In this episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe venture into the weird, wild world of Coffin Joe with the 1967 Brazilian horror film “This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse.”
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.
And this is Joe McCormick. And today on Weird House Cinema we're going to be talking about This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse, a movie that the title might lead you to believe is a Shallo film, but no, this is not a not an Italian film. This is a Brazilian horror movie from nineteen sixty seven, and one that has been tenaciously requested by listeners, at least one listener in particular.
Yeah, this one should make Susan happy, but we as some other listeners reach out as well. So today mark's our first entry into the world of Brazilian cinema. Is also going to be another one of these situations where we skip the first film in a series and go straight to the sequel, you know, because you know, sometimes a sequel is a Solos cash grab, but other times it gives filmmakers the chance to run with the concepts from the first film in a different and grander direction. And I think that's what you see in This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse, which you can also think of I guess it is coffin Joe.
Too, The Revenge. Now, I haven't seen the first coffin Joe movie, but I think the beginning of this movie sort of sets up. It's like, Hey, what happened at the previous At the end of the previous film was this our wicked protagonist got his face chopped to pieces by ghosts. But it turns out he was not dead. You may have been led to believe he died in the last movie, do Over, Do Over. He's not dead. He's fine.
Yes, the comeupp has been canceled at the beginning of this film, and we kind of get a do over on the whole thing. So yeah, this is a sixty seven film, a sequel to nineteen sixty threes at Midnight. I'll take your soul. I've seen it. Alleged this was the first Brazilian produced horror film and the movie that introduced the world to the murderous, preachy weirdo z Ducai Show, better known among English speaking filmgoers as coffin Joe.
Now, as I said, I was totally unfamiliar with Coffin Joe. This is my first coffin Joe movie. We're doing it because of persistent listener requests. But apparently this is not an obscurer character. Coffin Joe is like an icon of Brazilian horror cinema. He's like a well recognized character that I have seen, compared to characters like Freddy Krueger.
Yeah, yeah, he's a big deal I'm to understand in Brazilian horror cinema, and also achieved kind of a status as a Brazilian pop culture figure for a long time as well. Now we'll get into his characteristics more in a bit, but just the key visual attributes of Coffin Joe. This might ring a bell with people out there. Maybe you haven't seen these movies, but you've seen poster artors stills. But you have a top hat cape. You have long twisty fingernails, now not like you know Freddy Krueger nails, but like Guinness Book of World Record nails, Blackbeard and a monobrow.
I suppose this is coincidence. But apart from the monobrow, I found a picture of the young James Randy where he looks almost exactly like Coffin Joe.
Now, to be clear, the fingernails are not present in this.
Photograph, that's true, and the fingernails are a key part of his look. In fact, in many of his I think there are moments in the film that are trying to frame him for a kind of iconic close up that his face is right in the middle of the picture, but you can see he's just like working his fingers in on the side of the frame just so you can see that he does still have the long nails.
Yes, So who is Coffin Joe. Well, we're going to spend a lot of time talking about this, because he certainly spends a lot of time talking about this in the picture. But you could say, what he's a rebellious atheist and sadistic narcissist presented as a gleefully horrific dericature. That's part TV horror host, part old timey villain. But there are also some shades of some of some latter day horror villains in there as well. Like you could compare him to what would come much later and say the Saw franchise or in the Hannibal Lecter movies.
I would say Coffin Joe is a combination of Ivan Karmazov, Dracula Hannibal Lecter and the Joker, but also with a little bit of like Facebook Atheist from the year two thousand and nine, except with less liberal politics and more kind of like a real fondness for superiority. So you got to get an inn Ran d Angle in there too, I think, yeah, yeah.
I think that's a good comparison.
But of course a lot of these are sort of outside in these are like international influences on a Brazilian character, but apparently also there's some like uniquely Brazilian elements to the character as well. I was reading a chapter in the book Star and Stardom in Brazilian Cinema. This particular chapter dealing with Coffin Joe was by Laura Lo Garcio Canepa, and this author points out that the character also incorporates aspects of Brazilian folklore into the role, and we'll touch on a specific example of that in a minute. So you end up with something that yes, is drawing from films that are coming from international markets into Brazil, but also there is something distinctly Brazilian about the character, and I think that that's something that added to its popularity.
Hmm.
Okay, So Kanepa points out that, in addition to strong vibes of Dracula, Satyrs, and the Great God Pan, that also becomes obvious because he does have kind of a goatish look to him, to him, to his to himself. You know, he is kind of a malicious trickster.
Yes. In fact, there is one scene that seems intentionally to highlight his sort of goat like appearing, and the actor who created and plays this character does naturally have a little bit of a little bit of a goaty face, but they really play into it in a scene where he has later given visions of Hell and sees himself as the devil, and the devil version of him is way goadier than he is normally.
Yeah, and this is where Kneppa points out something that it seems key that the character also channels a recurrent Hafro Brazilian religious figure known as ex Su, a kind of narcissistic, hedonistic Bacchus type figure.
Okay, well, I can see that element, but that might lead you to believe that Coffin Joe is more about fun than he is, that he's like, you know, just into the pleasures of the flesh and pure you know, hedonistic, amoral desires and all that. That's not really Coffin Joe's vibe. In fact, Coffin Joe is in some cases extremely tedious and preaching. He is almost the mirror opposite of like the preacher whose sermon goes on way too long in the church, except he's outside the church talking about how everybody inside is stupid.
Yeah, he clearly sees himself not only as an intellectual, but the intellectual, certainly at least in this town that we see all the action take place in. Okay, But before we go any further here, previously on a Coffin Joe. In the first film, Local Undertaker. Coffin Joe spends his time lambasting people for how stupid they are for existing and believing in God and stuff. So he maims and kills people. He expounds a kind of Eugenics flavored philosophy in which he can achieve immortality by having a perfect son, and therefore well he needs the perfect woman. He runs a foul of the local villager, supernatural powers end up getting involved, and he winds up dead and possibly blind. It's a black and white film, and as Michael Weldon pointed out in the Psychotronic Video guide to film. Outside of seeing like an automobile in the background, at some point, the whole picture could have been set in a prior century, and you still get a strong sense of that in this film as well.
That's a good point. Yeah, there are a couple of things, like you see motorized vehicles, but for the most part the movie could be set entirely in like the nineteenth century.
Yeah.
So this movie picks up right where the last one left off and even includes scenes from that finale and throws you right back into Coffin Joe's quest to find the perfect woman so he can have a perfect son and live forever through that sun or something. The great thing about it is, if you have any questions, don't worry. Z is going to tell you all about it during the movie's one hundred and nine minute runtime.
Now, what I'm about to say might sound counterintuitive, but one of my favorite things about this movie was how tedious it was. That Like, there are parts where I was unable to contain laughter at his just sermonizing going on and on. Another way I'll put it is that this night I'll possess your corpse displays a filmmaking sensibility of thoroughness and abundance. So first of all, it's like, why express an idea once when you could say the same thing about twelve different ways and all in a row. And then the other thing is why show something just once when you could show it twenty seven times?
Yeah? I mean, they clearly shot a lot of footage of Tarantula's crawling around on ladies and laningerie, so why not just use absolutely all of the footage?
You know, Coffin Joe clearly sees himself as a Nietzchean superman. And there are lots of different ways of interpreting the idea of the Nietzschean superman. One is that it is the ultimate personal embodiment of affirmation and excess. You know, it's just like the never ending everything and yes always, And that's kind of what the filmmaking sensibility is here.
Yeah, that's a good point, all right, Later pitch for the movie as simple. Coffin Joe is back and he's ready to become a dad, nay world's best dad.
Now I haven't watched the trailer here, I'm to understand that there's not much good audio content. It's just like really excessive screaming.
