Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. Rewind. This is Rob
Speaker 1: Lamb and today we're going to rerun our episode on
Speaker 1: the Weird Wild nineteen sixty seven Brazilian horror film. This night,
Speaker 1: I'll Possess your corpse. Yes, this is a Coffin Joe film.
Speaker 1: This one is a lot of fun. This is a
Speaker 1: very fun episode to put together. And I don't remember
Speaker 1: if this release was out yet when we recorded this episode,
Speaker 1: but I do want to drive home that if you
Speaker 1: want to see Coffin Joe films, including this one, you
Speaker 1: need to go and check out Eero Videos Inside the
Speaker 1: Mind of Coffin Joe Limited Edition Blu Ray. It is
Speaker 1: a fabulous box set that's loaded with like all the
Speaker 1: Coffin Joe films and posters and all sorts of fun stuff.
Speaker 1: And they also have these video drome here in Atlanta.
Speaker 1: If you're local or visiting Atlanta and you know, want
Speaker 1: to go rent some Blue Red g this is the
Speaker 1: release to focus on for sure. All right, without further ado,
Speaker 1: let's jump right into the episode.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.
Speaker 3: And this is Joe McCormick. And today on Weird House Cinema,
Speaker 3: we're going to be talking about This Night I'll Possess
Speaker 3: Your Corpse, a movie that the title might lead you
Speaker 3: to believe is a Shallo film, but no, this is
Speaker 3: a not an Italian film. This is a Brazilian horror
Speaker 3: movie from nineteen sixty seven and one that has been
Speaker 3: tenaciously requested by listeners, at least one listener in particular.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this one should make Susan happy, but we have
Speaker 1: some other listeners reach out as well. So today mark's
Speaker 1: our first entry into the world of Brazilian cinema. Is
Speaker 1: also going to be another one of these situations where
Speaker 1: we skip the first film in a series and go
Speaker 1: straight to the sequel, you know, because you know, sometimes
Speaker 1: a sequel is a soul as cash grab, but other
Speaker 1: times it gives filmmakers the chance to run with the
Speaker 1: concepts from the first film in a different and grander direction.
Speaker 1: And I think that's what you see in This Night
Speaker 1: I'll Possess Your Corpse, which you can also think of.
Speaker 1: I guess its coffin Joe.
Speaker 3: Too, the Revenge. Now I haven't seen the first Coffin
Speaker 3: Joe movie. But I think the beginning of this movie
Speaker 3: sort of sets up. It's like, hey, what happened at
Speaker 3: the previous At the end of the previous film was
Speaker 3: this our wicked protagonist got his face chopped to pieces
Speaker 3: by ghosts. But it turns out he was not dead.
Speaker 3: You may have been led to believe he died in
Speaker 3: the last movie, do Over, do Over. He's not dead.
Speaker 3: He's fine.
Speaker 1: Yes, the comeuppance has been canceled at the beginning of
Speaker 1: this film and kind of get a do over on
Speaker 1: the whole thing. So, yeah, this is a sixty seven film,
Speaker 1: a sequel to nineteen sixty threes at Midnight. I'll take
Speaker 1: your Soul. I've seen it. Alleged to this was the
Speaker 1: first Brazilian produced horror film and the movie that introduced
Speaker 1: the world to the murderous, preachy weirdo z Ducai Show,
Speaker 1: better known among English speaking filmgoers as Coffin Joe.
Speaker 3: Now, as I said, I was totally unfamiliar with Coffin Joe.
Speaker 3: This is my first Coffin Joe movie. We're doing it
Speaker 3: because of persistent listener requests. But apparently this is not
Speaker 3: an obscurer character Coffin Joe is like an icon of
Speaker 3: Brazilian horror cinema. He's like a well recognized character that
Speaker 3: I have seen, compared to characters like Freddy Krueger.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, he's a big deal I'm to understand in
Speaker 1: Brazilian horror cinema, and also achieved kind of a status
Speaker 1: as a Brazilian pop culture figure for a long time
Speaker 1: as well. Now we'll get into his characteristics more in
Speaker 1: a bit, but just the key visual attributes of Coffin Joe.
Speaker 1: This might ring a bell with people out there. Maybe
Speaker 1: you haven't seen these movies, but you've seen poster Argors stills.
Speaker 1: But you have a top hat, a Dracula cape. You
Speaker 1: have long, twisty fingernails, now, not like you know Freddy
Speaker 1: Krueger nails, but like Guinness Book of World Record nails, Blackbeard,
Speaker 1: and a monobrow.
Speaker 3: I suppose this is coincidence. But apart from the monobrow,
Speaker 3: I found a picture of the young James Randy where
Speaker 3: he looks almost exactly like Coffin Joe.
Speaker 1: Now, to be clear, the fingernails are not present in
Speaker 1: this photograph.
Speaker 3: That's true, and the fingernails are a key part of
Speaker 3: his look. In fact, in many of his I think
Speaker 3: there are moments in the film that are trying to
Speaker 3: frame him for a kind of iconic close up that
Speaker 3: are you know, his face is right in the middle
Speaker 3: of the picture, but you can see he's just like
Speaker 3: working his fingers in on the side of the frame
Speaker 3: just so you can see that he does still have
Speaker 3: the long nails.
Speaker 1: Yes, So who is Coffin Joe. Well, we're gonna spend
Speaker 1: a lot of time talking about this, because he certainly
Speaker 1: spends a lot of time talking about this in the
Speaker 1: big Sure, but you could say what he's a rebellious
Speaker 1: atheist and sadistic narcissist presented as a gleefully horrific caricature
Speaker 1: that's part TV horror host, part old timey villain. But
Speaker 1: there are also some shades of some of some latter
Speaker 1: day horror villains in there as well. Like you could
Speaker 1: compare him to what would come much later and say
Speaker 1: the Saw franchise or in the Hannibal Lecter movies.
Speaker 3: I would say Coffin Joe is a combination of Ivan Karmazov, Dracula,
Speaker 3: Hannibal Lecter, and The Joker, but also with a little
Speaker 3: bit of like Facebook atheist from the year two thousand
Speaker 3: and nine, except with less liberal politics and more kind
Speaker 3: of like a real fondness for superiority. So you gotta
Speaker 3: get an inn Ran dangle in there too.
Speaker 1: I think, yeah, yeah, I think that's a good comparison.
Speaker 1: But of course a lot of these are sort of
Speaker 1: outside in these are like international influences on a Brazilian character,
Speaker 1: but apparently also there some like uniquely Brazilian elements to
Speaker 1: the character as well. I was reading a chapter in
Speaker 1: the book Stars and Stardom in Brazilian Cinema. This particular
Speaker 1: chapter dealing with Coffin Joe, was by Laura Lo Garcio Canepa,
Speaker 1: and this author points out that the character also incorporates
Speaker 1: aspects of Brazilian folklore into the role, and we'll touch
Speaker 1: on a specific example of that in a minute. So
Speaker 1: you end up with something that, yes, is drawing from
Speaker 1: films that are coming from international markets into Brazil, but
Speaker 1: also there is something distinctly Brazilian about the character, and
Speaker 1: I think that that's something that added to its popularity.
Speaker 3: Hmm. Okay.
Speaker 1: So Kanepa points out that in addition to strong vibes
Speaker 1: of Dracula, Satyrs and the Great God Pan. That also
Speaker 1: becomes obvious because he does have kind of a goatish
Speaker 1: look to him, to him, to himself, you know, he
Speaker 1: kind of a delicious trickster.
Speaker 3: Yes. In fact, there is one scene that seems intentionally
Speaker 3: to highlight his sort of goat like appearance. And the
Speaker 3: actor who created and plays this character does naturally have
Speaker 3: a little bit of a little bit of a goaty face,
Speaker 3: but they really play into it in a scene where
Speaker 3: he has later given visions of Hell and sees himself
Speaker 3: as the devil, and the devil version of him is
Speaker 3: way goadier than he is normally.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and this is where Kneppa points out something that
Speaker 1: that seems key that the character also channels a recurrent
Speaker 1: halfro Brazilian religious figure known as ex Su, a kind
Speaker 1: of narcissistic, hedonistic Bacchus type figure.
Speaker 3: Okay, well, I can see that element, but that might
Speaker 3: lead you to believe that Coffin Joe is more about
Speaker 3: fun than he is, that he's like, you know, just
Speaker 3: into the pleasures of the flesh and pure, you know,
Speaker 3: hedonistic amoral desires and all that. That's not really Coffin
Speaker 3: Joe's vibe In fact, Coffin Joe is in some cases
Speaker 3: extremely tedious and preaching. He is almost the mirror opposite
Speaker 3: of like the preacher whose sermon goes on way too
Speaker 3: long in the church, except he's outside the church talking
Speaker 3: about how everybody inside is stupid.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he clearly sees himself not only as an intellectual,
Speaker 1: but the intellectual, certainly at least in this town that
Speaker 1: we see. All the action take place in, Okay. But
Speaker 1: before we go any further here, previously on a Coffin Joe.
Speaker 1: In the first film, local Undertaker. Coffin Joe spends his
Speaker 1: time lambasting people for how stupid they are for existing
Speaker 1: and believing in God and stuff, so he maims and
Speaker 1: kills people. He expounds a kind of eugenics flavored philosophy
Speaker 1: in which he can achieve immortality by having a perfect son,
Speaker 1: and therefore well he needs the perfect woman. He runs
Speaker 1: a foul of the local villager, supernatural powers end up
Speaker 1: getting involved, and he winds up dead and possibly blind.
Speaker 1: It's a black and white film, and, as Michael Weldon
Speaker 1: pointed out in the Psychotronic Video Guide to Film, outside
Speaker 1: of seeing like an automobile in the background, at some point,
Speaker 1: the whole picture could have been set in a prior century,
Speaker 1: and you still get a strong sense of that in
Speaker 1: this film as well.
Speaker 3: That's a good point. Yeah, there are a couple of things,
Speaker 3: like you see motorized vehicles, but for the most part
Speaker 3: the movie could be set entirely in like the nineteenth century.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So this movie picks up right where the last
Speaker 1: one left off and even includes scenes from that finale
Speaker 1: and throws you right back into coffin Joe's quest to
Speaker 1: find the perfect woman so he can have a perfect
Speaker 1: son and live forever through that sun or something. The
Speaker 1: great thing about it is, if you have any questions,
Speaker 1: don't worry. Z is going to tell you all about
Speaker 1: it during the movie's one hundred and nine minute runtime.
Speaker 3: Now, what I'm about to say might sound counterintuitive, but
Speaker 3: one of my favorite things about this movie was how
Speaker 3: tedious it was. That Like, there are parts where I
Speaker 3: was unable to contain laughter at his just sermonizing going
Speaker 3: on and on. So another way I'll put it is
Speaker 3: that This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse displays a filmmaking
Speaker 3: sensibility of thoroughness and abundance. So, first of all, it's
Speaker 3: like why express an idea once when you could say
Speaker 3: the same thing about twelve different ways and all in
Speaker 3: a row. And then the other thing is why show
Speaker 3: something just once when you could show it twenty seven times?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, they clearly shot a lot of footage
Speaker 1: of Tarantula's crawling around on ladies and laningerie, so why
Speaker 1: not just use absolutely all of the footage?
