COFFIN JOE TAKES BRAZIL'S LOVE OF ASS-EATING TO STRANGE, EXCITING NEW PLACES

Trying to pare down Mojica’s 60-year film career into a digestible (ba-DUMP) 30-minute video was extremely difficult and managed to turn the simple task of eating a sandwich at my desk into a daily trial-by-vomit. I have to admit I wasn’t terribly excited when I was first assigned to edit the Coffin Joe piece. I’ve never been a big fan of horror, especially all this newfangled splat-pack, torture-porn the kids’ are into these days, and so the prospect of sitting down every day with some Brazilian beardo in fake nails didn’t really appeal to me. I’ve seen my share of bizarre, “out there” films, including a few made by Mojica’s Brazilian contemporaries from the 60s, but nothing I’ve ever seen approaches the sheer visceral dementia of the Coffin Joe movies.

I realize what a cliché it is, but José Mojica Marins is truly an evil genius. After the fifth Coffin Joe film I started to notice Mojica was essentially recycling the same movie over and over, using his undertaker alter ego to wreak mental havoc on the audience and also, to some degree, his hated nemesis, the censor. He made dozens of other movies, but Mojica’s primary obsession in life was fully realizing the one perfect Coffin Joe film (just as Coffin Joe is obsessed with realizing the perfect son to immortalize his bloodline). A genuine sadist of a director, Mojica wanted to dole out a ferocious beating to the audience, but he also knew how to let them in on the fun. Unfortunately, he was continually stopped short of manifesting his ultimate film by censors, lack of funding, and Catholic conservatism for four decades.

The Coffin Joe cycle consists of a proper trilogy: At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1963), Tonight I’ll Possess Your Corpse (1967), and Embodiment of Evil (2008), the long-awaited final installment Mojica considers his masterwork. Each film contains many of the same set-pieces (funerals, spiders crawling on pretty ladies in lingerie, Coffin Joe yelling at lightning, angry mobs) and plot points (Coffin Joe wants to squire the perfect son to achieve immortality, kills a few ladies during his quest, and is haunted by their ghosts). The Coffin Joe character appears in many other films, but this trilogy depicts the self-contained world of an undertaker convinced nothing comes after death (keep in mind Brazil is the world’s most populous Catholic country). Outside this set, Coffin Joe was used mainly to spice up mediocre horror films and to terrorize the “real” world by having Mojica (playing himself) examine Coffin Joe and the horror genre from a psychiatric angle.

By the time Mojica made Awakening of the Beast (aka Ritual of Sadists) in 1970, his goal was pretty straightforward: He was so intent on pushing the envelope of perversity and sadism onscreen that the resulting film was banned for 20 years. This film isn’t part of the Coffin Joe trilogy, it actually dissects it. Mojica and a group of psychiatrists are seated at a table discussing a series of self-contained segments in which drug use, from marijuana to cocaine to LSD, is depicted to bring about sexual perversity of all sorts (side note: this might also provide a hint as to what Mojica was up to offset during this era). One psychiatrist details his clinical study of four patients who are given LSD and then shown a Coffin Joe movie poster, leading them into full-blown psychiatric meltdown.  In the end, it’s almost as much a documentary about censorship as a horror film.  It’s also one of the most shocking, funny, psychedelic, and downright confusing films I’ve ever seen. And I was stone cold sober when I watched it.

In 1978’s Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind, Mojica (again playing himself) is enlisted by doctors at a mental institution to help treat a man suffering from a perpetual hallucination: Over and over, Coffin Joe terrorizes him and marches away with his beloved wife. Throughout the film, all of the previous Coffin Joe films are re-edited into a hallucinatory montage representing this pour schmuck’s delirium. In fact, much of this footage was culled from his archive of explicit images that he’d been forced to cut out of his previous films.

Finally, in Embodiment of Evil, Mojica was able to fully realize a film without concession to censors or religious interests. Actually, the only thing holding him back on this project was his camera crew, who nearly staged a revolt after some of the actors had trouble with all the real-life cockroaches, rats, and gigantic pig carcasses he confronted them with. The plot is confusing or just secondary and some of the acting is stiff, but at the end of the day, Mojica and Coffin Joe string together a series of sadistic performance art pieces that make you think that yes, just maybe, censorship isn’t such a bad thing after all. You’ll see why.

One incredible irony is that it’s Mojica’s real-life daughter, Liz Vamp, is his only real-life offspring to follow in daddy’s footsteps, having developed a Brazilian vampire character who is an advocate for blood donation in Brazil’s São Paulo state. Her sexy Brazilian vampire character is also Coffin Joe’s daughter and, due to her lobbying, April 15th has been officially declared “Vampire Day” for blood donation by the state’s legislature. When the IRS is sucking our blood dry here in the USA, Liz Vamp has accomplished an amazing subversive feat her father should proud of: His horror legacy and bloodline is cemented in an official state statute in Brasilia, seat of the government that unhinged his career (and sanity) in the first place.