Yeah, so we're only going to play just a very brief clip of it because it is mostly screaming. And i'd also i'd also suggest not watching the trailer if you think you're gonna watch the film, just because this film does have some surprises in it, and I feel like you're better off going into it a little cold, all right. That again, I'm sure that gives you no real indication of what's in store except that there will be things to be screamed about. Now, if you want to watch this film, Unfortunately, at the moment, I don't think it's currently streaming anywhere so far as I can tell. We rented it from Atlanta's own videodrome Phantoma, and more recently, Synapse Films has put the first three Coffin Joe films out on DVD. I think the third one, which occurs much later, is also available on Blu Ray, and you can get them all, or at least you could get them all in a DVD set that was shaped like a coffin, but this seems to be your only way to watch them. This is the sort of film though, you can definitely watch it on DVD. I don't think you're missing out on much in terms of quality here. Oh but wait, I have a post production note to add here. We recorded this episode earlier in the week, but today this morning, the morning of our publication date Friday, August twenty fifth Airro Video has announced that they're putting out a gigantic box set Inside the Mind of Coffin Joe. This is like a limited edition Blu ray box set, and it is going to contain let's see, at midnight, I'll take your soul this night, I'll possess your corpse. The movie we're talking about here today, the Awakening of the Beast, the end of Man, the strange world of Coffin Joe when the Gods fall asleep, the strange hostel of naked pleasures, hellish flesh and hallucinations of a deranged mind. So oh wait, and embodiment of evil. Six discs, all the Coffin Joe, all the z you could possibly ask for. So go look that up. I think you can. A little availability will be different for pre orders depending on where you're listening.
To the show. Now, Rob, I think you went much deeper into the context here than I did. But from what I understand, there are like there are three main chronology Coffin Joe films, and this is the second one of those. But also Coffin Joe just appears as a free floating recurring character in lots of other movies, Am I right?
Yes, mostly films by the same director, writer and actor here, and that's Jose Mojica Marens, who again here plays Coffin Joe, plays this character that is known in the original Portuguese Ze Ducai show. But he also was the director, the writer, and the producer. Who lived nineteen thirty six through twenty twenty. He was the son of a cinema manager on the outskirts of Salpaalu, and he grew up with a passion for film and began making his own short films at a young age with a nine point five millimeter camera that his parents had given him. You know, we see this similar story with a lot of film fans turned filmmakers. He created his own film studio at age eighteen, and his first film was a violent western called Adventurer's Fate, which did pretty well apparently in the big city, but it really it garnered some criticism because it was pretty violent, But then it did quite well as a traveling special screening in the outlying districts, with its female star Tonya Elektra performing a strip tease as part of the show and Maren serving as master of ceremonies.
Oh, I can totally see him as a master of ceremonies, with the top had on the microphone being like, then our next act will be yes.
Yes.
They followed this up with a melodrama in I Believe sixty three, and it didn't perform well. So inspired by a nightmare, the story goes, he scraped together what money he could manage to make the film that would become nineteen sixty four's at Midnight, I'll Take Your Soul. I might have said earlier that it was sixty three, but sixty four is generally the accepted date for this film, so they had a shoestring budget. But it was a huge hit and ignited a horror boom in Brazil, and it had elements of horror exploitation, but also a popular genre of Brazilian religious melodrama of the day, which I think is important to keep in mind in understanding some twists and turns in the plot and all of this also laid the groundwork to cement Coffin Joe as a Brazilian media icon, so he soon began to appear in the media on TV, etc. In character as Coffin Joe.
So I don't know, but I would guess based on other genres I am familiar with that the Brazilian religious melodrama would have some kind of common redemption arc, Like you'd have a sinful character who does a bunch of bad stuff and then at the end of the story they come round and repent and accept Christ.
Yeah. Yeah, that's my understanding, and I think it it basically matches up with all sorts of things you see, all sorts of artistic presentations and creations created beneath the Catholic Church throughout Western history, you know, where it's like I'm a painter, I really want to paint all these naked bodies. Well, make it be a Bible story and you can get away with it, you.
Know, that sort of thing.
As long as it's ultimately serving the message, then will allow it.
And this takes that a lot farther. Because I don't know if all of these melodramas are like this. I assume not, but at least in the case of Coffin Joe, it does have that arc, but you can tell it is really relishing showing all of the sin and bad stuff along the way. So I think in a way that that is a format that is common to what's known as exploitation cinema. More broadly, the idea that you would take a film that's like, oh, it's about an important issue, like it is about the dangers of marijuana. But because it's about that, you can show these dangerous marijuana parties where people are taking their clothes off and engaging in sinful behavior, and so like that's the appeal to the audience. So they want to go see the racy content, but you can always say, like, no, no, no, I had to show that because it's a message film about the dangers of this drug.
Yeah, exactly. So Maren's follows this up with the Western, but then he returns to the world of Coffin Joe with this film that we're dogging by here today this night, I'll Possess Your Corpse, a more ambitious swing at the same concepts. Joe wants a perfect son, and he'll do all sorts of evil to carry this out. And mocks the people of the town for their supernatural beliefs, while eventually encountering the supernatural himself. And on this point Kneppa has the following to say in that chapter quote. It is worth stressing here that in Brazil, in which the supernatural has been habitually seen by large parts of the population not as a deviant element, but rather is one of the fundamental elements of existence, it would be difficult to create a story of great impact in which the supernatural simply represented evil. Achievement of Mochico's creation, therefore, was the invention of a character who does not believe in the supernatural and who, as a result of this, can be terrified by its intervention.
Ah okay, so he in a context where there is widespread belief in magic, you introduce this like weird, dangerous element, which is a guy who is aggressively an atheist materialist, who's constantly talking about how there is no God, and then he can, after introducing all of that kind of weirdness and unpleasantness, can be terrified by images of hell that might be more commonplace to anybody else in this town. Yeah.
And I think also another aspect of it too, is something you see in wider horror in general, to have like that competent non believer. Yeah, eventually encountered the supernatural. Like Coffin Joke. Say what you will about him, he's very competent. He can hold up his end of a fight and so forth. So it's like when the supernatural starts kicking in and we see Coffin Joe frightened, it does have impact.
It's the arc of all three of the original Indiana Jones movies at the beginning, and he doesn't believe in any of that superstitious nonsense. And then at the end of the movie he always has to do a demonstration of faith in order to defeat the evil at the end.
Yeah, so you see some similar elements there. So after this film, Coffin Joe would go on to appear in multiple other films, though not a true sequel until two thousand and eight Embodiment of Evil. He appeared as a presenter in the anthology film The Strange World of Coffin Joe from sixty eight. A handful of other Maren's films involve the character in unique metafictional ways. These include nineteen seventies Awakening of the beast. This is an LSD film where I haven't seen it, but I believe that the idea is, like, there's an experiment, the test subjects are given LSD and then they watch Coffin Joe films, you know, something like that. There's The Bloody Exorcism of Coffin Joe, in which Maren's plays himself, and then there's another film, The Strange Hostel of Naked Pleasures, which features an implied Coffin Joe in the lead role. But I don't think it's like officially coffin Joe.
Mm okay.
So Coffin Joe remained a staple horror host on Brazilian TV at least into the nineties. The eighties and nineties I think were hard on him in Brazilian film in general, and he had to take on a lot of less glamorous work to get by. But he experienced more of a resurgence in the two thousands, including getting to return to the character of Coffin Joe on his own terms in two thousand and eights Embodiment of Evil.
I mean, it's a weird character to end up having this more broad cultural footprint, kind of in the way that a character like Freddy Krueger. Would you know that Freddy Krueger wasn't He started off as this like gross, sadistic killer in this first movie, But then the movies got sequels and became so popular that he's doing commercials for breakfast Cereal.
Right right, and eventually like nowadays, like children may dress as Freddy Grill. Even back in the day, kids were dressing up as Freddy Krueger for Halloween. Now you have like sexy Freddy Krueger outfits. I wonder if you have sexy Coffin Joe outfits. Maybe I got it one done.
