Horror Extreme Movie Catalog

When people yammer about indie cinema, they bring up directors who mostly work for studios. Jose Marins, on the other hand, is what true indie film should be. Self-financed, totally out of the mainstream, banned in his own country, his films are genuinely eccentric and an expression of his vision. Considering the constraints of how they're shot, and the amateur nature of his cast, Marins gets some excellent effects and prouduces genuinely disturbing scenes. What other director lets real spiders crawl over his cast? Worth it alone for the color scenes in hell, where people are imprisoned in rocks, have various body parts whipped, and are tormented by traditonal devils with pitchforks. If you've never seen Coffin Joe's films, this one is a good place to strart. Marins is a genuine surrealist horror director, along with other indie icon Jean Rollins. Both make films true to their oddball view of the world.

Ze do Caixo (better known - thanks to a mistranslation of his name - as Coffin Joe), returns in this remarkable sequel to At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul. This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse takes up right where the first film left off, then quickly takes the story to even more audacious extremes than before. The result is a truly visionary and shockingly bold masterpiece of psychological horror that easily earns director (and star) Jose Mojica Marins a place in the pantheon of horror's brightest lights. Despite Ze's appearance at the end of the first film, his life is saved and his vision eventually restored. Absolved of his former crimes thanks to insufficient evidence, Ze is soon ready and able to begin searching once more for the woman who will give him a son. Ze's philosophy, as he continually reminds us, is centered upon the immortality of blood. He takes existentialism to its greatest extreme, dismissing the weaklings polluting the surface of the earth with their absurd religious faith and their superstitious belief in spirits, challenging the very idea of either God or devil. All that matters to him is the immortality of blood, and thus he yearns for a son who will grant him that immortality. In this film, he goes even farther in his beliefs, though, characterizing himself as a sort of superman, man in his most superior form, one free to act on instinct alone; his son, he asserts, will save the human race by establishing a race of superior men. All he needs now is to find the superior woman deserving of her role as mother of the perfect man.

The complexity of Ze is communicated wonderfully in this film. One of his first acts after returning to a town where all men fear him is the heroic rescue of a child - proving just how genuine a love he has for children (it's just a pity they grow up and become idiots). Ze is also smarter now. Rather than merely choose a woman for the honor of accepting his seed, he kidnaps six prospects and tests them (it involves lots of really big spiders and isn't really the kind of test you can study for). In a scene of gleeful sadism, he takes the winner to bed while the agonizing final moments of the unfortunate runners-up play out vividly before him and his would-be bride. Alas, though, the woman is weak - amoral, but ultimately undeserving of Ze's gift. Then Laura, the daughter of the well-to-do "Colonel" arrives in town, and in her Ze finds the superior woman he is seeking. In a mesmerizingly perfect scene, they go at it against the backdrop of her brother's funeral. Laura is really something else, actually bolstering Ze's strength and resolve when he discovers he has done the one thing capable of prickling his seemingly non-existent conscience.

Of course, the most famous scene in This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse is its audacious hell sequence. Marin creates one of the most disturbing, surreal, and memorable visions of hell I've ever seen, and its magic is made even more pervasive by the fact that it, unlike the rest of the movie, is shot in color. Marin reportedly used electric shocks to make the writhing pain of the actors appear all the more real. Don't think that the film ends there, however; Ze's sacrilegious mania only culminates after he once more dares challenge both God and devil to prove their existence to him, staking his claim anew for eternal existence and immortality. It all makes for a powerful ending to an outrageously audacious masterpiece (there, I said it again).

We in America didn't know what we were missing until the mid-1990s when Coffin Joe finally made its way to our shores. Filmed in the mid-1960s, Marin's brilliant films still have the power to shock and horrify audiences. Limited budgets did not stop Marin from introducing scenes of effective gore into these films, and the amorality of Ze is so extreme as to surprise even the most jaded of modern-day viewers. Today's directors don't have half the vision or audacity of Jose Mojica Marins, so I would urge anyone who cares even a single bit about horror to get your hands on these Coffin Joe films and revel in their genius and power.