Speaker 3: You know, Coffin Joe clearly sees himself as a Nietzchean superman,
Speaker 3: and there are lots of different ways of interpreting the
Speaker 3: idea of the Nietzschean superman. One is that it is
Speaker 3: the ultimate personal embodiment of affirmation and excess. You know,
Speaker 3: it's just like the never ending everything and ye always,
Speaker 3: and that's kind of what the filmmaking sensibility is here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a good point, all right. My elevator pitch
Speaker 1: for the movie is simple. Coffin Joe is back and
Speaker 1: he's ready to become a dad, nay world's best dad.
Speaker 3: Now, I haven't watched the trailer here, I'm to understand
Speaker 3: that there's not much good audio content. It's just like
Speaker 3: really excessive screaming.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so we're only going to play just a very
Speaker 1: brief clip of it, because it is mostly screaming, and
Speaker 1: i'd also i'd also suggest not watching the trailer if
Speaker 1: you think you're gonna watch the film, just because this
Speaker 1: film does have some surprises in it, and I feel
Speaker 1: like you're better off going into it a little cold,
Speaker 1: all right. That again, I'm sure that gives you no
Speaker 1: real indication of what's in store, except that there will
Speaker 1: be things to be screamed about. Now, if you want
Speaker 1: to watch this film, Unfortunately, at the moment, I don't
Speaker 1: think it's currently streaming anywhere as so far as I
Speaker 1: can tell, we rented it from Atlanta's own video drome Phantoma,
Speaker 1: and more recently, Synapse Films has put the first three
Speaker 1: Coffin Joe films out on DVD. I think the third one,
Speaker 1: which occurs much later, is also available in Blu Ray,
Speaker 1: and you can get them all, or at least you
Speaker 1: could get them all in a DVD set that was
Speaker 1: shaped like a coffin, but this seems to be your
Speaker 1: only way to watch them. This is the sort of film,
Speaker 1: though you can definitely watch it on DVD. I don't
Speaker 1: think you're missing out on much in terms of quality here.
Speaker 1: Oh but wait, I have a post production note to
Speaker 1: add here. We recorded this episode earlier in the week,
Speaker 1: but today, this morning, the morning of our publication date Friday,
Speaker 1: August twenty fifth, Aero Video has announced that they're putting
Speaker 1: out a gigantic box set Inside the Mind of Coffin Joe.
Speaker 1: This is like a limited edition Blu ray box set,
Speaker 1: and it is going to contain let's see, at midnight,
Speaker 1: I'll take your soul. This night, I'll possess your corpse.
Speaker 1: The movie we're talking about here today, The Awakening of
Speaker 1: the Beast, the end of Man, the strange world of
Speaker 1: Coffin Joe when the Gods fall asleep, the strange hostel
Speaker 1: of naked pleasures, hellish flesh, and hallucinations of a deranged mind.
Speaker 1: So oh wait, and Embodiment of Evil. Six discs, all
Speaker 1: the Coffin Joe, all the z you could possibly ask for.
Speaker 1: So go look that up. I think you can. A
Speaker 1: little availability will be different for pre orders depending on
Speaker 1: where you're listening to the show.
Speaker 3: Rob I think he went much deeper into the context
Speaker 3: here than I did. But from what I understand, there
Speaker 3: are like there are three main chronology Coffin Joe films,
Speaker 3: and this is the second one of those. But also
Speaker 3: Coffin Joe just appears as a free floating recurring character
Speaker 3: in lots of other movies, Am I right?
Speaker 1: Yes, mostly films by the same director, writer, and actor here,
Speaker 1: and that's Jose Mojica Marens, who again here play plays
Speaker 1: Coffin Joe plays this character that is known in the
Speaker 1: original Portuguese Ze Ducai show. But he also was the director,
Speaker 1: the writer, and the producer who lived nineteen thirty six
Speaker 1: through twenty twenty. He was the son of a cinema
Speaker 1: manager on the outskirts of Salpaulu, and he grew up
Speaker 1: with a passion for film and began making his own
Speaker 1: short films at a young age with a nine point
Speaker 1: five milimeter camera that his parents had given him. You know,
Speaker 1: we see this similar story with a lot of film
Speaker 1: fans turned filmmakers. He created his own film studio at
Speaker 1: age eighteen, and his first film was a violent western
Speaker 1: called Adventurer's Fate, which did pretty well apparently in the
Speaker 1: big city, but it really it garnered some criticism because
Speaker 1: it was pretty violent, But then it did quite well
Speaker 1: as a traveling special screening in the outlying districts, with
Speaker 1: its female star Tonya Elektra performing a strip tease as
Speaker 1: part of the show and Maren serving as master of ceremonies.
Speaker 3: Oh, I can totally see him as a master of ceremonies,
Speaker 3: with the top had on the microphone being like, then
Speaker 3: our next act will be yes. Yes.
Speaker 1: They followed this up with a melodrama in I Believe
Speaker 1: sixty three, and it didn't perform well. So, inspired by
Speaker 1: a nightmare, the story goes, he scraped together what money
Speaker 1: he could manage to make the film that would become
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty four's at Midnight I'll Take Your Soul. I
Speaker 1: might have said earlier that it was sixty three, but
Speaker 1: sixty four is generally the accepted date for this film,
Speaker 1: so they had a shoestring budget. But it was a
Speaker 1: huge hit and ignited a horror boom in Brazil, and
Speaker 1: it had elements of horror exploitation but also a popular
Speaker 1: genre of Brazilian religious melodrama of the day, which I
Speaker 1: think is important to keep in mind in understanding some
Speaker 1: twists and turns in the plot. And all of this
Speaker 1: also laid the groundwork to cement Coffin Joe as a
Speaker 1: Brazilian media icon, so he soon began to appear in
Speaker 1: the media on TV, etc. In character as Coffin Joe.
Speaker 3: So I don't know, but I would guess based on
Speaker 3: other genres I am familiar with that the Brazilian religious
Speaker 3: melodrama would have some kind of common redemption arc, Like
Speaker 3: you'd have a sinful character who does a bunch of
Speaker 3: bad stuff and then at the end of the story
Speaker 3: they come round and repent and accept Christ.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, that's my understanding, and I think it basically
Speaker 1: matches up with all sorts of things you see, all
Speaker 1: sorts of artists, presentations and creations created beneath the Catholic
Speaker 1: Church throughout Western history, you know, where it's like I'm
Speaker 1: a painter, I really want to paint all these naked bodies. Well,
Speaker 1: make it be a Bible story and you can get
Speaker 1: away with it, you know that sort of thing. As
Speaker 1: long as it's ultimately serving the message, then will allow it.
Speaker 3: And this takes that a lot farther, because I don't
Speaker 3: know if all of these melodramas are like this, I
Speaker 3: assume not, but at least in the case of Coffin Joe,
Speaker 3: it does have that arc. But you can tell it
Speaker 3: is really relishing showing all of the sin and bad
Speaker 3: stuff along the way. So I think in a way
Speaker 3: that that is a format that is common to what's
Speaker 3: known as exploitation cinema. More broadly, the idea that you
Speaker 3: would take a film that's like, oh, it's about an
Speaker 3: important issue, like it is about the dangers of marijuana.
Speaker 3: But because it's about that, you can show these danger
Speaker 3: marijuana parties where people are taking their clothes off and
Speaker 3: engaging in sinful behavior, and so like that's the appeal
Speaker 3: to the audience, So they want to go see the
Speaker 3: racy content. But you can always say, like, no, no, no,
Speaker 3: I had to show that because it's a message film
Speaker 3: about the dangers of this drug.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. So Maren's follows this up with the Western,
Speaker 1: but then he returns to the world of Coffin Joe
Speaker 1: with this film that we're dougging by here today this night,
Speaker 1: I'll Possess your Corpse, a more ambitious swing at the
Speaker 1: same concepts. Joe wants a perfect son and he'll do
Speaker 1: all sorts of evil to carry this out, and mocks
Speaker 1: the people of the town for their supernatural beliefs, while
Speaker 1: eventually encountering the supernatural himself. And on this point Kneppa
Speaker 1: has the following to say in that chapter quote. It
Speaker 1: is worth stressing here that in Brazil, in which the
Speaker 1: supernatural has been habitually seen by large parts of the
Speaker 1: population not as a deviant element, but rather is one
Speaker 1: of the fundamental elements of excis distance, it would be
Speaker 1: difficult to create a story of great impact in which
Speaker 1: the supernatural simply represented evil. The great achievement of Mochico's creation, therefore,
Speaker 1: was the invention of a character who does not believe
Speaker 1: in the supernatural and who, as a result of this,
Speaker 1: can be terrified by its intervention.
Speaker 3: Ah okay, so he in a context where there is
Speaker 3: widespread belief in magic, you introduce this like weird dangerous element,
Speaker 3: which is a guy who is aggressively an atheist materialist,
Speaker 3: who's constantly talking about how there is no God, and
Speaker 3: then he can, after introducing all of that kind of
Speaker 3: weirdness and unpleasantness, can be terrified by images of hell
Speaker 3: that might be more commonplace to anybody else in this town.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And I think also another aspect of it too
Speaker 1: is something you see in wider horror in general, to
Speaker 1: have like that competent non believer. Yeah, eventually encounter the supernatural.
Speaker 1: Like Coffin Joe. Say what you will about him, he's
Speaker 1: very confident, he can hold up his end of a
Speaker 1: fight and so forth. So it's like when the supernatural
Speaker 1: starts kicking in and we see Coffin Joe frightened, it
Speaker 1: does have impact.
Speaker 3: It's the arc of all three of the original Indiana
Speaker 3: Jones movies at the beginning, and he doesn't believe in
Speaker 3: any of that superstitious nonsense. And then at the end
Speaker 3: of the movie he always has to do a demonstration
Speaker 3: of faith in order to defeat the evil at the end.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so we see some similar elements there. So after
Speaker 1: this film, Coffin Joe would go on to appear in
Speaker 1: multiple other films, though not a true sequel until two
Speaker 1: thousand and eights Embodiment of Evil. He appeared as a
Speaker 1: presenter in the anthology film The Strange World of Coffin
Speaker 1: Joe from sixty eight. A handful of other Maren's films
Speaker 1: involve the character in unique metafictional ways. These include nineteen
Speaker 1: seventies Awakening of the Beast. This is an LSD film
Speaker 1: where I haven't seen it, but I believe that the
Speaker 1: idea is like, there's an experiment, the test subjects are
Speaker 1: given LSD, and then they watch Coffin Joe films, you know,
Speaker 1: something like that. There's The Bloody Exorcism of Coffin Joe,
Speaker 1: in which Maren's plays himself, and then there's another film,
Speaker 1: The Strange Hostel of Naked Pleasures, which features an implied
Speaker 1: Coffin Joe in the lead role. But I don't think
Speaker 1: it's like officially Coffin Joe.
Speaker 3: Mm okay.
Speaker 1: So Coffin Joe remained a staple horror host on Brazilian
Speaker 1: TV at least into the nineties. The eighties and nineties
Speaker 1: I think were hard on him in Brazilian film in general,
Speaker 1: and he had to take on a lot of less
Speaker 1: glamorous work to get by. But he experienced more of
Speaker 1: a resurgence in the two thousands, including getting to return
Speaker 1: to the character of Coffin Joe on his own terms
Speaker 1: in two thousand and eights Embodiment of Evil.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's a weird character to end up having
Speaker 3: this more broad cultural footprint, kind of in the way
Speaker 3: that a character like Freddy Krueger would you know that
Speaker 3: Freddy Krueger wasn't He started off as this like gross,
Speaker 3: sadisticler in this first movie. But then the movies got
Speaker 3: sequels and became so popular that he's doing commercials for
Speaker 3: breakfast cereals.