But even so, like given that broader cultural footprint and the fact that Freddy Krueger is now just a totally defanged, like funny figure. Oh, he's just you recognize what he looks like. You know, you remember him from commercials on TV when you were a kid. If you go back and watch the first movie, it's like, oh my god, it's like shocking, how how like gross and evil and nasty he is.
Yeah, yeah, I think you have to go back to that original one, to the original Nightmare on Elm Street to get that sense of it. Also, the remake, I think takes a good swing at trying to recapture that.
And so anyway, I wonder if there's the same thing there's a similar thing with coffin Joe, because I mean, he is really like gross and evil in these films, or at least in the one we just watched.
Yeah.
Another thing that I think is interesting is so he's presented as a character who sees himself as the Nietzschean superman, Like he transcends petty morality, he transcends the illusions of other worldly rewards and punishments in order to forge an affirmative humanity on the strength of his unstoppable will you know, He's just like I am the new Thing, I Am the new Man. But I think he kind of fails at the Nietzschean ideal because ultimately he is a really resentful whiner. He is complaining all the time about stuff he doesn't like, religion, superstition, weakness, morality, dramas. He doesn't like dramas, and it creates drama everywhere he goes. He walks into a room, it's like instant drama. But he hates dramas. He is the pope of dramas. But also when other people are having dramas. He hates dramas, but it really gets him down. And I think if he were truly the uberminch that he imagines himself to be, he would not be complaining so much. He would just achieve the immortality of blood, kill God already, get it done, and reshape the world in the image of his genius. He does not do it.
And the plan really stays in like phase one for I think most of both of the first films. I presume it probably stays in phase one in the third film as well.
Well. Also, Yeah, so his plan is what he calls the immortality of blood, so he has a specialized name for it that I guess sounds kind of cool. But ultimately his goal is not that outside the box a revolutionary. What he wants is to have a son with the perfect woman. How outside the box is that? That seems like something other characters have tried before, except that he is more of a nasty, violent, immoral creep in trying to achieve this goal.
Yeah, a lot of what, especially in the latter portions of the film, there's a lot of stuff that feels like just a hard twist on what a lot of fathers feel like at one point he's like, I cannot die because my son will need me, and is like, well, yeah, I mean I think a lot of people feel that way about their responsibilities in life, just without all the implied mustache twirling.
Though. Well, we can explore this dynamic later, but I think when he feels that, that's supposed to reveal his hypocrisy, because you know, that's that's love, which we know from earlier scenes he believes to be a form of weakness.
You know. It also strikes me that Ze is kind of the anti necromonger here. You know, while while both Coffin Joe and the Necromongers dig skulls and stuff, the necromongers are deep into sci fi occultism and they consider procreation the absolute worst, while Coffin Joe despises belief in the occult and believes that babies are literally all that matters.
I actually ended up making a list of Coffin Joe's likes and dislikes that we discover throughout the movie.
Do you want to do that here? Oh yeah, let's let's have it. Let's the full dating profile for Coffin Joe for any ladies out there, that are interested.
Okay, what coffin Joe does like a superior people, though that's primarily just himself. Superior people, strength, courage, liberation, sex, atheism, the innocence of children, procreation, venomous animals, owning, people with logic, grapes, quote science. I think his understanding of what that means is a little off the mark. And he really likes instinct. He talks repeatedly about how instinct is pure compared to I think religion. Okay, so that's his likes. His dislikes are superstition, god, religion. He's really not into war, hatred, and the triumph of lies. He doesn't like the idiots, Catholicism, inferior people, oh boy. Multiple times in the movie. You can hear it because it's a cognate in the languages. He's just going inferior.
Oh.
Morality, oh disgusting, hates morality, belief in the immortality of the soul, really does not like dying without having a son with the perfect woman to achieve the immortality of blood. He hates dramas, and he really does not like trimming his nails or people who love because they are weak.
I would also add trunk of Door to the list, he's really hard on Trunk of Door.
Doesn't like Trunk of Door. Trunk of Door is a character we'll.
Get to in a minute, but basically a beefy muscle man who is just like it clearly is he's here in part so that Coffin Joe can just dunk on him.
Okay, I've got a question I thought was interesting. Wonder what you think about this? What do you think is the relationship of this film to the philosophy of Coffin Joe, Like, what do you think the filmmaker's attitude to that philosophy is? Because on one hand, Coffin Joe is obviously full evil, hard evil does all all kinds of unforgivable crimes. He is a murderer, rapist, kidnapper, does every awful crime. And yet there are other ways that the movie seems to go out of its way to make him sympathetic, such as these kind of treacily scenes of showing his protectiveness of children and when he's giving sermons about how like God and the church are trash. I don't know, it seems like they're giving him a lot of room to talk and well, a lot of what he says was funny to us, I sense a real desire to make his case sound as eloquent as possible. So is there a part of the filmmaker that sort of likes or agrees with Coffin Joe. There's that on you know, so he does the crimes, then there's that on the other hand. But then coming back on the other side, that would be kind of weird, given that in the end we see Coffin Joe, we see his ideology humiliated by supernatural intervention, and we see him repudiate his previous existence and beg for repentance.
Yeah.
Yeah, it is weird to try and make sense of, like the full narrative of the thing. I do think there is a sense of Coffin Joe as an expression of the soul, and that that Maren's considered him very much his alter ego. So I guess some of the ideas he's he's preaching about, or perhaps ideas that Maren's you know, sympathize with it at least. And I think also you could throw in that like this is clearly a figure that is supposed to feel counterculture and counter norms. You know, he's the the ultimate outsider who inspires fear just by walking down the main street in town. So he's the enemy, but we're also attracted to him. You know, there's this there's this weird kind of push and pull like, yeah, how are we ultimately even as the viewer supposed to feel about coffin Joe and certainly like, how is the intended audience, the initial intended audience of the time supposed to to think about him like you're you're kind of enjoying his rebellious nature, while also at the end of the day, it's like, Okay, the universe is put back in its right place at the end of the film, but we still got to have the catharsis of seeing it.
I mean, in a way, I almost wonder if it's another form of the exploitation cinema principle that's like, we want to show you some things that we think you will be interested and titillated by, but framed within a context where there's deniability that this is like no, no, but we're saying he's bad. He is fully bad.
Yeah, yeah, you absolutely can't take the exploitation out of the equation here.
But I don't know the thing in the end about how Coffin Joe is a friend to all children. It just remains deeply hilarious.
Yes, all right, rolling through just some of the other members of the cast and crew here, most most of the people involved here didn't do a lot else outside of this film. I've seen interviews from Maren says that he worked a lot with with amateur actors and preferred to work with amateur actors because more professional actors were difficult to could be difficult to control. Let's see, we have a writer on this, al Donora di Sapporto. This was their only writing credit. We also have an actor by the name of Larcio Larelli who does the voice of Coffin Joe. So Maren's did not speak perfect Portuguese apparently. I don't know how much of this had to do with his family being of Spanish descent or not, but at any rate, at the end of the day, the voice of Coffin Joe, even in Portuguese, is dubbed by a different actor.
So that's somebody else's voice we're hearing say inferior.
Yes, yes, And you know this isn't out of the norm. I mean, Paul Nashi Films for example, in Spain. Like most of the time, we're not hearing.
Paul Nashi's actual voice.
I think there are a few films where he does his own his own vocals as well, but for the most part he's dubbed, even in Spanish. All right. Other cast members here, Tina Worls plays Laura, this is their only acting credit. Nadia Fritz plays Marcia. This is her only acting credit. And then oh, we have Trunkador played by Antonio Frakari. This is a beefy actor and makeup artist who also was an associate producer on this film. He only has three acting and three makeup credits, all in Brazilian cinema from nineteen fifty eight through nineteen sixty seven. Great look, though, He is this bald headed muscle man with I don't know if this is natural or in fact I'm assuming an effect, but one of his eyes is black like it's like it's a black false eye or it's some sort of contact lens in there.
