The Cinema - Coffin Joe’s Sleep-Inducing “Awakening”
January 25th, 2008
The Coffin Joe series goes seriously astray in 1969’s Awakening of the Beast, an incomprehensible film that was somewhat foolishly suppressed by the Brazilian government.
If it makes no sense and is boring as all get out, how can it be subversive?
The idea, as far as I can figure after watching the thing twice, is that Jose Mojica Marins is part of a TV panel discussing the drug problem. We then get taken into the druggie world, with vignettes of assorted kookaboos and wackadoodles doing their various and tedious things.
There’s a scene between a young woman and a bunch of male students that is sort of interesting in a clinical way, and Ze do Caixho pops up here and there to question the existence of being.
But the endless color LSD trip sequence completely negates whatever residual Coffin Joe-ness the audience might retain. It’s worse than Corman’s The Trip, and that’s saying something.
I’m surprised some bright young cineaste hasn’t tried to compare Awakening of the Beast with Godard’s “Hey Lookit Me!” period - One Plus One, for instance.
Alas, this clunker comes with the Coffin Joe casket set so the buyer is stuck with it.
Summary: Some extremely half-hearted breasts. Hippie students. Psychiatrists with syringes. Brazilian folk-rock (”War! Peace! We’re all going to die!”). Ultra-tedious LSD trip in color, with some whippings. Gratuitous references to Coffin Joe, to the director, and to Art.
Dumber and longer than The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, my previous benchmark for bad hippie-era CACA.
Half a coil.
The Cinema - Coffin Joe Hits His Evil Stride
January 24th, 2008
The auteur and star, Jose Mojica Marins, on his way to the manicurist
Brazilian loon Jose Mojica Marins avoids the sophomore slump in his second flick, 1966’s This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse. Quite possibly the worst film ever shot in an abandoned synagogue, the film should delight arachnophobes and snake chunkers especially.
This Night… opens with the same sequence of the villagers chasing Ze do Caixho (Coffin Joe) to the cemetery, only to find him lying dead with his eyes bugging out in terror. But hey - turns out he wasn’t really dead after all.
This time he’s running roughshod over a slightly larger town. This town has a sort of a square and a pond and some marshes and stuff. (According to the interview with the director, included in the DVD, Mojica’s budget went up about 11 bucks so he was able to shoot a few scenes outside.)
Ze is still obsessed with fathering a son, so he and his creepy fez-wearing deformed assistant set about kidnapping a bunch of girls. To test their mettle he releases a whole herd of big ol’ tarantulas into their dormitory. The lady that doesn’t freak out he keeps around; the rest go into the snake pit he has conveniently located under the master bedroom.
The girl he’s picked happens to be the daughter of the town bigwig, so Ze’s got a gang of mercenaries to contend with, led by the village idiot who is in love with the same girl.
Of course, Coffin Joe runs rings around the hired hands, and it takes a skinny black zombie to drag him - literally - to the underworld.
Which is in color!
The Hell sequence, which must run 10 minutes at least, is where This Night… goes from being an above-average but quaint schlocker into sublime CACA territory. Ze wanders around this rather chilly and snowy version of Hades and marvels at the excellent tortures being used on the damned, all the while proclaiming loudly that he believes none of it.
Which is not very convincing when the King of the Underworld is sitting on a nearby throne, surrounded by half-nekkid snake women, laughing his head off.
We have, in addition to Hell: A stampede of tarantulas; tarantulas on pretty girls; tarantulas on pretty girls’ bottoms; well-stocked snake pit; corpse-dissolving pool; one axe in head; death by quicksand; gratuitous (and ad-libbed) blasphemy; terrible dentistry; fez-wearing hunchback.
A masterpiece. Four coils.
The Cinema - Coffin Joe, CACA pioneer
January 21st, 2008
Joe gets busy with the blasphemy in an early scene
At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1963) is the debut of Brazil”s “Coffin Joe” character - part philosopher, part demented genius, part plain old bad guy with the nastiest fingernails you ever saw. Played by director/auteur/fruitloop Jose Mojica Marins, Coffin Joe is an underground institution in Brazil.
Gravedigger Ze do Caixao is a bully who’s got everybody in the little town buffaloed. Not only are they scared of him physically - he attacks anyone who crosses him, quite viciously - but his defiantly blasphemous attitude really gets folks right where they live.