Speaker 1: Right right, And eventually, like nowadays, like children may dress
Speaker 1: as Freddy Grill. Even back in the day, kids were
Speaker 1: dressing up as Freddy Krueger for Halloween. Now you have
Speaker 1: like sexy Freddy Krueger outfits. I wonder if you have
Speaker 1: sexy Coffin Joe outfits. Maybe I got it one done.
Speaker 3: But even so, like given that broader cultural footprint and
Speaker 3: the fact that Freddy Krueger is now just a totally defanged,
Speaker 3: like funny figure. Oh he's just you recognize what he
Speaker 3: looks like. You know, you remember him from commercials on
Speaker 3: TV when you were a kid. If you go back
Speaker 3: and watch the first movie, it's like, oh my god,
Speaker 3: it's like shocking, how how like gross and evil and
Speaker 3: nasty he is?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I think you have to go back to
Speaker 1: that original one, the original Nightmare and Elm Street to
Speaker 1: get that sense of it. Also, the remake, I think
Speaker 1: takes a good swing at trying to recapture that.
Speaker 3: And so Anyway, I wonder if there's the same thing
Speaker 3: there's a similar thing with coffin Joe, because I mean,
Speaker 3: he is really like gross and evil in these films,
Speaker 3: or at least in the one we just watched.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Another thing that I think is interesting is so he's
Speaker 3: presented as a character who sees himself as the Nietzschean superman,
Speaker 3: Like he transcends petty morality, he transcends the illusions of
Speaker 3: other worldly rewards and punishments in order to forge an
Speaker 3: affirmative humanity on the strength of his unstoppable will you know,
Speaker 3: He's just like, I am the new thing, I Am
Speaker 3: the new Man. But I think he kind of fails
Speaker 3: at the Nietzschean ideal because ultimately he is a really
Speaker 3: resentful whiner. He is complaining all the time about stuff
Speaker 3: he doesn't like, religion, superstition, weakness, morality, dramas. He doesn't
Speaker 3: like dramas.
Speaker 1: And it creates drama everywhere he goes. He walks into
Speaker 1: a room, it's like instant drama. But he hates drama.
Speaker 3: He is the pope of dramas. But also when other
Speaker 3: people are having dramas dramas, but it really gets him down.
Speaker 3: And I think if he were truly the uberminch that
Speaker 3: he imagines himself to be, he would not be complaining
Speaker 3: so much. He would just achieve the immortality of blood,
Speaker 3: kill God already, get it done, and reshape the world
Speaker 3: in the image of his genius.
Speaker 1: He does not do it, and the plan really stays
Speaker 1: in like phase one for I think most of both
Speaker 1: of the first films. I presume it probably stays in
Speaker 1: phase one in the third film as well well.
Speaker 3: Also, Yeah, so his plan is what he calls the
Speaker 3: immortality of blood. So he has a specialized name for
Speaker 3: it that I guess sounds kind of cool. But ultimately
Speaker 3: his goal is not that outside the box a revolutionary.
Speaker 3: What he wants is to have a son with the
Speaker 3: perfect woman. How outside the box is that? That seems
Speaker 3: like something other characters have tried before, except that he
Speaker 3: is more of a nasty, violent, immoral creep in trying
Speaker 3: to achieve this goal.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so, a lot of what, especially in the latter
Speaker 1: portions of the film, there's a lot of stuff that
Speaker 1: feels like just a horror twist on what a lot
Speaker 1: of fathers feel like. At one point, he's like, I
Speaker 1: cannot die because my son will need me, and it's like, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I think a lot of people feel that
Speaker 1: way about their responsibilities in life, just without all the
Speaker 1: implied mustache twirling. Though.
Speaker 3: Well, we can explore this dynamic later, but I think
Speaker 3: when he feels that, that's supposed to reveal his hypocrisy,
Speaker 3: because you know, that's that's love, which we know from
Speaker 3: earlier scenes he believes to be a form of weakness.
Speaker 1: You know. It also strikes me that z is kind
Speaker 1: of the anti necromunger here. You know, while while both
Speaker 1: Coffin Joe and the Necromongers dig skulls and stuff, the
Speaker 1: necromongers are deep into sci fi occultism and they consider
Speaker 1: procreation the absolute worst, while Coffin Joe despises belief in
Speaker 1: the occult and believes that babies are literally all that matters.
Speaker 3: I actually ended up making a list of Coffin Joe's
Speaker 3: likes and dislikes that we discover throughout the movie. Do
Speaker 3: you want to do that here?
Speaker 1: Oh? Yeah, let's have it. Let's get the full dating
Speaker 1: profile for coffin Joe for any any ladies out there
Speaker 1: that are interested.
Speaker 3: Okay, what coffin Joe does like a superior people, though
Speaker 3: that's primarily just himself. Superior people, strength, courage, liberation, sex, atheism,
Speaker 3: the innocence of children, procreation, venomous animals, owning people with logic, grapes,
Speaker 3: quote science. I think his understanding of what that means
Speaker 3: is a little off the mark. And he really likes instinct.
Speaker 3: He talks repeatedly about how instinct is pure compared to
Speaker 3: I think religion. Okay, so that's his likes. His dislikes
Speaker 3: are superstition, god, religion. He's really not into war, hatred,
Speaker 3: and the triumph of lies. He doesn't like the idiots, Catholicism,
Speaker 3: inferior people. Oh boy, multiple times in the movie. You
Speaker 3: can hear it because it's a cognate in the languages.
Speaker 3: He's just going inferior.
Speaker 1: Oh.
Speaker 3: Morality, oh disgusting, hates morality, belief in the immortality of
Speaker 3: the soul, really does not like dying without having a
Speaker 3: son with the perfect woman to achieve the immortality of blood.
Speaker 3: He hates dramas, and he really does not like trimming
Speaker 3: his nails or people who love because they are weak.
Speaker 1: I would also add trunk Ador to the list. He's
Speaker 1: really hard on trunk of Door, doesn't like trunk of door.
Speaker 1: Trunka door is a character we'll get to in a minute,
Speaker 1: but basically a beefy muscle man who is just like it.
Speaker 1: Clearly is he's here in part so that Coffin Joe
Speaker 1: can just dunk on him.
Speaker 3: Okay, I've got a question I thought was interesting. Wonder
Speaker 3: what you think about this? What do you think is
Speaker 3: the relationship of this film to the philosophy of Coffin Joe, Like,
Speaker 3: what do you think the filmmaker's attitude to that philosophy is?
Speaker 3: Because on one hand, Coffin Joe is obviously full evil,
Speaker 3: hard evil does all kinds of unforgivable crimes. He is
Speaker 3: a murderer, rapist, kidnapper, does every awful crime. And yet
Speaker 3: there are other ways that the movie seems to go
Speaker 3: out of its way to make him sympathetic, such as
Speaker 3: these kind of treacily scenes of showing his protectiveness of children,
Speaker 3: and when he's giving sermons about how like God and
Speaker 3: the church are trash. I don't know, it seems like
Speaker 3: they're giving him a lot of room to talk, and well,
Speaker 3: a lot of what he says was funny to us.
Speaker 3: I've sense a real desire to make his case sound
Speaker 3: as eloquent as possible. So is there a part of
Speaker 3: the filmmaker that sort of likes or agrees with Coffin Joe.
Speaker 3: There's that on you know, so he does the crimes,
Speaker 3: then there's that on the other hand, But then coming
Speaker 3: back on the other side, that would be kind of
Speaker 3: weird give and that in the end we see coffin Joe,
Speaker 3: we see his ideology humiliated by supernatural intervention, and we
Speaker 3: see him repudiate his previous existence and beg for repentance.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, it is weird to try and make sense of,
Speaker 1: like the full narrative of the thing. I do think
Speaker 1: there is a sense of Coffin Joe's an expression of
Speaker 1: the soul, and that that Maren's considered him very much
Speaker 1: his alter ego. So I guess some of the ideas
Speaker 1: he's he's preaching about, or perhaps ideas that that Maren's
Speaker 1: you know, sympathize with it at least. And I think
Speaker 1: also you could throw in that like this is clearly
Speaker 1: a figure that is supposed to feel counterculture and counter norms.
Speaker 1: You know, he's the the ultimate outsider who inspires fear
Speaker 1: just by walking down the main street in town. So
Speaker 1: he's the enemy, but we're also attracted to him. You know,
Speaker 1: there's this there's this weird kind of push and pull like, yeah,
Speaker 1: how are we ultimately even as the viewer supposed to
Speaker 1: feel about Coffin Joe, and certainly like, how is the
Speaker 1: intended audience, the initial intended audience of the time supposed
Speaker 1: to to think about him like you're kind of enjoying
Speaker 1: his rebellious nature, while also at the end of the day,
Speaker 1: it's like, Okay, the universe is put back in its
Speaker 1: right place at the end of the film, but we
Speaker 1: still got to have the catharsis of seeing it.
Speaker 3: I mean, in a way, I almost wonder if it's
Speaker 3: another form of the exploitation cinema principle that's like, we
Speaker 3: want to show you some things that we think you
Speaker 3: will be interested and titillated by, but framed within a
Speaker 3: context where there's deniability that this is like no, no,
Speaker 3: but we're saying he's bad. He is fully bad.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, you absolutely can't take the exploitation out of
Speaker 1: the equation here.
Speaker 3: But I don't know the thing in the end about
Speaker 3: how Coffin Joe is a friend to all children. It
Speaker 3: just remains deeply hilarious.
Speaker 1: Yes, all right, rolling through just some of the other
Speaker 1: members of the cast and crew here. Most of the
Speaker 1: people involved here didn't do a lot else outside of
Speaker 1: this film. I've seen interviews with Maren says that you know,
Speaker 1: he worked a lot with with amateur actors and preferred
Speaker 1: to work with amateur actors because more professional actors were
Speaker 1: difficult to could be difficult to control. Let's see, we
Speaker 1: have a writer on this, al Donora di Sapporto. This
Speaker 1: was their only writing credit. We also have an actor
Speaker 1: by the name of Larciolarelli who does the voice of
Speaker 1: coffin Joe. So Maren's did not speak perfect Portuguese apparently.
Speaker 1: I don't know how much has this had to do
Speaker 1: with his family being of Spanish descent or not, But
Speaker 1: at any rate, at the end of the day, the
Speaker 1: voice of coffin Joe, even in Portuguese, is dubbed by
Speaker 1: a different actor.
Speaker 3: So that's somebody else's voice we're hearing say inferior.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, And you know this isn't out of the norm.
Speaker 1: I mean Paul Nashi films, for example, in Spain, like
Speaker 1: most of the time, we're not hearing Paul Nashi's actual voice.
Speaker 1: I think there are a few films where he does
Speaker 1: his own his own vocals as well. For the most part,
Speaker 1: he's dubbed, even in Spanish. All right. Other cast members here,
Speaker 1: Tina Worls plays Laura. This is her only acting credit.
Speaker 1: Nadia Fritz plays Marcia. This is her only acting credit.
Speaker 1: And then oh, we have Trunkador played by Antonio Fracari.
Speaker 1: This is a beefy actor and makeup artist who also
Speaker 1: was an associate producer on this film. He only has
Speaker 1: three acting and three makeup credits, all in Brazilian cinema
Speaker 1: from nineteen fifty eight through nineteen sixty seven. Great look, though,
Speaker 1: he is this bald headed muscle man with I don't
Speaker 1: know if this is natural or in ef fact I'm
Speaker 1: assuming an effect. But one of his eyes is black,
Speaker 1: like it's a black false eye or it's some sort
Speaker 1: of contact lens in there.
Speaker 3: But it's a very impressive look. And he's dressed like Sinbad.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I couldn't figure out the outfit either. He does
Speaker 1: look like he walked out of a sword and sandals picture.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't know why he's dressed like that. It
Speaker 3: looks looks like some kind of wrestling costume or something.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's very physically intimidating, which again, this makes it
Speaker 1: all the more hilarious when Coffin Joe just like beats
Speaker 1: the crap out of him in one scene, you know,
Speaker 1: run circles around him intellectually. In another scene, it's it's
Speaker 1: hilarious like he's basically Coffin Joe's punching back. All right,
Speaker 1: we have Bruno. We'll talk about Bruno in a bit
Speaker 1: played by Jose Lobo. This is their only acting credit.
Speaker 1: And then we have the score here is by Hermineo Gaminez,
Speaker 1: who lived nineteen oh five through nineteen ninety one, responsible
Speaker 1: for a number of scores including At Midnight, I'll Take
Speaker 1: Your Soul, The Strange World of Coffin Joe, and End
Speaker 1: of Man from nineteen seventy one. That's another Maren's film.
Speaker 3: All right, are we talking about the plot now?
Speaker 1: Yes, let's get into the plot.
Speaker 3: So the movie starts with Coffin Joe just talking straight
Speaker 3: into the camera. There's a plume of smoke twisting in
Speaker 3: front of his face, and he looks at you and
Speaker 3: he says, is life everything and death nothing? Or is
Speaker 3: death everything and life? Nothing makes you think I think.
Speaker 1: It's the former. I'm gonna go with the former, but
Speaker 1: I'm getting the impression he thinks maybe the latter.
Speaker 3: Maybe he does seem to be into death, though not
Speaker 3: for himself.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: It's like he loves death, but he doesn't love He
Speaker 3: doesn't want to die. He wants to be immortal, but
Speaker 3: not to believe in the immortality of the soul, which
Speaker 3: is foolish. He wants to have the immortality of blood.
Speaker 3: He'll explain more later. We'll get to that. So we
Speaker 3: get a narration at the beginning. I think there's some
Speaker 3: text displayed on the screen that says Coffin Joe, obsessed
Speaker 3: with having a son, killed many people, but he was
Speaker 3: haunted by hallucinations. And so it shows Coffin Joe ripping
Speaker 3: open a couple of caskets. I think this is the
Speaker 3: end of At Midnight, I'll take your Soul or your soul,
Speaker 3: but whatever the previous movie.
Speaker 1: Was at Midnight, I'll take your Soul as a previous
Speaker 1: And then this one is this night, I'll possess your corpse.
Speaker 3: Okay, it doesn't specify a time tonight. It could be anytime.
Speaker 3: It could be nine pm. To four am.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like the cable guy come into to fix
Speaker 1: your cable. It's just you have a window for arrival.
Speaker 3: Right sometime between nine pm and four am. I'll possess
Speaker 3: your corpse. And then they don't get there to possess
Speaker 3: it till four thirty. But anyway, Yeah, so Coffin Joe's
Speaker 3: he's pulling the lids off caskets. He reveals a couple
Speaker 3: of mutilated corpses with spiders crawling on him, and then
Speaker 3: Coffin Joe apparently something happens to him. I think he
Speaker 3: gets his face sort of chopped up by ghosts, and
Speaker 3: the townspeople come and they find him lying at the
Speaker 3: entrance to the crypt with his head all bloody and
Speaker 3: one of his eyeballs popped out. So it doesn't really
Speaker 3: look like he could come back from this, but you
Speaker 3: know what, turns out he's totally all right. And then
Speaker 3: we get the credits, and I don't know what you
Speaker 3: call the effect here, but the lettering of the credits
Speaker 3: is wildly animated. The letters are jumping and wiggling all
Speaker 3: over the place, and I actually paused it and went
Speaker 3: frame by frame to see what's happening. Here, what it
Speaker 3: looks like is that every frame of the credit sequence
Speaker 3: had the words that are being displayed sort of painted
Speaker 3: or handwritten on the frame anew and there was no
Speaker 3: stencil to keep them like lined up in between shots.
Speaker 3: So imagine just writing the same words dozens of times
Speaker 3: on many frames in a row, and every time you're
Speaker 3: just roughly eyeballing it to keep them in the same place,
Speaker 3: so they're wiggling crazily all over the screen.
Speaker 1: It's a very startling effect, especially given the fact that
Speaker 1: even in you know, weirder films, the credits are usually
Speaker 1: not that weird, and sometimes they're mandated that they can't
Speaker 1: be that weird, right, I mean, like they're just there's
Speaker 1: certain norms that are followed with opening credits and closing
Speaker 1: credits within a given time frame and cinematic tradition, and
Speaker 1: here it's just right off the bat, everything's unhinged.
Speaker 3: It seems they're they prioritize making the credit sequence look
Speaker 3: interesting over making it readable, and I respect that.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Also, the credits include shots of hands frantically reaching up
Speaker 3: from the soil, so they're clawing their way out of graves,
Speaker 3: but so coffin Joe head old, bloody, I popped out.
Speaker 3: He's taking to the hospital. Not only is he not dead,
Speaker 3: he heals up perfectly, not a scar to be seen. Also,
Speaker 3: whatever murders and crimes he did in the last movie,
Speaker 3: it's like, no, biggie. There's a really fast scene in
Speaker 3: front of a judge in a courtroom where the judge
Speaker 3: is just like, not enough evidence to convict Coffin Joe
Speaker 3: is now free to kill again. So he's lying there
Speaker 3: in a hospital bed and the doctors come and he's
Speaker 3: got bandages wrapped around his head, covering his eyes. They
Speaker 3: remove the bandages, they take him off, his sight is restored.
Speaker 3: It's perfect now. And then he just starts cackling like
Speaker 3: a maniac at the concept of light while the doctors
Speaker 3: are just standing there looking at him.
Speaker 1: This should be a red flag already, that like, I'm
Speaker 1: not sure that this guy was necessarily innocent.
Speaker 3: So he's back. He's back, Baby's he's in town. We
Speaker 3: see shots of people going about their business, you know,
Speaker 3: children playing in the streets, people are singing and dancing.
Speaker 3: Everybody's having a good time. But then they all see
Speaker 3: Coffin Joe's coming down the road and everyone flees in terror,
Speaker 3: parents grab their children and take them inside. Old women
Speaker 3: duck behind windows and slam the shutters.
Speaker 1: It's it's good, Yeah, it's it's a little bit hilarious
Speaker 1: because it's it's really hard to nail down the initial
Speaker 1: impact of Coffin Joe, because yes, he's creepy. He doesn't
Speaker 1: look completely ridiculous or anything like that, Like I don't
Speaker 1: want to imply that. Like he does look legitimately creepy,
Speaker 1: and he brings this wonderful, weird energy to every scene
Speaker 1: he's in, and yet there is something ridiculous about here,
Speaker 1: Like here he comes, he's strolling into town and everybody's
Speaker 1: running like a twenty foot monster just strolled into the village.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so Coffin Joe struts across the churchyard. He scowls
Speaker 3: at the town center, and he just says, people are
Speaker 3: allays the same, ignorant, superstitious, inferior, but they will learn
Speaker 3: the truth, even if I must make their eyes run
Speaker 3: with tears of blood. So he's not like easing into it.
Speaker 3: The moment he sees the town again, he's like, I'm
Speaker 3: going to destroy these people. He checks in at the
Speaker 3: funeral home that he operates, he looks to be very
Speaker 3: proud to be a small business owner. He's just looking
Speaker 3: around at his employees and beaming. And here we also
Speaker 3: meet one of his employees who is basically his egor.
Speaker 3: This is a man named Bruno, who they have a
Speaker 3: not super convincing looking hunchback prosthetic and some stuff on
Speaker 3: his face.
Speaker 1: Yeah, kind of like a hunchback lurch character.
Speaker 3: But coffin Joe looks out the window at a bunch
Speaker 3: of kids playing games in the street, and then he said,
Speaker 3: and this is where it gets weird. He's like, look
Speaker 3: at nature's perfect creation children. Pity they all grow up
Speaker 3: to become idiots. He says that they get lost in
Speaker 3: a labyrinth of egoism and dominated by an imaginary power,
Speaker 3: the faith in the immortality of the spirit. That's what
Speaker 3: he really doesn't like. But I guess maybe they don't
Speaker 3: have that faith yet, so they're still good, They're still
Speaker 3: awesome in his view. And he says there's only one
Speaker 3: truth in this life that is the immortality of blood.
Speaker 3: He'll explain more about that later, but Bruno is just nodding, like, yep,
Speaker 3: the labyrinth of egoism. And then there's a scene where
Speaker 3: suddenly Coffin Joe he's like looking down the road and
Speaker 3: he sees a man on a motorcycle or it might
Speaker 3: be a motor scooter, just driving straight toward a group
Speaker 3: of children who are playing in the street, and Coffin
Speaker 3: Joe yells, he's crazy, and most of the children get
Speaker 3: out of the way, but one boy just stands right
Speaker 3: there in the vehicle's path, and Coffin Joe swoops in
Speaker 3: like batman and saves the child, just like lifts him
Speaker 3: out of the street.
Speaker 1: And then the.
Speaker 3: Kid's crying there. He's like, oh no, and Coffin just says,
Speaker 3: don't cry my boy. Do you like music? And then
Speaker 3: what is with this weird he gets like this little
Speaker 3: Zippo lighter music box out. It's like a tiny metal
Speaker 3: rectangle that plays music out of some weird little window.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess this is like the iPod of the day, right,
Speaker 1: you just have this little, you know, wind up musical
Speaker 1: contraption that, yeah, generally you would see in the bottom
Speaker 1: of the music box.
Speaker 3: So once again, I think it is so odd and
Speaker 3: interesting that they're giving him these superficially heroic or sympathetic traits.
Speaker 3: It's like, what if Freddy Krueger still murdered you in
Speaker 3: your dreams, but he was also a friend to all
Speaker 3: children like Gamera.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean he has a code, right, That's
Speaker 1: that's what we're laying down here.
Speaker 3: Anyway, the driver of the scooter comes over to him
Speaker 3: and says, thank God, it's a miracle that I didn't
Speaker 3: hit that boy. You must have been sent by God
Speaker 3: to save him. And you can just see Offen Joe's
Speaker 3: eyes start twitching and he's like, stupid fanaticism, and he
Speaker 3: tells the guy a child is the most important creature
Speaker 3: in the universe, and he says, protect them, or even
Speaker 3: your God will not be able to save you from hell.
Speaker 1: Oh.
Speaker 3: And then he goes back to his funeral parlor and
Speaker 3: there's a rich heiress named Marcia who comes over. She
Speaker 3: comes over to flirt with Coffin Joe. She's like, wow,
Speaker 3: I saw what you did. You're a hero. There is
Speaker 3: no God. Talk to you later. But here the movie
Speaker 3: makes an abrupt transition. It's like, okay, it is time
Speaker 3: to do heinous crimes. So Coffin Joe says, I must
Speaker 3: now immortalize my blood, which means for him, because the
Speaker 3: spiritual afterlife does not exist, he must find the perfect
Speaker 3: heathen superwoman to bear him a son.
Speaker 1: All right, right, so not a situation of trying to
Speaker 1: create the occult power couple, but the heathen power couple.
Speaker 1: That's the quest, and then of course the heathen superbaby.
Speaker 3: So it seems like his plan is roughly shaped like this.
Speaker 3: He's going to kidnap six beautiful women who are all
Speaker 3: free thinking materialists. Oh but there's one who he sends
Speaker 3: Bruno to kidnap, and then when Bruno gets there, she's like,
Speaker 3: no need, no need for violence, no need to kidnap me.
Speaker 3: I'm all in on coffin Joe. And that one that
Speaker 3: is Marcia, who flirted with him at the funeral parlor.
Speaker 3: But once all of the victims are assembled, he's going
Speaker 3: to terrorize them by putting a bunch of tarantulas in
Speaker 3: their beds, and then if any of them get scared
Speaker 3: of the tarantulas, they're not worthy. So he's going to
Speaker 3: give them to Bruno or kill them by making them
Speaker 3: get into a pit of venomous snakes. And then if
Speaker 3: any of them don't get freaked out by the tarantulas,
Speaker 3: that means they are superior and will be appropriate to
Speaker 3: help him achieve the immortality of blood.
Speaker 1: Highly suspect logic here. Everything is hinging on whether or
Speaker 1: not these individuals are wigged out by spiders and snakes.
Speaker 3: Yes, well, it's obvious that this plan has moral defects.
Speaker 3: I think it also has logical defects, despite the fact
Speaker 3: that Coffin Joe is constantly delivering sermons about how he
Speaker 3: is superior and logical and God is bad. There's a
Speaker 3: scene at the police station of Trunkador, the wrestler guy,
Speaker 3: being falsely accused of kidnapping the women, and then the
Speaker 3: colonel comes out and he vouches for him. He's like,
Speaker 3: if Trunkador is guilty, you might as well arrest me too,
Speaker 3: and then the detective is like, well that settles it.
Speaker 3: He's innocent.
Speaker 1: Trunk of Door is off the hook. I get the
Speaker 1: impression Trunkador's job is just like professional heavy slash bodyguard.
Speaker 3: That seems to be his role here, I think so.
Speaker 3: I think he is maybe the colonel's bodyguard. There is
Speaker 3: another scene where a mob gathers in front of a
Speaker 3: guy outside the church who's saying that Coffin Joe did
Speaker 3: all the kidnappings and then the mob they get whipped
Speaker 3: up into a frenzy and they say they're going to
Speaker 3: go after him, They're going to go get him. But
Speaker 3: then coffin Joe appears and he disproves the premise of
Speaker 3: their posse with logic, And you can't help but notice that, like,
Speaker 3: there's a similarity of this scene to scenes in the
Speaker 3: Gospels where the Pharisees are getting a mob together to
Speaker 3: accuse Jesus of breaking the Sabbath or blaspheming or something,
Speaker 3: and then Jesus uses some kind of clever word play
Speaker 3: or argument or like turns their logic around on them
Speaker 3: to shut them up. And so here coffin Joe is like,
Speaker 3: you say, I'm guilty, Well what about you? Who can
Speaker 3: prove that you're not guilty? You know, maybe your wife
Speaker 3: left you because she hates you. And also this speech
Speaker 3: includes a really irrefutable argument. He says, how can any
Speaker 3: of you be innocent of these kidnappings when in fact
Speaker 3: we know that only children are innocent. Boom can't argue
Speaker 3: with that. Yeah, I don't know. Do you think the
Speaker 3: parallel to like the controversy stories of Jesus and the Bible,
Speaker 3: where is intentional here.
Speaker 1: You know, I bet so. You know, we talked about
Speaker 1: like the audience being an audience that is either you know, Christian,
Speaker 1: or has come up in a Christian dominated kind of culture,
Speaker 1: and you could see the appeal of an Antichrist character,
Speaker 1: not in the sense that the character is supposed to
Speaker 1: be like the actual Antichrist from you know, biblical tradition
Speaker 1: or from cinematic portrayals the Antichrist, but being like a
Speaker 1: figure that is kind of this reverse altered image of
Speaker 1: Christ where they're like, there's something about this guy. He
Speaker 1: reminds me of somebody else that I hear about every week,
Speaker 1: except you know, through a mirror darkly. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Interesting, Okay, but wait, coffin Joe. It's almost like he
Speaker 3: forgot that he had lady prisoners. So he goes back
Speaker 3: to the prisoners and he lectures them about how there's
Speaker 3: no immortality of the soul, only immortality of the blood.
Speaker 3: And then he's talking to all of them about how
Speaker 3: he selected them because they were without faith. Like he
Speaker 3: goes up to one of the ladies and he says,
Speaker 3: you you were married outside the church. No faith? Good,
Speaker 3: very good, And then he does the Tarantula test. I
Speaker 3: recall this scene goes on a long time where the
Speaker 3: ladies are all just like sleeping and we get to
Speaker 3: see tarantulas crawling on their legs and stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, this is definitely a case where you could
Speaker 1: have used a little less footage and you could have
Speaker 1: gotten the point across. But they clearly just liked this
Speaker 1: footage of tarantula is crawling across ladies in there at lingerie,
Speaker 1: so we see a lot of it.
Speaker 3: Only Marcia passes the test, the one who was all
Speaker 3: in on Coffin Joe. Anyway, all the other ladies they
Speaker 3: start screaming about the tarantulas, so Coffin Joe he takes
Speaker 3: them downstairs to get murdered in the pit of venomous snakes.
Speaker 1: The snake pit looks good, by the way, like all
Speaker 1: these SATs this is. This film is black and white,
Speaker 1: so we have these very grim, gritty, black and white
Speaker 1: sets in addition to those street scenes. And yeah, this
Speaker 1: it feels claustrophobic. The snakes are definitely real, at times
Speaker 1: alarmingly real, as are the spiders.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, that's weird. I guess we haven't talked about
Speaker 3: the visual style of this movie much yet. I guess
Speaker 3: just because the subject matter is so ripe for conversation.
Speaker 3: But this is a great looking movie, I think. I
Speaker 3: think most of the sets and the effects and everything
Speaker 3: look really good. It is surprisingly visually striking for a
Speaker 3: black and white film.
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, especially knowing that you know, they didn't have
Speaker 1: an inexhaustible budget here that you know, I think they
Speaker 1: had more money than they did on the first film,
Speaker 1: but still they didn't have a lot to play with.
Speaker 1: A lot of times the elements they're using you can
Speaker 1: see the limitations, but you also see that well they
Speaker 1: put a lot of effort into into lighting it appropriately
Speaker 1: and making sure that, you know, they could lean on
Speaker 1: the shadows as much as possible to give it this
Speaker 1: this air of Gothic intrigue.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of good use of high contrast in
Speaker 3: the set dressings. There are some excellent indoor swamp and
Speaker 3: pond sets later and yeah, just well thought out and
Speaker 3: often high energy imagery. It is designed not to let
Speaker 3: your eyes get bored.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And it's my understanding that they built all the
Speaker 1: sets in that synagogue, and I think they built the
Speaker 1: swamp in the backyard of the synagogue.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, But anyway, so back to the depraved crimes
Speaker 3: of Coffin Joe. So he's murdering all these ladies in
Speaker 3: the snake pit. And then uh oh, Marcia, the lady
Speaker 3: who was going to be worthy because she's not afraid
Speaker 3: of spiders, she proves herself unworthy as well because she
Speaker 3: has compassion. So Coffin Joe is like, he's like, hey,
Speaker 3: let's get in the mood by watching these ladies get
Speaker 3: bitten by snakes, and Marcia doesn't like it. She has
Speaker 3: pity on them. She's like, please stop. And then Coffin
Speaker 3: Joe just stands there eating grapes while one of the
Speaker 3: ladies in the snakepit curses him in the name of God.
Speaker 1: This is a pretty creepy scene, the curse sequence, as
Speaker 1: it should be. And I think this sense is high
Speaker 1: because the snake around her neck is actually like visibly
Speaker 1: tightening around her neck. And according to an interview with
Speaker 1: Maren's The Yeah, this is a situation where they had
Speaker 1: to jump in right after the film cuts and like
Speaker 1: pull the snake off of her neck to keep it
Speaker 1: from strangling her. So, you know, to her credit, she
Speaker 1: you know, she used it in the performance.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, she I mean she really portrays wrath at
Speaker 3: Coffin Joe, and he's not impressed at first, but maybe
Speaker 3: he will be later in the film. So anyway, Marcia
Speaker 3: is like coffin Joe, you are sadistic. I can't stand
Speaker 3: the sadism. And coffin Joe says, it's not sadism, it
Speaker 3: is science. Is sciensia. These women, he says, these women
Speaker 3: were not a human sacrifice. Their deaths will be for
Speaker 3: the creation of the superior race, a race that will
Speaker 3: become immortal through the control of instinct. So I think
Speaker 3: he wants to create a new man. And Marcia is
Speaker 3: standing there looking like that doesn't sound right. Marcia, your
Speaker 3: instincts are correct. I don't think coffin Joe understands what
Speaker 3: science means. He also seems to imply that it is
Speaker 3: science because killing the women with the snakes revealed their hypocrisy.
Speaker 3: I don't know what that means.
Speaker 1: This does remind me that sometimes you will hear people
Speaker 1: say I don't believe in God, I believe in science.
Speaker 1: And yes, that can be an actual stance, but it
Speaker 1: can also be you know, it can also be just
Speaker 1: kind of like a shallow statement, which I think is
Speaker 1: more in line with a Coffin Joe is saying, here,
Speaker 1: I mean.
Speaker 3: I don't know. I have a lot of trust in science,
Speaker 3: but that seems like a weird way to phrase things
Speaker 3: to me. That's kind of like saying I don't believe
Speaker 3: in ghosts, I believe in the law. It's like, huh. Anyway,
Speaker 3: Coffin Joe, he releases Marcia without killing her, but he says,
Speaker 3: you know, she's not worthy to bear him, to bear
Speaker 3: him a son because she loves him and love is weak,
Speaker 3: and it saddened him to see the weakness of love
Speaker 3: in her eyes.
Speaker 1: All told, though, this is a pretty good breakup for
Speaker 1: Coffin Joe.
Speaker 3: I have to say, yeah, oh yeah, because she's like,
Speaker 3: are you gonna kill me? And he's like, nope, you
Speaker 3: can go because I know you're not going to report
Speaker 3: me because you love me, which again is weak and bad.
Speaker 1: Yeah. This would be toxic in any other relationship, no doubt,
Speaker 1: But for Coffin Joe, this is I mean, this feels
Speaker 1: like perhaps a step up from just murdering a bunch
Speaker 1: of people.
