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"To all a horrible night," the birth of Brazilian horror as a direct act of blasphemy toward pious cinema and country alike. José Mojica Marins opens with a gnomic soliloquy, Zé do Caixão is born on the spot with Wellesian beard, cape, top hat and unclipped claws. The demonic reprobate is a grave-digger and a grave-defiler, presiding over the superstitious townsfolk and doing a spit-take when told there's no meat allowed on Good Friday. "Today I feast on flesh, even if it's human flesh!" (He chortlingly tears into a leg of lamb while a solemn procession marches outside his window.) Nothing matters but "the continuity of blood," thus the fate of the barren wife (Valéria Vasquez), bound and gagged with a tarantula on her decolletage. "Like a rebellion. But against what?" Rules, symbols, belief itself. When his friend (Nivaldo Lima) counters with an ode to God and virtue, the protagonist blithely reaches for a bludgeoning fire poker and afterwards helps himself to his fiancée (Magda Mei). The razzing bully might be a stand-in for the newly-installed military dictatorship, except that Mojica Marins perversely envisions "Coffin Joe" as a slash-and-burn liberator, a De Sadean "free man" terrorizing the backward devout with his ecstatic cruelty. A gloating close-up makes the maiden's mauled mouth as bizarrely erotic as Barbara Steele's punctured visage in Bava's La Maschera del Demonio, a note from Renoir's Partie de Campagne is adduced in the midst of her violation as her hand clenches around a parakeet. Shrines are casually trampled, the crown of thorns makes a handy weapon in a tavern scuffle. "Spirits! Which of you will take my soul?" The comeuppance is to be at long last acquainted with fear, the celluloid itself is scratched for the marvelous infernal descent. Carey's The World's Greatest Sinner is closely related. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |