxset with The Strange Hostel of Naked Pleasures, where Mojica Marins allows himself to settle back into an irregular narrative flow with more scenes of debauchery at a guest house run by a man who may or may not be Coffin Joe (he now wears a bowler hat instead of a stovepipe). Comfortably the least necessary and engaging addition to the story of Zé, it does deal in some hallucinatory freakouts that involve plenty of impressive DIY phantasmagoria, but also requires a strong amount of patience as the cross-cutting between yet another hippie orgy and other transgressions hits the doldrums very quickly. 

We’re back to some irregular programming with Hellish Flesh, a Hammer-lite giallo tribute in which Mojica Marins plays narcissistic acid scientist Dr George Demedeiros who pays more attention to his beakers than his wife. Through a murderous plan spurred on by infidelity, he is left horribly disfigured while his wife and best friend go off and blow some money in his absence. There’s nothing wrong per se with Mojica Marins making his very own Darkman, but there’s nothing of the interest to be found here, with endless scenes of partying intercut with an echoing scream of “RAQUEEEEELLLL! POR QUE, RAQUEEEEEELLLLLL!” becoming a genuine irritant after the first act.

Many may be gagging for the return of Coffin Joe after Hellish Flesh’s dullness, and Mojica Marins once again grafts him onto another meta-narrative where his perception is misconstrued by the weak-minded. Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind sees a psychiatrist driven insane by visions of Coffin Joe stealing his wife as his perfect woman, and becomes irrationally convinced that he is out there trying to exact that plan. Mojica Marins himself is enlisted to solve the mystery by delving into his own scripts to find the source of this paranoia, and the finished result plays a lot like a quasi-remake of both Awakening of the Beast and The Bloody Exorcism of Coffin Joe. In fact, the amount of new footage shot for Hallucinations is minimal, with the visions themselves being mostly cobbled together from no less than four other Coffin Joe films. It’s literally a Now That’s What I Call Zé do Caixão! Greatest Hits compilation that does strangely find some meaning in its ending, where the twisted philosophy of Coffin Joe finds its seeds in all of our psyches, but for those who have already endured the same tortures in previous films, Mojica Marins’ last Coffin Joe film of the twentieth century remains a curio at best.

Coffin Joe was then laid to rest for thirty years, but in 2008, Mojica Marins got back in the saddle one last time for a modern, meaner take on his underhand undertaker. Embodiment of Evil is an official follow-up to This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse, where Joe returns after a forty-year prison sentence to continue his work. A 72 year-old Mojica Marins looks surprisingly at home in this hyper-contemporary setting, with the quaint villages of his 1960s films being replaced with back alleys and favellas overrun with corruption. His acolytes dress like nu-metal fetishists, and his new lair has more than a whiff of Jigsaw’s workshop in the Saw franchise; yet despite these obvious attempts to modernise what might appear to be a silly brand from days gone by, Joe’s violence and torture feels so much more at home in today’s liberated world. One can accuse Mojica Marins of taking too much on with his final outing as Joe, with topics ranging from police brutality to poverty to his regular interest in eugenics, but a full plate for one last ride more than justifies any ill discipline he indulges in along the way. The fact that there is no handsomeness to a septuagenarian Coffin Joe feels like his true form: a crooked, unkempt monster who will rape and murder his way to what he wants. The extreme nastiness of Embodiment of Evil frequently reaches levels that might make Eli Roth blush, and what a fitting way to sign off a legacy by reminding people who the daddy of it was all along.

Even if viewers are full to burst after ten peeks into Mojica Marins’ skull, each disc is packed with brand-new video essays on Coffin Joe’s legacy and transgressions, commentaries from Mojica Marins himself and his crew, a feature-length documentary on the director’s work (enticingly titled Damned) and glimpses of Mojica Marins’ work before he brought Coffin Joe into the world (including his first short film, Bloody Kingdom). Although it may miss out one of Joe’s greatest outings, Arrow’s unparalleled curation of Mojica Marins’ most iconic works is a warts-and-all triumph, taking into account the highs and lows of the man’s career to great effect. Coffin Joe never once cared what anyone thought of his disgusting crusade or the ideas that started it, and this impressive encapsulation of his horrors is as honest and damning an assessment as you’re likely to find on the man, his myth and the legend that made him.

Simon’s Archive – Inside the Mind of Coffin Joe