But it's a very impressive look. And he's dressed like Sinbad.
Yeah, I couldn't figure out the outfit either. He does look like he walked out of a sword and sandals picture.
Yeah, I don't know why he's dressed like that. It looks looks like some kind of wrestling costume or something.
Yeah, he's very physically intimidating, which again, this makes it all the more hilarious when Coffin Joe just like beats the crap out of him in one scene, you know, run circles around him intellectually. In another scene, it's hilarious like he's basically Coffin Joe's punching back. All right, we have Bruno. We'll talk about Bruno in a bit, played by Jose Lobo. This is their only acting credit. And then we have the score. Here is by Herminio Gaminez, who lived nineteen oh five through nineteen ninety one, responsible for a number of scores including At Midnight, I'll Take Your Soul, The Strange World of Coffin Joe, and End of Man.
From nineteen seventy one. That's another Maren's film.
All right, to be talking about the plot now, yes, let's get into the plot. So the movie starts with Coffin Joe just talking straight into the camera. There's a plume of smoke twisting in front of his face, and he looks at you, and he says, is life everything and death nothing? Or is death everything and life nothing? Thing makes you think.
I think it's the former.
I'm gonna go with the former, but I'm getting the impression he thinks maybe the latter.
Maybe he does seem to be into death, though not for himself. You know, it's like he loves death, but he doesn't love He doesn't want to die. He wants to be immortal, but not to believe in the immortality of the soul, which is foolish. He wants to have the immortality of blood. He'll explain more later. We'll get to that. So we get a narration at the beginning. I think there's some text displayed on the screen. It says Coffin Joe, obsessed with having a son, killed many people, but he was haunted by hallucinations. And so it shows Coffin Joe ripping open a couple of caskets. I think this is the end of At Midnight, I'll take your soul or your soul, but whatever the previous movie.
Was at Midnight, I'll take your soul as a previous And then this one is this night I'll possess your corpse.
Okay, it doesn't specify a time tonight. It could be anytime. It could be nine pm to four am.
Yeah, it's like the cable guy come into to fix your cable. It's just you have a window for arrival.
Right sometime between nine pm and four am. I'll possess your corpse. And then they don't get there to possess it till four thirty. But anyway, Yeah, so Coffin Joe's he's pulling the lids off caskets. He reveals a couple of mutilated corpses with spiders crawling on him. And then Coffin Joe apparently something happens to him. I think he gets his face sort of chopped up by ghosts, and the townspeople come and they find him lying at the entrance to the crypt with his head all bloody and one of his eyeballs popped out. So it doesn't really look like he could come back from this. But you know what, turns out he's totally all right. And then we get the credits and I don't know what you call the effect here, but the lettering of the credits is wildly animated. The letters are jumping and wiggling all over the place. And I actually paused it and went frame by frame to see what's happening here. What it looks like is that every frame of the credit sequel and had the words that are being displayed sort of painted or handwritten on the frame anew and there was no stencil to keep them like lined up in between shots. So imagine just writing the same words dozens of times on many frames in a row, and every time you're just roughly eyeballing it to keep them in the same place, so they're wiggling crazily all over the screen.
It's a very startling effect, especially given the fact that even in you know, weirder films, the credits are usually not that weird, and sometimes they're mandated that they can't be that weird, right, I mean, like they're just there's certain norms that are followed with opening credits and closing credits within a given timeframe and cinematic tradition, and here it's just right off the bat, everything's unhinged.
It seems they're they prioritize making the credit sequence look interesting over making it readable, and I respect that.
Yeah.
Yeah, Also, the credits include shots of hands franticly reaching up from the soil. So they're clowing their way out of graves. But so Coffin Joe head old bloody, I popped out. He's taking to the hospital. Not only is he not dead, he heals up perfectly, not a scar to be seen. Also, whatever murders and crimes he did in the last movie, it's like, no, biggie. There's a really fast scene in front of a judge in a courtroom where the judge is just like, not enough evidence to convict Coffin Joe is now free to kill again. So he's lying there in a hospital bed and the doctors come and he's got bandages wrapped around his head, covering his eyes. They remove the bandages, they take him off. His sight is restored. It's perfect now. And then he just starts cackling like a maniac at the concept of light while the doctors are just standing there looking at him.
This should be a red flag already that like, I'm not sure that this guy was necessarily innocent.
So he's back. He's back, baby, He's in town. We see shots of people going about their business, you know, children playing in the streets, people are singing and dancing. Everybody's having a good time. But then they all see Coffin Joe's coming down the road and everyone flees in terror. Parents grab their children and take them inside. Old women duck behind windows and slam the shutters.
It's it's good, Yeah, it's it's a little bit hilarious because it's it's really hard to nail down the initial impact of Coffin Joe, because yes, he's creepy. He doesn't look completely ridiculous or anything like that, Like I don't want to imply that, Like he does look legitimately creepy, and he brings this wonderful, weird energy to every scene he's in, and yet there is something ridiculous about here, Like here he comes, he's strolling into town and everybody's running like a twenty foot monster just strolled into the village.
Yeah, so Coffin Joe struts across the churchyard, he scowls at the town center, and he just says, people are always the same, ignorant, superstitious, inferior, but they will learn the truth, even if I must make their eyes run with tears of blood. So he's not like easing into it. The moment he sees the town again, he's like, I'm going to destroy these people. He checks in at the funeral home that he operates. He looks to be very proud to be a small business owner. He's just looking around at his employees and beaming. And here we also meet one of his employees who is basically his egor. This is a man named Bruno, who they have a not super convincing looking hunchback prosthetic and some stuff on his face.
Yeah, kind of like a hunchback lurch character.
But Coffin Joe looks out the window at a bunch of kids playing games in the street, and then he said, and this is where it gets weird. He's like, look at nature's perfect creation children. Pity they all grow up to become idiots. He says that they get lost in a labyrinth of egoism and dominated by an imaginary power, the faith in the immortality of the spirit. That's what he really doesn't like. But I guess that maybe they don't have that faith yet, so they're still good, They're still awesome in his view. And he says there's only one truth in this life that is the immortality of blood. He'll explain more about that later, but Bruno is just nodding like, yep, the Labyrinth of Egoism. And then there is a scene where suddenly Coffin Joe he's like looking down the road and he sees a man on a motorcycle or it might be a motor scooter, just driving straight toward a group of children who are playing in the street, and Coffin Joe yells he's crazy, and most of the children get out of the way, but one boy just stands right there in the vehicle's path, and Coffin Joe swoops in like batman and saves the child, just like lifts him out of the street. And then the kid's crying there. He's like, oh no, and Coffin just says, don't cry my boy. Do you like music? And then what is with this weird he gets like this little Zippo lighter music box out. It's like a tiny metal rectangle that plays music out of some weird little window.
Yeah, I guess this is like the iPod of the day, right, you just have this little, you know, wind up musical contraption that, yeah, generally you would see in the bottom of the music box.
So once again I think it is so odd and interesting that they're giving him these superficially heroic or sympathetic traits. It's like, what if Freddy Krueger still murdered you in your dreams, but he was also a friend to all children like Gamera.
Yeah, yeah, I mean he has a code, right, That's that's what we're laying down here.
Anyway, the driver of the scooter comes over to him and says, thank God, it's a miracle that I didn't hit that boy. You must have been sent by God to save him. And you can just see Coffin Joe's eyes start twitching and he's like stupid fanaticism, and he tells the guy a child is the most important creature in the universe, and he says, protect them, or even your God will not be able to save you from hell. Oh and then he goes back to his funeral parlor and there's a rich heiress named Marcia who comes over. She comes over to flirt with Coffin Joe. She's like, wow, I saw what you did. You're a hero. There is no God. Talk to you later. But here the movie makes an abrupt transition. It's like, okay, it is time to do heinous crimes. So Coffin Joe says I must now immortalize my blood, which means for him, because the spiritual afterlife does not exist, he must find the perfect heathen superwoman to bear him a son.
