This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse

Jose Mojica Marins' This Night I Will Possesses Your Corpse, from Brazil in 1967, is the second film in the "Coffin Joe" trilogy. Joe is a long-nailed, top-hatted demonic figure who kidnaps the flower of Brazilian womanhood in order to find the perfect candidate to bear his son and seal his bid for immortality. In other words, an excuse for Marins to put busty women in diaphanous tops and black panties and have spiders and snakes wriggle over them while his camera ogles their curves. Martins plays Jose, so this is a postmodern self-reflexive work and, of course, an exploitive one

Marins' cinema is closer to the "let's put on a show" camp of John Waters or Herschell Gordon Lewis than the sublime surrealism of a Buñuel. Still, I enjoyed this for what it was despite feeling that it was twenty minutes too long. Marins throws in some nice old-fashioned touches, particularly the film's "Igor" character and a torch lit chase by the villagers to kill the "beast". Though the film is chiefly in black and white, there is a prolonged color dream sequence in which Joe imagines he is in hell; albeit one with plenty of gratuitous nudity, a touch of the 60s, I suppose, before Brazil's military cracked down on the fun.

I saw this film as part of the Tigard Joy Cinema's Weird Wednesday series. I've seen ten or so of the features in this series and this film is superior to nearly all of their bargain basement fare. Marins obviously loves what he is doing and that affection shines through the hackneyed script and middling mise en scene. Marins' work breaks no new cinematic ground, but he does have a vision that he seeks to convey, however cockeyed. He grasps that as we age our focus shifts from sex to death and that in his chosen genre the decay of the flesh is a key and fitting theme. (8/3/17)