Speaker 3: And she does not tell on him at first. She
Speaker 3: vouches for Coffin Joe to the police. She says I
Speaker 3: was on a trip, which is where I was, and
Speaker 3: no idea what happened to the other five non religious
Speaker 3: women in town? And he did nothing wrong.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and a law of enforcements, Like it's rock solid,
Speaker 1: what can we do?
Speaker 3: Yeah? So, next thing is the movie takes a shift.
Speaker 3: Coffin Joe sees Laura arriving in town in a carriage,
Speaker 3: and Laura is the beautiful daughter of the colonel. He
Speaker 3: is protected by Trunkador. And here's where we get that
Speaker 3: trunk Adoor Coffin Joe fight scene where Coffin Joe looks
Speaker 3: at him, He's like, oh, yeah, okay, he's pretty muscly,
Speaker 3: but I have an idea. He grabs a cane that
Speaker 3: somebody in the crowd is holding that's got one of
Speaker 3: those what do you call it, like the crook on top,
Speaker 3: the like you know, the U shaped top of the cane,
Speaker 3: and he hooks it around Trunkador's neck and then he
Speaker 3: spins Trunkendor around in circles and throws him in the mud.
Speaker 3: And so I guess he's beating up trunk a door
Speaker 3: in front of Laura, maybe to impress Laura.
Speaker 1: I think, yeah, yeah, I think so, Like I gotta
Speaker 1: make I gotta make an example out of this meathead. Again,
Speaker 1: trunk Ador is largely there to be made an example
Speaker 1: of by by Coffin Joe. I also want to point out,
Speaker 1: like I was not prepared well for multiple aspects of
Speaker 1: this film, multiple choices, but I wasn't prepared for how
Speaker 1: many action sequences we get. You know, they're not you know,
Speaker 1: they're not. We're not in a Shaw Brothers film or
Speaker 1: anything like that. Here, they're there. They're brief moments of action,
Speaker 1: but they're they're more elaborate than I anticipated.
Speaker 3: I agree, And it does seem like the point of
Speaker 3: these action scenes is very much that, oh, coffin Joe
Speaker 3: could beat up anybody he wanted to. Yeah, So are
Speaker 3: you supposed to think he's cool? I don't know.
Speaker 1: I guess on some level he's supposed to be cool,
Speaker 1: Like he's he's a smart fighter. I think that's the thing. Like, yes,
Speaker 1: trunk Adoor is stronger, but I mean he's got he's
Speaker 1: got that like seventeen strength. But you know, coffin Joe's
Speaker 1: got that that nineteen decks and that high intelligence. He's
Speaker 1: gonna get in there and he's gonna he's gonna make
Speaker 1: short work of the muscleman.
Speaker 3: Trunkador is Ajax, but Coffin Joe is Odysseus.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So there's a party at the Colonel's house, I guess
Speaker 3: to I don't know, celebrate the arrival of Laura in town.
Speaker 3: And Coffin Joe shows up at the party, and of
Speaker 3: course it's a real buzzkill. When Coffin Joe shows up, everybody, like,
Speaker 3: everybody stops talking and laughing and have a good time,
Speaker 3: and they just stare at him. Coffin Joe walks up
Speaker 3: to Laura, who again she's playing the piano, and he's like,
Speaker 3: meet me at midnight in the Alley of red Flowers,
Speaker 3: and she does, and an owl is there to make
Speaker 3: the scene cool. So she shows up in the alley
Speaker 3: and he goes, are you afraid of me? And she
Speaker 3: says no, and he says, they say that I am
Speaker 3: cruel and I am a sadist. Don't you fear me now?
Speaker 3: And she says, if you were to kill me, that
Speaker 3: would only bring the one true thing in life death,
Speaker 3: And Coffin Joe he just goes weak in the knees.
Speaker 3: He has found the perfect woman for him, and it
Speaker 3: gets even better. So she tells him after this, she's like,
Speaker 3: you know, the only true thing between life and death
Speaker 3: is you. So she's all about him, and then she says,
Speaker 3: the only thing that matters is having a superior child
Speaker 3: born of two superior beings. What are the odds? So
Speaker 3: it is a match made in heaven, which is stupid
Speaker 3: and doesn't exist, by the way, And she's like, Coffin Joe,
Speaker 3: all I want is to be your godless devil wife
Speaker 3: and the mother of unholy science. And Coffin Joe is
Speaker 3: just thrilled. He's like, okay, we will make that happen.
Speaker 1: All right, We're off of the races now, Like this
Speaker 1: is this is a perfect match, Like you say, so,
Speaker 1: there's just a few things I got to check off
Speaker 1: the list here, you know, her dad hating him and
Speaker 1: so forth, the various murders around town. Once we smooth
Speaker 1: all of this out, Yeah, it's just all about that
Speaker 1: immortal baby blood.
Speaker 3: I think that they were like, oh, we need to
Speaker 3: get Coffin Joe to do some more murders before before
Speaker 3: the immortality of the Blood. So first Laura's brother tries
Speaker 3: to bribe Coffin Joe to leave town. So he comes,
Speaker 3: and he says, you know, I'll pay you twice what
Speaker 3: your properties are worth to buy them from you if
Speaker 3: you'll just leave town and leave Laura alone. But I
Speaker 3: don't know. It seems like Laura would just like find
Speaker 3: another Coffin Joe type to end up with, wouldn't she
Speaker 3: like she's she's got her own priorities.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Plus, you can't you can't stand in the way
Speaker 1: of love or something that closely resembles love. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is clearly meant to be. But Coffin Joe sees some
Speaker 1: possibilities here. The wheels are turning. He doesn't actually want
Speaker 1: that money, but you know, I'm guessing. On one level,
Speaker 1: he realizes this brother is a problem. This brother needs
Speaker 1: to be taken care of. But also perhaps here is
Speaker 1: one more test for my future wife to make sure
Speaker 1: she's truly one devoted to what we've got going on here.
Speaker 3: Right, So, there are a couple of prongs to his plan.
Speaker 3: One of them is dealing with a Trunkador. They're going
Speaker 3: to try to well, they're going to kill the brother
Speaker 3: and frame Trunkador for the murder. So so Coffin Joe
Speaker 3: recruits Marcia to seduce Trunkador and then tell him that
Speaker 3: she needs money. And then Coffin Joe challenges Trunkador to
Speaker 3: a game of poker, and I guess the idea is
Speaker 3: trunk Ador agrees to this because he's like, I need
Speaker 3: to win money for my new girlfriend Marcia.
Speaker 1: Yeah goodor claims that he's been playing poker since like
Speaker 1: he was in the Womb. But it's clear from the
Speaker 1: get go that he's just gonna get owned at cards
Speaker 1: by the one true strategic genius coffin Joe. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's there's no question here. It's just this is doomed
Speaker 1: from the start.
Speaker 3: And there is a poker game. It's like a it's
Speaker 3: like a James Bond movie. There's a high stakes gambling scene.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we cut into it already. Trunkador's losing, like he's
Speaker 1: he's down. However, many games, this whole vision that he's
Speaker 1: going to somehow make a fortune off of coffin Joe.
Speaker 1: Who I think it is. I think it's maybe more
Speaker 1: presented in the first film, but Coffin Joe is also
Speaker 1: supposed to be like a wealthier member of this town,
Speaker 1: like he's he's the undertaker, Like there's there's always business
Speaker 1: for the undertaker. He makes plenty of business for himself,
Speaker 1: That's right, except sometimes, I mean except with like these uh,
Speaker 1: these murders, these most recent murders. We had the scene
Speaker 1: where he's hiding the bodies in the swamp so that
Speaker 1: they'll you know, get you know, the rod, or be
Speaker 1: eaten by the scavengers. So in cases like that, he
Speaker 1: is kind of depriving himself off business. I guess he's
Speaker 1: still doing the close casket thing. So that's the That's
Speaker 1: what really sucks about having a family member killed by
Speaker 1: coffin Joe is he's still going to handle the funeral.
Speaker 3: So coffin Joe he kills Laura's brother by crushing him
Speaker 3: with the giant rock. And before that, he before he
Speaker 3: does that, he gives a long speech like he I
Speaker 3: don't even The themes are like will and instinct and
Speaker 3: inferiority and superiority. Guess what the brother he's inferior, coffin Joe,
Speaker 3: he's superior. He says, how long would these nails grow
Speaker 3: if I didn't cut them? I don't recall what that
Speaker 3: refers to. He's just like the fingernails are illustrative of
Speaker 3: some kind of point he's making.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a whole thing with the stone, they crush
Speaker 1: a rat, I mean, not for real, and then he
Speaker 1: like catches the rope on fire. There's it's all old
Speaker 1: like Saw esque situation here where he's like, okay, go ahead,
Speaker 1: call out to God, maybe he'll save you, or you know,
Speaker 1: this will crush your head, And of course it ends
Speaker 1: up crushing his head anyway.
Speaker 3: It's a pit in the pendulum kind of trap. But yes,
Speaker 3: he also does the thing from the the Atheist Professor
Speaker 3: chain email where he's like, if God is real, he
Speaker 3: will come and save you. If he's not real, haha,
Speaker 3: improve and correct again. Yes, oh but anyway, then they
Speaker 3: so they crush him with the rock and then they
Speaker 3: frame Trunkador for the murder because they're playing poker in
Speaker 3: this crowded bar. Trunkador leaves the crowded bar. A scream
Speaker 3: is heard from outside, and they go out and they
Speaker 3: find Trunkador lying on the ground next to Laura's brother
Speaker 3: who is squished, and it's like, oh, trunk of Door
Speaker 3: must have done it because Coffin Joe was inside where
Speaker 3: everybody could see him, he couldn't possibly be to blame.
Speaker 3: It's not like he could have had accomplices.
Speaker 1: It's not like he's known to have multiple accomplices across
Speaker 1: town at this point.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but I think they have the funeral in coffin
Speaker 3: Joe's parlor.
Speaker 1: It's the only game in town. You gotta go to
Speaker 1: coffin Joe.
Speaker 3: So here Laura and coffin Joe start getting really serious.
Speaker 3: They have another midnight rendezvous, and there's a thing any
Speaker 3: scene where coffin Joe is like kissing a woman. We
Speaker 3: get these hilarious close ups of his face where he's
Speaker 3: frowning and scowling. He's making like a yucky face as
Speaker 3: he forms the kissy lips, and it is so funny.
Speaker 3: I don't think it's supposed to be funny. I don't
Speaker 3: know what they're going for there. It's just like he's
Speaker 3: not gonna smile, so he's just like mmm. And then
Speaker 3: I think Laura comes to live at coffin Joe's house
Speaker 3: after this, and coffin Joe's got a cool house.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we get to see his bedroom at one point.
Speaker 1: I think it's only really one shot where we get
Speaker 1: to see the full the full stat but yeah, he
Speaker 1: has this nice dark curtained bed and I think there's
Speaker 1: like a like a painting of the Devil over the bed.
Speaker 1: It's splendid.
Speaker 3: But uh oh, we're going to start getting some of
Speaker 3: the moral melodrama coming in because Coffin Joe's about to
Speaker 3: develop a guilty conscience. He's in a bar and he
Speaker 3: overhears some people talking and he finds out that one
Speaker 3: of the women that he killed in his snake pit
Speaker 3: was pregnant, and this causes him to have a crisis
Speaker 3: of conscience. But how could he have a crisis of conscience?