All right, right, So not a situation of trying to create the occult power couple, but the heathen power couple. That's the quest, and then of course the heathen super baby.
So it seems like his plan is roughly shaped like this. He's gonna kidnap six beautiful women who are all free thinking materials. Oh, but there's one who he sends Bruno to kidnap, and then when Bruno gets there, she's like, no need, no need for violence, no need to kidnap me. I'm all in on coffin Joe. And that one that is Marcia, who flirted with him at the funeral parlor. But once all of the victims are assembled, he's going to terrorize them by putting a bunch of tarantulas in their beds, and then if any of them get scared of the tarantulas, they're not worthy. So he's going to give them to Bruno or kill them by making them get into a pit of venomous snakes. And then if any of them don't get freaked out by the tarantulas. That means they are superior and will be appropriate to help him achieve the immortality of blood.
Highly suspect logic here that everything is hinging on whether or not these individuals are wigged out by spiders and snakes.
Yes, well, it's obvious that this plan has moral defects. I think it also has logical defects, despite the fact that Coffin Joe is constantly delivering sermons about how he is superior and logical and God is bad. There's a scene at the police station of Trunkador, the wrestler guy, being falsely accused of kidnapping the women, and then the colonel comes out and he vouches for him. He's like, if Trunkador is guilty, you might as well arrest me too, And then the detective is like, well that settles it. He's innocent.
Trunk of Door is off the hook.
I get the impression Trunkador's job is just like professional heavy slash bodyguard.
That seems to be his role here.
I think so. I think he is maybe the colonel's bodyguard.
Yea.
There is another scene where a mob gathers in front of a guy outside the church who's saying that Coffin Joe did all the kidnappings. And then the mob they get whipped up into a frenzy and they say they're going to go after him. They're going to go get him. But then coffin Joe appears and he disproves the premise of their posse with logic, And you can't help but notice that, like, there's a similarity of this scene to scenes in the Gospels where the Pharisees are getting a mob together to accuse Jesus of breaking the Sabbath or blaspheming or something, and then Jesus uses some kind of clever word play or argument or like turns their logic around on them to shut them up. And so here coffin Joe is like, you say, I'm guilty, Well what about you? Who can prove that you're not guilty? You know, maybe your wife left you because she hates you. And also this speech includes a really irrefutable argument. He says, how can any of you be innocent of these kidnappings when in fact we know that only children are innocent. Boom can't argue with that. Yeah, I don't know. Do you think the parallel to like the controversy stories of Jesus and the Bible, where is intentional here?
You know, I bet so.
You know, we talked about like the audience being an audience that is either you know, Christian or is come up in a Christian dominated kind of culture, and you could see the appeal of an Antichrist character, not in the sense that the character is supposed to be like the actual Antichrist from you know, biblical tradition or from cinematic portrayals of the Antichrist, but being like a figure that is kind of this reverse altered image of Christ where they're like, there's something about this guy. He reminds me of somebody else that I hear about every week, except you know, through a mirror darkly. Yeah.
Interesting, Okay, but wait, coffin Joe, It's almost like he forgot that he had lady prisoners. So he goes back to the prisoners and he lectures them about how there's no immortality of the soul, only immortality of the blood. And then he's talking to all of them about how he selected them because they were without faith. Like he goes up to one of the ladies and he says, you you were married outside the church? Why no? Faith? Good, very good? And then he does the tarantula test. I recall this scene goes on a long time where the ladies are all just like sleeping, and we get to see tarantulas crawling on their legs and stuff.
Yeah, yeah, this is definitely a case where you could have used a little less footage and you could have gotten the point across. But they clearly just liked this footage of tarantula is crawling across ladies in their lingerie, so we see a lot of it.
Only Marcia passes the test, the one who was all in on Coffin Joe. Anyway, all the other ladies they start screaming about the tarantulas, so Coffin Joe he takes them downstairs to get murdered in the pit of venomous snakes.
The snake pit looks good, by the way, like all these SATs this is. This film is black and white, so we have these very grim, gritty, black and white set sets in addition to those street scenes. And yeah, this it feels claustrophobic. The snakes are definitely real, at times alarmingly real, as are the spiders.
Oh yeah, that's weird. I guess we haven't talked about the visual style of this movie much yet. I guess just because the subject matter is so ripe for conversation. But this is a great looking movie, I think. I think most of the sets and the effects and everything look really good. It is surprisingly visually striking for a black and white film.
Yeah, absolutely, especially knowing that you know, they didn't have an inexhaustible budget here that you know, I think they had more money than they did on the first film, but still they didn't have a lot to play with. A lot of times the elements they're using you can see the limitations, but you also see that well they put a lot of effort into lighting it appropriately and making sure that, you know, they could lean on the shadows as much as possible to give it this this air of Gothic intrigue.
There's a lot of good use of high contrast in the set dressings. There are some excellent indoor swamp and pond sets later and yeah, just well thought out and often high energy imagery. It is designed not to let your eyes get bored.
Yeah, And it's my understanding that they built all the sets in that synagogue and I think they built the swamp in the backyard of the synagogue.
Oh yeah. But anyway, so back to the depraved crimes of Coffin Joe. So he's murdering all these ladies in the snake pit, and then uh oh, Marcia, the lady who was going to be worthy because she's not afraid of spiders, she proves herself unworthy as well because she has compassion. So Coffin Joe is like, He's like, hey, let's get in the mood by watching these ladies get bitten by snakes. And Marcia doesn't like it. She has pity on them. She's like, please stop. And then Coffin Joe just stands there eating grapes while one of the ladies in the snakepit curses him in the name of God.
This is a pretty creepy scene, the curse sequence, as it should be, and I think this sense is heightened because the snake around her neck is actually like visibly tightening around her neck. And according to an interview with Maren's The Yeah, this is a situation where they had to jump in right after the film cuts and like pull the snake off of her neck to keep it from strangling her, so, you know, to her credit, she you know, she used it in the performance.
Oh yeah, she. I mean, she really portrays wrath at Coffin Joe and he's not impressed at first, but maybe he will be later in the film. So anyway, Marcia is like Coffin Joe, you are sadistic. I can't stand the sadism. And Coffin Joe says, it's not sadism, it is science. It is siensia. These women, he says, these women were not a human sacrifice. Their jets will be for the creation of the superior race, a race that will become immortal through the control of instinct. So I think he wants to create a new man. And Marcia is standing there looking like that doesn't sound right. Martha Mark, your instincts are correct. I don't think coffin Joe understands what science means. He also seems to imply that it is science because killing the women with the snakes revealed their hypocrisy. I don't know what that means.
This does remind me that sometimes you will hear people say I don't believe in God, I believe in science, And yes, that can be an actual stance, but it can also be you know, it can also be just kind of like a shallow statement, which I.
Think is more in line with a Coffin Joe is saying here.
I mean, I don't know. I have a lot of trust in science, but that seems like a weird way to phrase things to me. That's kind of like saying I don't believe in ghosts, I believe in the law. It's like, huh. Anyway, Coffin Joe, he releases a Marcia without killing her, but he says, you know, she's not worthy to bear him, to bear him a son because she loves him and love is weak, and it saddened him to see the weakness of love in her eyes.
All told, though, this is a pretty good breakup for Coffin Joe.
I have to say yeah, oh yeah, because she's like, are you going to kill me? And he's like, nope, you can go because I know you're not going to report me because you love me, which again is weak and bad.
Yeah, this would be toxic in any other relationship, no doubt, But for Coffin Joe, this is I mean, this feels like perhaps a step up from just murdering a bunch of people.
And she does not tell on him at first. She vouches for Coffin Joe to the police. She says, I was on a trip, which is where I was, and no idea what happened to the other five non religious women in town and he did nothing wrong.
