Aug 30 2008
The return of Coffin Joe!
Brazilian cinema doesn’t have much of a foothold in the States — even less so when you’re talking about Brazilian genre movies — but there’s a definite die-hard cult following for José Mojica Marins, a.k.a. “Coffin Joe.” Marins has directed over thirty features and starred in over forty, appearing in many of those as his Coffin Joe alter ego. The movies, which sport evocative titles like At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul or This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse, are essentially hallucinatory, non-narrative collections of horror-themed vignettes, bound together by the the presence of Coffin Joe, as he prowls Brazil in search of the perfect woman to bear him a son.
It’s been about twenty years since Marins’s last movie, so it’s quite a coup that his latest, Embodiment of Evil, is not only garnering attention, but has the honor of playing at the 65th Venice International Film Festival tomorrow, Aug. 31. The press already had a chance to have a peek at it yesterday (the photo above is Marins, decked out as Coffin Joe, rocking the red carpet), and here is an early review. A subtitled trailer can be seen here. I think it’s safe to say that the preview’s not safe for work (well, depending on your gig).