Speaker 3: Isn't conscience weak? Isn't that a display of inferiority? How
Speaker 3: could a superior being like Coffin Joe feel guilty? Well,
Speaker 3: remember his one real moral impulse. He thinks it is
Speaker 3: wrong to harm children, and he thinks that this counts,
Speaker 3: So he has a guilt freak out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and Laura, the future Miss Coffin here is hilarious
Speaker 1: in her attempts to make him feel better. She's like, come, Onzie,
Speaker 1: that child was just going to grow up to be
Speaker 1: an inferior adult. He was just going to be an idiot.
Speaker 1: So it's actually a good thing that you did this.
Speaker 1: But Coffin Joe's not buying it. He's like He's like, nope, nope,
Speaker 1: this is against my code. This is wrong. I feel awful.
Speaker 3: It is time to have a nightmare of going to hell.
Speaker 3: And he goes to sleep. He has a nightmare of hell,
Speaker 3: and suddenly the film transitions to technic color. It's like
Speaker 3: The Wizard of Oz. But whereas in The Wizard of Oz,
Speaker 3: Kansas is black and white and Oz is in color,
Speaker 3: here most of the movie in I guess Earth is
Speaker 3: black and white, but Hell is in color.
Speaker 1: This was tremendous in part for me because I was
Speaker 1: not expecting it. I thought we were going to be
Speaker 1: in the same dreary but effective black and white for
Speaker 1: the full film. I had not seen the trailer, so
Speaker 1: I didn't know that there were going to be color elements,
Speaker 1: and so suddenly we're in this weird technicolor world and
Speaker 1: I'm like, wow, this is this blew my socks off.
Speaker 1: It reminds me of when I watched The Tingler for
Speaker 1: the first time, and I didn't know that there were
Speaker 1: going to be color elements in that otherwise black and
Speaker 1: white film.
Speaker 3: Oh I forgot about that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I found it. I found it highly effective. I
Speaker 1: got a big kick out of it.
Speaker 3: So yeah. In this sequence, he gets dragged out of
Speaker 3: bed and taken to a graveyard full of shaky hands.
Speaker 3: There's like a demon neo grabs him, pulls them out
Speaker 3: of bed. This like tall, lean figure. He taken to
Speaker 3: the graveyard. Everybody's reaching out of the graves with hands,
Speaker 3: going nuts all over the place. And then once he
Speaker 3: is in Hell, he sees the tortures of the damned,
Speaker 3: which include muscly oiled up hercules, guys just running around
Speaker 3: poking people with pitchforks.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm, yeah, naked people crawling around on the floor,
Speaker 1: topless women strapped to columns in this kind of cave set.
Speaker 1: And then here come the musclemen with tridents to occasionally
Speaker 1: stab them, and it's worth driving home. This goes on
Speaker 1: for what feels like half an hour. This is another
Speaker 1: situation where they're like, well, we shot a lot of
Speaker 1: Hell footage, and we did it in color. Let's give
Speaker 1: the people what they want. Let's give them all of
Speaker 1: this footage. This actually reminded me a lot of the
Speaker 1: Hell scenes in the nineteen seventy musical Scrooge starring Albert
Speaker 1: Finney and Alec Guinness, except more naked and pokey here,
Speaker 1: but that level of obvious fake hell cavern set. This
Speaker 1: set here in the Coffin Joe film was apparently built
Speaker 1: in the synagogue, and according to Maren's they had rigged
Speaker 1: wiring in the floor of this set so they could
Speaker 1: have little pyrotechnic explosions, which I don't think I really
Speaker 1: noticed the explosion so much. There's a lot going on
Speaker 1: in these sequences, but the wiring wasn't great, and so
Speaker 1: as all the actors, including Coffin Joe, were moving around,
Speaker 1: they would get periodically shocked by the wiring and the floor.
Speaker 1: So if you rewatch the sequences, you'll see Coffin Joe
Speaker 1: and other people kind of going to that, and you know,
Speaker 1: it adds to the craziness of the sequence.
Speaker 3: So a bunch of things happen in Hell. Coffin Joe
Speaker 3: is he says it can't be. He's at one point
Speaker 3: he yells literally, he says, I don't believe in laws.
Speaker 3: I think what he means there is like there aren't
Speaker 3: actually things people could go to Hell for. There's no
Speaker 3: such things right or wrong.
Speaker 1: It's like, I absolutely reject this notion in its entirety.
Speaker 1: There is no way that I am actually in Hell,
Speaker 1: but clearly like we are in Hell at this point,
Speaker 1: and it's full color. It's like, which is very interesting
Speaker 1: to think about, you know, outside of just sort of
Speaker 1: the obvious gimmickiness of it, Like Hell is another realm
Speaker 1: and it's in color. So it's like, in a sense,
Speaker 1: suddenly Hell is more real than the rest of the film.
Speaker 1: Hell feels more modern than the rest of the film.
Speaker 1: It's it's a very weird vibe. It's hard to like
Speaker 1: really figure out like what aspects of it are intentional
Speaker 1: and which or not.
Speaker 3: But he's obviously frightened. And then he sees the devil,
Speaker 3: which is Joe himself. It's the same actor again. He's
Speaker 3: a very goat like devil. I think he's got laurel
Speaker 3: leaves around his head and a little, you know, kind
Speaker 3: of kind of king of the Forest crown. So there
Speaker 3: are elements of pan in there. And he's dressed in
Speaker 3: like orange and pink and purple robes. So he's this
Speaker 3: devil looks like he's having a great time. But coffin
Speaker 3: Joe is not having a great time. He is things
Speaker 3: are rough, and he's like, uh, oh, did I throw
Speaker 3: in everything? On an incorrect ideology. Uh oh.
Speaker 1: There's also a big carnival feel to all of this
Speaker 1: as well. Yes, especially with the devil on his throne.
Speaker 1: He seems like he's the grand marshal of a parade.
Speaker 3: And then Coffin Joe sees his murder victims. There is
Speaker 3: the woman who cursed him in the snake pit, and
Speaker 3: she's coming at him saying, this night, I'll possess your corpse.
Speaker 1: Ooh, that's the title. Now we're in it.
Speaker 3: So Coffin Joe wakes up from his nightmare and then
Speaker 3: he has to talk himself back into atheism and wickedness,
Speaker 3: and Laura is trying to help. She's like, no, don't
Speaker 3: worry about it. There is no God, there is no Hell.
Speaker 3: Everything's fine. Do more murders.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but he's clearly shaken at this point.
Speaker 3: Oh and then like in the next scene, Laura and
Speaker 3: Coffin Joe find out there going to have a baby,
Speaker 3: and then basically in the next scene after that, she's
Speaker 3: having the baby. So some time passes, I guess.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I was very confused at this point, as like,
Speaker 1: what has it been months and months? I thought it
Speaker 1: was like the next day.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but before that there's there's another subplot, which is
Speaker 3: the Colonel busts Trunkador out of prison, and then the
Speaker 3: Colonel and Trunkador hire a bunch of I don't know, Hinchman,
Speaker 3: I was gonna say assassins, but I think they're not
Speaker 3: trying to kill him. They hire some tough guys to
Speaker 3: go capture a Coffin Joe and bring him back to
Speaker 3: the colonel.
Speaker 1: Oh my goodness. This is this is where things get
Speaker 1: really interesting, because we definitely get a lot of action
Speaker 1: at this point, and some of it is very convincing
Speaker 1: and cool. There's also the sequence where they initially come
Speaker 1: for Joe, and you know, Coffin Joe can hold his
Speaker 1: own in a fight against one, two, three, maybe like
Speaker 1: four guys tops, but five or six is clearly too many.
Speaker 1: And he tries to like Spider Man, up a wall
Speaker 1: to escape, but like falls back down, and I'm not
Speaker 1: sure if that was intended at the door not, but
Speaker 1: I got to chuckle out of it because yeah, oh
Speaker 1: there's no escape, Joe. You've got to You've got to
Speaker 1: fight or flee. Flee's not working, and again he's no
Speaker 1: match for this many hired dunes.
Speaker 3: He says to himself, I can't die. I must protect
Speaker 3: my son from inferior people. Yeah, so the henchman beat
Speaker 3: him up. I like, how there's one guy they hired
Speaker 3: that's just the head butt guy. All he does is
Speaker 3: head butt.
Speaker 1: Yeah. He like, they get Joe down and then he's
Speaker 1: like bam, head butt knocks him out.
Speaker 3: So they put coffin Joe in a wagon to take
Speaker 3: him to the colonel. But then he pops up and
Speaker 3: he attacks, and he's got blades on his shoes. He's
Speaker 3: got secret weapons all over the place.
Speaker 1: Oh, this is so good. This this reminded me a
Speaker 1: little bit of Riddick. There's a little bit of Ridtick
Speaker 1: in all this, because there's a scene where Riddic is
Speaker 1: in the back of a cart and chronicles of Riddic
Speaker 1: and manages to kill some folks. But it also reminds
Speaker 1: me a little bit of Hannibal Lecter, where, especially in
Speaker 1: the book and film adaptation of Hannibal, where you know, oh,
Speaker 1: this guy's super dangerous, but uh are a more resourceful
Speaker 1: and powerful entity. Has hired a bunch of guys to
Speaker 1: capture him, but it's very difficult to keep a handle
Speaker 1: on Hannibal Lecter it's very difficult to keep Coffin Joe
Speaker 1: contained and you know. Yeah, so we get that scene
Speaker 1: where he has secret secreted razor blades like straight razors
Speaker 1: and his I don't know, his back straps or something,
Speaker 1: and he slides him into his boot and then does
Speaker 1: this neat like scissor leg clamp kill on one of
Speaker 1: the goons. It's it's pretty great. I love this sequence.
Speaker 3: He kills another one of the goons with an axe
Speaker 3: that he finds in a boat and then just like
Speaker 3: chops him in the head. And then he is the
Speaker 3: world's fakest axe.
Speaker 1: Yes, it looks like he's made out of paper mache,
Speaker 1: so it's not as convincing as the straight razors.
Speaker 3: Then he gets the other guys. He lures them into
Speaker 3: a trap in the swamp where they like sink in
Speaker 3: quicksand and they're begging for mercy and he's like, ah,
Speaker 3: I have defeated you. You are in and again the
Speaker 3: swamp set is great.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, the hired goons are swallowed up by the swamp.
Speaker 1: It's great.
Speaker 3: And yeah, the more I think about it, the more
Speaker 3: your your comparison to Hannibal Lecter. I think I said
Speaker 3: it earlier. But you off, Mike, you had said Hannibal
Speaker 3: Lecter to me before I made that connection. I think
Speaker 3: that is really apt in many ways, except that coffin
Speaker 3: Joe does not have Hannibal Lecter's poetic brevity of comment.
Speaker 3: You know, it's like Hannibal Lecter. But if Hannibal Lecter
Speaker 3: talked like an iin Rand protagonist.
Speaker 1: I think this is one of the shortcomings of Hannibal Lecters.
Speaker 1: Hannibal Lecter did not preach enough, and he also never
Speaker 1: traveled to Hell, Like, how did that never happen? I mean,
Speaker 1: plenty of other pop culture fictional characters have had their
Speaker 1: own Inferno moments, but not Hannibal Lecter. Come on, make
Speaker 1: it happen.