So Ze discovers his wife cannot bear him a son and kills her. Then he tries to rape his best friend’s fiancee but she bites him. She dies too, in childbirth, as does the best friend. And so on.
Eventually even the timid villagers get fed up and they track ol’ Ze down- to the crypt where, perhaps luckily, the supernatural has already caught up with him.
Bear in mind this was made in a Catholic military dictatorship in 1963, and then consider the following laundry list of CACA-tatiousness: One hand mangling with bottle; one barren wife vs. tarantula; one eye-gouging with nasty long fingernails; one attack with crown of thorns. Also gratuitous bad teeth, long speeches about the futility of life (in general) and religion (in particular), and eating meat on Friday.
With all this going on, I figure At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul would be a good entry for an Easter double feature. A heart-felt three coils.
The Avengers - Tougher Than Tough, Cooler Than Cool
January 14th, 2008
I recently plowed through my DVDs of “The Avengers,” and came to the reluctant conclusion that while Diana Rigg’s Emma Peel remains the sexiest woman in screen history, the episodes starring Honor Blackman as Cathy Gale are better.
Would you mess with this lady?
Patrick Macnee’s John Steed begins the series in 1962 as a manipulative, slouch-hatted agent and a definite second fiddle to the rather earnest Dr. Martin King, as played by Jon Rollason. Steed cheerfully puts nitwit chanteuse Venus Smith (Julie Stevens) at considerable risk from assassins and suchlike, and is clearly alarmed by Dr. Gale, who keeps up with her kung fu.
In the 1963 episodes Steed is slightly more likeable and the bowler hat appears. Still, Gale has the brains in the duo - Steed is a cross between James Bond and Bertie Wooster.
Mrs. Gale patiently explaining things to Steed
The plots are believeable - the bad guys are usually corrupt industrialists and recognizable thug archetypes, and while Gale’s reasoning gets the pair to the truth, they still have to resort to the rough stuff to wind things up.
You never know when you’ll have to untie a gorgeous girl in black leather
By 1964, with Rigg on board, what most fans think of the classic era of The Avengers begins. The villains get more and more ambitious, the plots more far-fetched, and the campiness level is slowly ratcheted up until, by 1967, it’s a mod mod mod mod world.
Mrs. Peel’s outfit’s become more, uh, subtle, as Steed gets tubbier
The years 1965 and 1966 are the best of these. The dynamic between Steed and Emma is one of equals - they divvy up assignments and bail each other out of jams.
And the producers never allowed the pair to become romantically involved, “romantic” meaning “sex.” It’s a distinction that would be completely lost on the creators of today’s wretched television programs, save Chris Carter of “The X-Files,” who kept Mulder and Scully in separate rooms, never mind beds.
This little number, from “A Touch of Brimstone,” got “The Avengers” banned in Boston
More on The Avengers:
The Cinema - “Angels’ Brigade,” or the Film Peter Lawford Would Not Have Been Forced To Make Had JFK Lived
December 10th, 2007
Angels’ Brigade (1979) is a real Pure-D piece of dreck that features several character actors at the end of their careers and at least as many breasts. All are fully-clad - character actors and breasts - which is a mixed blessing.
The movie, directed by Greydon Clark, also illustrates the good common sense of the old saying: “Never thrust anything that comes from a man with two last names.”
The plot runs like this: After a schoolboy gets roughed up by the winner of the World’s Most Obvious Drug Dealer award, his teacher decides to take action and rid the school of the scourge of illegal drugs.
So she forms a working group of concerned parents, teachers, community leaders and law enforcement officials and…
Nope. Sorry. What she does is recruit a disco singer from Las Vegas who in turn knows a whole bunch of other women who just happen to look good in jumpsuits. They buy a van and a motorcycle, steal a bunch of guns and ammo from Jim Backus and his merry band of right-wing nuts, and take it to the drug baron (Peter Lawford) and his evil Number One (Jack Palance).
Along the way they encounter Alan Hale, Pat Buttram and Arthur Godfrey (as himself).
Jack Palance: Take it easy, honey - that’s my truss!
Massive jiggling. Kung fu. Peter Lawford committing modern art. Jack Palance eaten by dog. Black lady with veritable ziggurat of hair. One of the worst songs ever recorded, “Shine Your Love.” Gratuitous white people in Vegas audience clapping on the wrong beat to “Shine Your Love.”
We’re talking Non-Sequitur City.
One coil.