Yeah, and a law of enforcements, like it's rock solid, what can we do?
Yeah? So next thing is the movie takes a shift. Coffin Joe sees Laura arriving in town in a carriage, and Laura is the beautiful daughter of the colonel. She is protected by Trunkador. And here's where we get that trunk Adoor Coffin Joe fight scene, where Coffin Joe looks at him, he's like, yeah, okay, he's pretty muscly, but I have an idea. He grabs a cane that somebody in the crowd is holding that's got one of those what do you call it, like the crook on top, the like you know, the U shaped top of the cane, and he hooks it around Trunkador's neck and then he spins Trunkedor around in circles and throws him in the mud. And so I guess he's beating up Trunkador in front of Laura, maybe to impress Laura.
I think, yeah, yeah, I think so, like I gotta make I got to make an example out of this meathead. Again, Trunkador is largely there to be made an example of bye by Coffin Joe. I also want to point out, like I was not prepared well for multiple aspects of this film, multiple choices, but I wasn't prepared for how many action sequences we get. You know, they're not you know, they're not We're not in a Shaw Brothers film or anything like that. Here, they're they're they're brief moments of action, but they're they're more elaborate than I anticipated.
I agree, And it does seem like the point of these acts scenes is very much that, oh, coffin Joe could beat up anybody he wanted to. Yeah, So are you supposed to think he's cool? I don't know.
I guess on some level he's supposed to be cool, Like he's he's a smart fighter.
I think that's the thing.
Like, yes, trunk Adoor is stronger, but he's got he's got that like seventeen strength. But you know, coffin Joe's got that that nineteen decks and that high intelligence he's gonna get in there, and he's gonna he's gonna make short work of the muscleman trunk.
Odor is Ajax, but Coffin Joe is Odysseus.
Yeah.
So there's a party at the Colonel's house, I guess to I don't know, celebrate the arrival of Laura in town. And Coffin Joe shows up at the party, and of course it's a real buzzkill. When Coffin Joe shows up, everybody, like everybody stops talking and laughing and having a good time and they just stare at him. Coffin Joe walks up to Laura, who again she's playing the piano, and he's like, meet me at midnight in the Alley of red Flowers, and she does, and an owl is there to make the scene cool. So she shows up in the alley and he goes, are you afraid of me? And she says no, And he says, they say that I am cruel and I am a sadist. Don't you fear me now? And she says, if you were to kill me, that would only bring the one true thing in life death, And Coffin Joe. He just goes weak in the knees. He has found the perfect woman for him, and it gets even better. So she tells him after this, she's like, you know, the only true thing between life and death is you. So she's all about him, and then she says, the only thing that matters is having a superior child born of two superior beings. What are the odds? So it is a match made in heaven, which is stupid and doesn't exist, by the way, And she's like, Coffin Joe, all I want is to be your godless devil wife and the mother of unholy science. And Coffin Joe is just rilled. He's like, okay, we will make that happen.
All right, We're off of the races now, like this is this is a perfect match, Like you say, so, there's just a few things they got to check off the list here, you know, her dad hating him and so forth, the various murders around town. Once we smooth all of this out, yeah, it's just all about that immortal baby blood.
I think that they were like, oh, we need to get Coffin Joe to do some more murders before before the immortality of the blood. So first, Laura's brother tries to bribe Coffin Joe to leave town. So he comes and he says, you know, I'll pay you twice what your properties are worth to buy them from you, if you'll just leave town and leave Laura alone. But I don't know. It seems like Laura would just like find another Coffin Joe type to end up with, wouldn't she like she's she's got her own priorities.
Yeah. Plus, you can't you can't stand in the way of love or something that closely resembles love. Yeah, this is clearly meant to be. But often Joe sees some possibilities here. The wheels are turning. He doesn't actually want that money, but you know, I'm guessing. On one level, he realizes this brother is a problem, This brother needs to be taken care of. But also perhaps here is one more test for my future wife to make sure she's truly one devoted to what we've got going on here.
Right, So there are a couple of prongs to his plan. One of them is dealing with a trunk adoor. They're going to try to well, they're going to kill the brother and frame Trunkador for the murder. So so Coffin Joe recruits Marcia to seduce Trunkador and then tell him that she needs money, and then Coffin Joe challenges Trunkador to a game of poker, and I guess the idea is Trunkador agrees to this because he's like, I need to win money for my new girlfriend Marcia.
Yeah, Trunkedor claims that he's been playing poker since he was in the womb, but it's clear from the get go that he's just going to get owned at cards by the one true strategic genius, coffin Joe. I mean, it's there's no question here. It's just this is doomed from the start.
And there is a poker game that's like a it's like a James Bond movie. There's a high stakes and gambling scene.
Yeah, we cut into it already. Trunkador is losing, like he's he's down. However, many games, this whole vision that he's gonna somehow make a fortune off of coffin Joe. Who I think it is. I think it's maybe more presented in the first film, but coffin Joe is also supposed to be like a wealthier member of this town, like he's he's the undertaker, Like there's there's always business for the undertaker. He makes plenty of business for himself, that's right, except sometimes, I mean except with like these, uh, these murders, these most recent murders. We had the scene where he's hiding the bodies in the swamp so that they'll you know, get you know, the rod, or be eaten by the scavengers. So in cases like that, he is kind of depriving himself off business. I guess he's still doing the close casket thing. So that's the that's what really sucks about having a family member killed by Coffin Joe, is he's still gonna handle the funeral.
So Coffin Joe he kills Laura's brother by crushing him with the giant rock. And before that, he before he does that, he gives a long speech like he I don't even The themes are like will and instinct and inferiority and superiority. Guess what, the brother he's inferior. Coffin Joe, he's superior. He says, how long would these nails grow if I didn't cut them? I don't recall what that refers to. He's just like the fingernails are illustrative of some kind of point he's making.
Yeah, there's a whole thing with the stone. They crush a rat, I mean, not for real, and then he like catches the rope on fire. There's it's a whole like saw esque situation here where he's like, okay, go ahead, call out to God, maybe he'll save you, or you know, this crush your head, And of course it ends up crushing his head anyway.
It's a pit in the pendulum kind of trap. But yes, he also does the thing from the the Atheist Professor chain email where he's like, if God is real, he will come and save you. If he's not real, haha, improve and correct again. Yes, oh but anyway, then they so they crush him with the rock and then they frame Trunkador for the murder because they're playing poker in this crowded bar. Trunkador leaves the crowded bar. A scream is heard from outside, and they go out and they find Trunkador lying on the ground next to Laura's brother who is squished, and it's like, oh, Trunkador must have done it, because Coffin Joe was inside where everybody could see him. He couldn't possibly be to blame. It's not like he could have had accomplices.
It's not like he's known to have multiple accomplices across town at this point.
Yeah, but I think they do have the funeral in Coffin Joe's parlor.
It's the only game in town. You gotta go to Coffin Joe.
So here Laura and Coffin Joe start getting really serious. They have another midnight rendezvous and there's a thing any scene where coffin Joe is like kissing a woman. We get these hilarious close ups of his face where he's frowning and scowling. He's making like a yucky face as he forms the kissy lips, and it is so funny. I don't think it's supposed to be funny. I don't know what they're going for there. It's just like he's not gonna smile, so he's just like mmm. And then I think Laura comes to live at coffin Joe's house after this, and coffin Joe's got a cool house.
Yeah, we get to see his bedroom at one point. I think there's only really one shot where we get to see the full stat But yeah, he has this nice dark curtain bed and I think there's like a like a painting of the devil over the bed. It's splendid.