Speaker 3: All right. Well, we're in the final final stretch of
Speaker 3: the film, so the guilty consciences really just start popping
Speaker 3: up all over the place. Marcie, I remember her. She
Speaker 3: has a guilty conscience now, and she because of her
Speaker 3: feelings of guilt, she drinks poison and then she dies.
Speaker 3: But as she's dying, she confesses to everyone that she
Speaker 3: witnessed Coffin Joe do all the murders. He did it.
Speaker 3: He's guilty. So this leads the colonel to form an
Speaker 3: angry mob to go kill Coffin Joe in revenge.
Speaker 1: I mean the whole time they know Coffin Joe did this.
Speaker 1: Deep down, I don't understand why this is such a revelation.
Speaker 1: Coffin Joe is a murder our. Coffin Joe, not Zee.
Speaker 3: And then there is a very sad scene where Laura
Speaker 3: is about to give birth and the doctor is there,
Speaker 3: but Laura and their child die in childbirth, and Coffin
Speaker 3: Joe is moved, despite the fact that he shouldn't feel
Speaker 3: love or feel sympathy or pity for anyone. In fact,
Speaker 3: it turns out that he can't accept Laura's death, and
Speaker 3: he is He is driven into a kind of a
Speaker 3: fit of despondency, and he first shows denial. He's like,
Speaker 3: Laura can't be dead. She's you know, she's my perfect match.
Speaker 3: We will, we will create the superior Man. And then
Speaker 3: he clearly is feeling sadness and he takes Laura's body
Speaker 3: and carries her to the graveyard, and then the real
Speaker 3: guilt visions begin. One of the women that he murdered
Speaker 3: shows up wrapped in a snake, telling him that she
Speaker 3: will possess his corpse, as she was the same one
Speaker 3: saying this in hell and the one who cursed him.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, Remember part of the curse was that he
Speaker 1: would never have a sign, and so this whole situation
Speaker 1: is the culmination of the curse too.
Speaker 3: So he starts yelling at the sky, which is storming.
Speaker 3: He says, come all spirits, come untrue things, come spirits.
Speaker 3: If you exist and change my mind.
Speaker 1: Yes does God, if you exist, you will fight me
Speaker 1: now fisticuffs right here in the storm.
Speaker 3: So then God strikes a tree with lightning, and a
Speaker 3: burning branch of the tree falls off on top of
Speaker 3: Coffin Joe and like pins himTo the ground. And he
Speaker 3: literally says it was just a coincidence.
Speaker 1: Oh it's so good.
Speaker 3: He says, I am still superior. And a priest shows
Speaker 3: up with a Bible and a crucifix to convert Coffin Joe.
Speaker 3: He's like, you know what you can you can come
Speaker 3: accept Jesus. It's gonna be okay. Coffin Joe says, I
Speaker 3: am not weak. God does not exist, and he's, you know,
Speaker 3: gnashing his teeth and foaming at the mouth, screaming at
Speaker 3: the sky. The mob arrives at the graveyard slash swamp.
Speaker 3: I don't know why you'd put the graveyard in the swamp,
Speaker 3: but apparently they did.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: The mob shoots Coffin Joe and at the last he's
Speaker 3: mortally wounded. He's sinking into the slime, into the quicksand
Speaker 3: of the swamp. The skeletons of his victims start rising
Speaker 3: to the surface and he literally yelps. He goes oh.
Speaker 3: And then and at the last he does come around.
Speaker 3: He repents. He says God, God is the Truth across
Speaker 3: a symbol of the sun, and church music starts playing.
Speaker 3: There's like church organ music. This totally sounds like none
Speaker 3: of the other music in the movie. And the priest
Speaker 3: crosses himself and Bruno looks on, seeming kind of sad.
Speaker 3: And then we get a read out on the screen
Speaker 3: that says, man, we'll only find truth when he searches
Speaker 3: for truth. And that's the end.
Speaker 1: So it all paid off, I guess sort of.
Speaker 3: So, But does Coffin Joe get to go to heaven?
Speaker 1: I mean, I hope he would get to go to
Speaker 1: purgatory first. I would hope he would get the full
Speaker 1: divine comedy here.
Speaker 3: Ah, yes, yes, we'd get a lot of descriptions of
Speaker 3: which direction the sun was setting as he goes around
Speaker 3: the mountain.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: But okay, so we get the whole thing. We get
Speaker 3: all of the depraved, evil, sinful, murderous behavior, but then
Speaker 3: we also get the redemption arc at the end, though
Speaker 3: it's very it's very abrupt, like he it's literally just
Speaker 3: the last thing he says, right as he's sinking into
Speaker 3: the water. We don't get to see him like pivot
Speaker 3: and do anything kind or you know, like act out
Speaker 3: his new redemption at all. It's just like the it
Speaker 3: is the razor's edge deathbed confession. Sorry, death swamp confession.
Speaker 1: Yeah, death swamp confession. I've seen some criticism of this
Speaker 1: as as maybe it felt you know, too rushed or forced.
Speaker 1: I've read also that Brazilian sensors at the time only permitted,
Speaker 1: you know, all of this film's excess if it had
Speaker 1: an ending like this. And I'm not a completist by
Speaker 1: any stretch on his various interviews in comments, but I've
Speaker 1: read that Maren's later said that he didn't like the
Speaker 1: ending and maybe felt forced to do it. But you know,
Speaker 1: at the same time, I think we have to you know,
Speaker 1: think about the various influences and the idea of like
Speaker 1: Brazilian religious morality plays essentially being an influence on the
Speaker 1: film as well. And I don't know, for for my taste,
Speaker 1: I didn't feel like the ending was felt completely rushed
Speaker 1: or completely tacked on. I mean it it it arrives,
Speaker 1: you know, swifter than a lot of the major movements
Speaker 1: in the plot do. But I mean it's I'm not
Speaker 1: sure how else this could have gone. Likes, what else
Speaker 1: could happen? Either you get the happy ending where the
Speaker 1: perfect baby is born. That can't happen. This is a
Speaker 1: hard exploitation movie. Also, it's not very climactic if Coffin
Speaker 1: Joe challenges God to a fight and just God doesn't
Speaker 1: show up, and then Coffin Joe declares himself the winner
Speaker 1: and goes off to find another bride, like you need
Speaker 1: something to go down, and this seems like a fitting
Speaker 1: way to end it.
Speaker 3: I agree, I really can't think of another way this
Speaker 3: could have gone. But yeah, I don't know, Maybe my
Speaker 3: imagination is limited. Maybe I should be more of an
Speaker 3: outside the box thinker like Coffin Joe, and then I
Speaker 3: could imagine the Curt no, I can see the other ending.
Speaker 3: So the mob shows up to get Coffin Joe for
Speaker 3: his crimes, and then he just turns it around on
Speaker 3: them again like he did earlier. He convinces them that
Speaker 3: it was good for him to do the crimes, and
Speaker 3: they are all stupid for criticizing him, and they all
Speaker 3: go home. They hang their heads in shame, and they're like, Wow,
Speaker 3: coffin Joe really is superior to all of us.
Speaker 1: Or I think you alluded to this earlier. The idea
Speaker 1: that Coffin Joe becomes God or I don't know, becomes
Speaker 1: the Pope or something like that would be that would
Speaker 1: be fitting as well. Actually kind of kind of reminiscent
Speaker 1: of a Chronicles a ritic, you know, it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: I became the thing I oppose, Like that would be
Speaker 1: a fitting downer ending for coffin Joe.
Speaker 3: I think Coffin Joe becomes the Lord Marshall of the
Speaker 3: Necromonga Empire.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's like, darn it, I love this room in
Speaker 1: this throne, but this whole ideology is completely repellent to me.
Speaker 3: Okay, this does though want to make me. I have
Speaker 3: listical desire here to make a list of the best,
Speaker 3: the best preachy hectoring villains from movies who give long
Speaker 3: lectures and sermons explaining why they're right and everyone else
Speaker 3: is wrong.
Speaker 1: Hmmm, Oh, that would be an interesting exercise because on
Speaker 1: one level, some of the memorable preachy villains, you know,
Speaker 1: they might not have actually preached that much. It's kind
Speaker 1: of like our memory of effective storytelling is sometimes you
Speaker 1: actually show a little bit and we imagine the rest.
Speaker 1: That's not the case with this film.
Speaker 3: But that is a good point storytelling tip out there.
Speaker 3: I think often you have to show fewer examples of
Speaker 3: something in the story to establish the impression of a
Speaker 3: pattern than you would think.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but yeah, this is this is a really fun one.
Speaker 1: I really enjoyed this night. I'll Possess your Corpse. It's
Speaker 1: so many, so many additional details we didn't even get into,
Speaker 1: Like I love how when coffin Joe is dragged a hell,
Speaker 1: he's like dragged face first through the ground. Like there
Speaker 1: are moments like that where it seems like they could
Speaker 1: have done the easier thing and gone with just sort
Speaker 1: of the feet first drag. But but no, Maren's i'
Speaker 1: meant just a guess And it was like it was
Speaker 1: all in. It's like, nope, drag me face first. I'm
Speaker 1: the director, gosh darn it, and we want it to
Speaker 1: look physical. This needs to it needs to be believable,
Speaker 1: face first, into the dirt. Let's do it.
Speaker 3: Okay, this moment, I possess no more insights about this night,
Speaker 3: I'll possess your corpse.
Speaker 1: All right. Well that's very uncoffin of you, Joe, but
Speaker 1: I'll accept it. But hey, that doesn't mean we can't
Speaker 1: continue to talk about Coffin Joe on listener mail in
Speaker 1: the future. So hey, if you have thoughts about this night,
Speaker 1: I'll possess your corpse, or at midnight, I'll take your soul,
Speaker 1: or any other I'd love to hear more about some
Speaker 1: of these other Coffin Joe films because it took. One
Speaker 1: of the reasons it took so long to get around
Speaker 1: to doing one of these is I was like, well,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of Coffin Joe related films, which
Speaker 1: ones are even acceptable for us to talk about, And
Speaker 1: you know, there are some of these that I just
Speaker 1: I'm not sure you can really access right now. So
Speaker 1: I'd love to hear more about them if we have
Speaker 1: any Coffin Joe experts out there write in. We would
Speaker 1: love to hear from you. If you want to check
Speaker 1: out the other movies we've selected for Weird House Cinema
Speaker 1: in the past, you can go to a couple of places.
Speaker 1: I blog about these episodes at im mutimusic dot com.
Speaker 1: But also if you go to a letterbox dot com
Speaker 1: that's L E T T E R B O x
Speaker 1: D dot com, you can find us there. Our username
Speaker 1: is weird House. We have a list of all the
Speaker 1: movies we've covered over the years, and sometimes you get
Speaker 1: a peek ahead at what's next. A reminder that we're
Speaker 1: primarily a science podcast, the real science, not the Coffin
Speaker 1: Joe science, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, listener
Speaker 1: mail on Monday's short form Artifactor, Monster Fact on Wednesdays,
Speaker 1: and then on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns
Speaker 1: to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3: Huge thanks to our excellent audio producer Jjposway. If you
Speaker 3: would like to get in touch with us with feedback
Speaker 3: on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
Speaker 3: for the future, or just to say hello, you can
Speaker 3: email us at contact at Stuff to Blow Your Mind
Speaker 3: dot com.
Speaker 2: Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
Speaker 2: more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 2: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite show.