« Previous Post | Main | Next Post »

DEMONS AND WONDERS (1987) - Coffin Joe!

Filed under: Imported

For those not familiar with the films of Brazil's Jose Mojica Marins and the character he plays in them, Ze do Caixao ("Joseph of the Coffins" aka Coffin Joe), I have an introductory piece in an April blog entry-- you can find it here (scroll down).

This short film (49 minutes) is Mojica's cracked autobiography mixed with a big dose of excuses for all the things that went wrong in his life. The story begins with the flush of success from his first horror film, At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul (which is a genuine masterpiece of cheap scary thrills and is remarkably undated) and then recreates his long, confusing fall. He's arrested for a shady film financing deal, which he claims he had no part of, and is publicly humiliated. When he's prevented from making films, he turns to the stage, only to fall and wreck his back right before opening night. Then his father dies, he goes bankrupt, has a stroke . . . in other words, shit happens.

Because he probably couldn't afford in-sync sound, the entire drama is played out in pantomime by Joe and the rest of his cast, which includes his mother, his girlfriend, and a strange-faced hulk of a bodyguard actually named Satan. So as his company of amateurs go through their histrionics, Joe does a voiceover-of-death narration, explaining how evil his enemies were and what they did to Brazilian cinema. In between these poverty-row recreations of his bad breaks are many newspaper headlines from his past, and they're an unexpected treat-- my favorite is the one pertaining to Joe's unorthodox acting auditions: EAT ROACHES AND LICK SKULLS TO GET ROLE IN MOVIE!

The funniest thing about the film is all the stolen music that makes up the soundtrack. Scenes of him at work are accompanied by John Barry's 007 theme, he's arrested to the opening of West Side Story, goes broke with help from Pink Floyd's "Time" and muses over the meaning of it all with the theme from The Summer of '42 in the background as played by Zamfir. (My favorite is a joke that probably didn't translate into Joe's native Portuguese-- when he's shown teaching acting to a roomful of dumb-looking "disciples", as he calls them, the music choice is Lalo Schifrin's theme for Mission: Impossible.)

For an overview of the best of Mojica's films, there's a good website that, among other things, includes the first major article I remember seeing on old Joe, from Michael Weldon's indispensible Psychotronic Magazine. The article also includes a brief interview with Marins.

Posted by Steve Monaco at May 27, 2003 6:05 PM

« The Monday Movie Quiz #5 | Main | 100 years ago, a ski-nosed asshole was born »