But uh oh, we're gonna start getting some of the moral melodrama coming in because Coffin Joe's about to develop a guilty cor conscience. He's in a bar and he overhears some people talking and he finds out that one of the women that he killed in his snake pit was pregnant, and this causes him to have a crisis of conscience. But how could he have a crisis of conscience? Isn't conscience weak? Isn't that a display of inferiority? How could a superior being like Coffin Joe feel guilty? Well, remember his one real moral impulse. He thinks it is wrong to harm children, and he thinks that this counts, So he has a guilt freak out.
Yeah, and Laura, the future Miss Coffin here is hilarious in her attempts to make him feel better. She's like, come, Onzie, that child was just going to grow up to be an inferior adult. He was just going to be an idiot. So it's actually a good thing.
That you did this.
But coffin Joe's not buying it. He's like, He's like, nope, nope, this is against my code. This is wrong. I feel awful.
It is time to have a nightmare of going to hell, and he goes to sleep. He has a nightmare of hell, and suddenly the film transitions to technic color. It's like The Wizard of Oz. But whereas in the Wizard of Oz, Kansas is black and white and Oz is in color, here most of the movie in I guess Earth is black and white, but Hell is in color.
This was tremendous, in part for me because I was not expecting it. I thought we were going to be in the same dreary but effective black and white for the full film. I had not seen the trailer, so I didn't know that there were going to be color elements, and so suddenly we're in this weird technicolor world and I'm like, wow, this is this blew my socks off. It reminds me of when I watched The Tingler for the first time, and I didn't know that there were going to be color elements in that. Otherwise black and white film.
Oh I forgot about that.
Yeah, I found it. I found it highly effective. I got a big kick out of it.
So yeah. In this sequence, he gets dragged out of bed and taken to a graveyard full of shaky hands. There's like a demon who grabs him, pulls him out of bed. This like tall, lean figure. He taken into the graveyard. Everybody's reaching out of the graves with hands, going nuts all over the place. And then once he is in Hell, he sees the tortures of the damned, which include muscly oiled up hercules, guys just running around poking people with pitchforks.
Mm hmm, yeah, naked people crawling around on the floor, topless women strapped to columns in this kind of cave set. And then here come the musclemen with tridents to occasionally stab them. And it's worth driving home. This goes on for what feels like half an hour. This is another situation where they're like, well, we shot a lot of Hell footage, and we did it in color. Let's give the people what they want. Let's give them all of this footage. This actually reminded me a lot of the Hell scenes in the nineteen seventy musical Scrooge starring Albert Finney and Alec Guinness, except more naked and pokey here. But that level of obvious fake Hell set. This set here in the Coffin Joe film was apparently built in the synagogue, and according to Maren's they had rigged wiring in the floor of this set so they could have little pyrotechnic explosions, which I don't think I really noticed the explosion so much. There's a lot going on in these sequences, but the wiring wasn't great, and so as all the actors, including Coffin Joe, were moving around, they would get periodically shocked by the wiring and the floor. So if you rewatch the sequences, you'll see Coffin Joe and other people kind of going to that, and you know, it adds to the craziness of the sequence.
So a bunch of things happen in Hell. Coffin Joe is he says, I can't be He's at one point he yells literally, he says, I don't believe in the laws. I think what he means there is that, like there aren't actually things people could go to Hell for. There's no stings right or wrong.
It's like, I absolutely reject this notion in its entirety. There is no way that I am actually in Hell, but clearly like we are in Hell at this point, and it's full color. It's like, which is very interesting to think about, you know, outside of just sort of the obvious gimmickiness of it, Like Hell is another realm and it's in color. So it's like, in a sense, suddenly Hell is more real than the rest of the film. Hell feels more modern than the rest of the film. It's it's a very weird vibe. It's hard to like really figure out like what aspects of it are intentional and which or not.
But he's obviously frightened. And then he sees the devil, which is Joe himself. It's the same actor again. He's a very goat like devil. I think he's got laurel leaves around his head and a little, you know, kind of kind of king of the Forest crown, so there are elements of pan in there. And he's dressed in like orange and pink and purple robes. So he's this devil looks like he's having a great time. But coffin Joe is not having a great time. He is things are rough, and he's like, uh oh, did I throw in everything on an incorrect ideology? Uh oh.
There's also a big carnival feel to all of this as well, Yes, especially with the devil on his throne. He seems like he's the grand marshal of a parade.
And then Coffin Joe sees his murder victims. There is the woman who cursed him in the snake pit, and she's coming at him saying, this night, I'll possess your corpse.
Oh, that's the title. Now we're in it.
So Coffin Joe wakes up from his nightmare and then he has to talk himself back into atheism and wickedness, and Laura is trying to help. She's like, no, don't worry about it. There is no God, there is no Hell. Everything's fine. Do more murders.
Yeah, but he's clearly shaken at this point.
Oh and then like in the next scene, Laura and Coffin Joe find out they're gonna have a baby, and then basically in the next scene after that, she's having the baby. So some time passes, I guess.
Yeah, I was very confused at this point and is like, what has it been months and months? I thought it was like the next day.
Yeah. But before that, there's there's another subplot, which is the Colonel busts Trunkador out of prison, and then the Colonel and Trunkador hire a bunch of I don't know, henchman. I was gonna say assassins, but I think they're not trying to kill him. They hire some tough guys to go capture a coffin Joe and bring him back to the colonel.
Oh my goodness.
This this is this is where things get really interesting, because we definitely get a lot of action at this point, and some of it is very convincing and cool. There's also the sequence where they initially come for Joe and you know, Coffin Joe can hold his own in a fight against one, two, three, maybe like four guys tops, but five or six is clearly too many, and he tries to like Spider Man, up a wall to escape, but like falls back down and I'm not sure if that was intended at the door not uh, but I got to chuckle out of it because yeah, oh there's no escape, Joe. You've got to you've got to fight or or Flee. Flee's not working, and again he's no match for this many hired dunes.
He says to himself, I can't die. I must protect my son from inferior people. Yeah, so the henchman beat him up. I like, how there's one guy they hired that's just the head butt guy. All he does is head butt.
Yeah. He like.
They get Joe down and then he's like bam, head butt knocks him out.
So they put coffin Joe in a wagon to take him to the colonel. But then he pops up and he attacks, and he's got blades on his shoes, he's got secret weapons all over the place.
Oh, this is so good. This this reminded me a little bit of Riddick. It's a little bit of Ridtick in all this, because there's a scene where Ridic is in the back of a cart and chronicles of Riddic and manages to kill some folks. But it also reminds me a little bit of Hannibal Lecter where, especially in the book and film adaptation of Hannibal, where you know, oh, this guy's super dangerous, but are a more resourceful and powerful entity has hired a bunch of guys to capture him. But it's very difficult to keep a handle on Hannibal Lecter. It's very difficult to keep Coffin Joe contained.
And you know.
Yeah, so we get that scene where he has secret secreted razor blades like straight razors and his I don't know it, his back straps or something, and he swides them into his boot and then does this neat like scissor leg clamp kill.
On one of the goons. It's it's pretty great. I love this sequence.
He kills another one of the goons with an axe that he finds in a boat and then just like chops him in the head. And then he gets the world's fakest axe. Yes, it looks like he's made out of paper mache, so it's not as convincing as the straight raizers. Then he gets the other guys. He lures them into a trap in the swamp where they like sink in quicksand and they're begging for mercy and he's like, ah, I have defeated you. You are inferior. And again the swamp set is great.
Yeah, the hired goons are swallowed up by the swamp.
It's great, and yeah, the more I think about it, the more your comparison to Hannibal Lecter. I think I said it earlier, but you off, Mike, you had said Hannibal Lecter to me before I made that connection. I think that is really apt in many ways, except that Coffin Joe does not have Hannibal Lecter's poetic brevity of comment. You know, it's like Hannibal Lecter. But if Hannibal Lecter talked like an iin Rand protagonist.
I think this is one of the shortcomings of Hannibal Electors. Hannibal Lecter did not preach enough, and he also never traveled to Hell, Like, how did that never happen? I mean, plenty of other pop culture fictional characters have had their own Inferno moments, but not Hannibal Lecter. Come on, make it happen.
All right. Well, we're in the final final stretch of the film, so the guilty consciences really just start popping up all over the place. Marcie, I remember her. She has a guilty conscience now, and she because of her feelings of guilt, she drinks poison and then she dies. But as she's dying, she confesses to everyone that she witnessed Coffin Joe do all the murders. He did it, He's guilty. So this leads the colonel to form an angry mob to go kill Coffin Joe in revenge.
I mean, the whole time they know Coffin Joe did this. Deep down, I don't understand why this is such a revelation. Coffin Joe is a murder our.
Coffin Joe, not Zee.
And then there is a very sad scene where Laura is about to give birth and the doctor is there, but Laura and their child die in childbirth, and Coffin Joe is moved, despite the fact that he shouldn't feel love or feel sympathy or pity for anyone. In fact, it turns out that he can't accept Laura's death, and he is. He is driven into a kind of a fit of despondency, and he first shows denial like Laura can't be dead. She's you know, she's she's my perfect match. We will, we will create the superior man. And then he clearly is feeling sadness and he takes Laura's body and carries her to the graveyard, and then the real guilt visions begin, one of the women that he murdered shows up wrapped in a snake, telling him that she will possess his corpse, as she was the same one saying this in hell and the one who cursed him.
Oh yeah, Remember part of the curse was that he would never have a sign, and so this whole situation is the culmination of the curse too.
So he starts yelling at the sky, which is storming. He says, come all spirits, come untrue things, comes spirits. If you exist and change my mind.
Yes does God, If you exist, you will fight me now fisticuffs right here in the storm.
So then God strikes a tree with lightning, and a burning branch of the tree falls off on top of Coffin Joe and like pins into the ground, and he literally says it was just a coincidence.
Oh it's so good.
He says, I am still superior. And a priest shows up with the Bible and a crucifix to convert Coffin Joe. He's like, you know what you can you can come accept Jesus. It's gonna be okay. Coffin Joe says, I am not weak. God does not exist, and he's you know, gnashing his teeth and foaming at the mouth, screaming at the sky. The mob arrives at the graveyard slash swamp. I don't know why you'd put the graveyard in the swamp, but apparently they did.
Yeah.
The mob shoots Coffin Joe and at the last he's mortally wounded. He's sinking into the slime, into the quicksand of the swamp. The skeletons of his victims start rising to the surface, and he literally yelps. He goes oh. And then and at the last he does come around. He repents. He says God, God is the Truth across a symbol of the sun, and church music starts playing. There's like church organ music. This totally sounds like none of the other music in the movie, and the priest crosses himself and Bruno looks on, seeming kind of sad, and then we get a readout on the screen that says, man, we'll only find truth when he searches for truth. And that's the end.
So it all paid off, I guess sort of.
So, but does Coffin Joe get to go to Heaven?
I mean, I hope he would get to go to purgatory first. I would hope he would get the full divine comedy here.
Ah.
Yes, yes, we'd get a lot of descriptions of which direction the sun was setting as he goes around the mountain.
Yeah.
But okay, so we get the whole thing. We get all of the the depraved, evil, sinful, murderous behavior, but then we also get the redemption arc at the end, though it's very it's very abrupt, like he it's literally just the last thing he says right as he's sinking into the water. We don't get to see him like like pivot and do anything kind or you know, like act out his new redemption at all. It's just like that. It is the razor's edge deathbed confession. Sorry, death swamp confession.
Yeah, death swamp confession.
I've seen some criticism of this as being as maybe it felt, you know, too rushed or forced. I've read also that Brazilian sensors at the time only permitted, you know, all of this film's excess if it had an ending like this. And I'm not a completist by any stretch. On his various interviews and comments, but I've read that Maren's later said that he didn't like the ending and maybe felt forced to do it, But you know, at the same time, I think we have to, you know, think about the various influences and the idea of like Brazilian religious morality plays essentially being an influence on the film as well. And I don't know for for my taste, I didn't feel like the ending was felt completely rushed or completely tacked on. I mean it it it arrives, you know, swifter than a lot of the major movements in the plot do. But I mean it's I'm not sure how else this could have gone, Like what's what else could happen? Either you get the happy ending where the perfect baby is born. That can't happen. This is a hard exploitation movie. Also, it's not very climactic. If Coffin Joe challenges God to a fight and just God doesn't show up, and then Coffin Joe declares himself the winner and goes off to find another bride, like you need something to go down, and this seems like a fitting way to end it.
I agree, I really can't think of another way this could have gone. But yeah, I don't know, Maybe my imagination is limited. Maybe I should be more of an outside the box thinker like Coffin Joe, and then I could imagine the curtain. No, I can see the other ending. So the mob shows up to get Coffin Joe for his crimes, and then he just turns it around on them again like he did earlier. He convinces them that it was good for him to do the crimes, and they are all stupid for criticizing him, and they all go home. They hang their heads in shame, and they're like, Wow, coffin Joe really is superior to all of us.
Or I think you alluded to this earlier, or the idea that Coffin Joe becomes God or I don't know, becomes the Pope or something like that would be that would be fitting as well. Actually kind of kind of reminiscent of a Chronicles iritic, you know, it's like, oh, I became the thing I oppose, Like that would be a fitting downer ending for Coffin Joe.
I think Coffin Joe becomes the Lord Marshall of the Necromonger Empire.
Yeah, yeah, he's like darn it, I love this room in this throne. But this whole ideology is completely repellent to me.
Okay, this does, though want to make me I have listical desire here to make a list of the best the best preachy hectoring villains from movies who give long lectures and sermons explaining why they're right and everyone else is wrong.
Hmmm, Oh, that would be an interesting exercise because on one level, some of the memorable preachy villains, you know, they might not have actually preached that much. It's just kind of like our memory of effective storytelling is sometimes you actually show a little bit and we imagine the rest. That's not the case with this film.
But that is a good point storytelling tip out there. I think often you have to show fewer examples of something in the story to establish the impression of a pattern than you would think.
Yeah, but yeah, this is this is a really fun one. I really enjoyed this night. I'll Possess your Corpse. It's so many, so many additional details we didn't even get into. Like I love how when coffin Joe is dragged a hell, he's like dragged face first.
Through the ground.
Like there are moments like that where it seems like they could have done the easier thing and gone with just sort of the feet first drag. But but no, Maren's i' meant just a guess and it was like it was all in. It's like, nope, drag me face first. I'm the director, gosh darn it, and we want it to look physical. This needs to it needs to be believable, face first into the dirt.
Let's do it.
Okay, this moment, I possess no more insights about this night. I'll possess your corpse.
All right, Well that's that's very uncoffin of you, Joe, but but I'll accept it. But hey, that doesn't mean we can't continue to talk about Coffin Joe on listener mail in the future. So hey, if you have thoughts about this night, I'll possess your corpse or at midnight, I'll take your soul or any other I'd love to hear more about some of these other Coffin Joe films because it took. One of the reasons it took so long to get around to doing one of these is I was like, well, there are a lot of coffin Joe related films, which ones are even acceptable for us to talk about, And you know, there are some of these, I just I'm not sure you can really access right now, so I'd love to hear more about them. If if we have any Coffin Joe experts out there, write in, we would love to hear from you. If you want to check out the other movies we've selected for Weird House Cinema in the past, you can go to a couple of places. I blog about these episodes at immutamusic dot com, but also if you go to letterbox dot com that's L E T T E R B O x D dot com, you can find us there. Our username is weird House. We have a list of all the movies we've covered over the years, and sometimes you get a peek ahead at what's next. A reminder that we're primarily a science podcast, the real science, not the Coffin Joe science, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, listener Mail on Monday's short form Artifact or Monster Fact on Wednesdays, and then on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Huge thanks to our excellent audio producer, JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello. You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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