"A catalogue of depravity!" (Awakening Of The Beast (DVD))

Name: hogsflesh

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Product:	Awakening Of The Beast (DVD)
Date:	06.05.04 (63 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Crazy little drug, film from Brazil containing, unusual stuff

Disadvantages: The first hour, while fun,, is nowhere near as good as, the acid sequence

This DVD is released by Mondo Macabro, a company devoted to releasing extremely unusual horror and exploitation films from Europe and the developing world. Mondo Macabro was a TV series that screened on Channel 4 a few years back; there would be a documentary about that week?s subject, followed by a relevant film. (The series was based on an excellent book by Pete Tombs.) The jewel in Mondo Macabaro?s crown is undoubtedly Alucarda - if there?s a better Mexican film about teenage lesbian satanists I?d like to see it! - but of the ones I?ve seen, Awakening of the Beast runs it a fairly close second.

The film?s director and lead actor is José Mojica Marins, Brazil?s only horror star. He directed his own films and was hugely popular and controversial in his native country during the 60s, also appearing in TV shows and comic books. His trademark character was Zé de Caixão (Coffin Joe), an evil, black-clad undertaker in league with the Devil. With his bushy black beard, top hat and outrageously long fingernails, the character romped through films like At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul, and This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse. I have seen neither of these films in full, but clips suggest they are deranged gothic horrors with unique local colouring and some surprisingly nasty moments. Predictably enough in such a strongly Catholic country, he ran into all kinds of censorship troubles, and his magnum opus, Awakening of the Beast, made in 1970, was banned in Brazil and has never been shown there.

It?s a very odd film, not really a horror film at all. What it actually is, strangely enough, is a kind of documentary, which purports to examine the seedy underbelly of the Brazilian drug scene. After an opening s
cene in which Coffin Joe confronts the audience directly, we get a nice credits scene featuring Coffin Joe?s comic strip intercut with a woman injecting something into her ankle (all done for real). She then strips for the benefit of some leering middle-aged perverts. So far it looks a bit like Ed Wood crossed with Andy Warhol, and it kind of holds on to that vibe throughout, although is far better made than anything Wood did, and a lot more fun than Warhol. It also has moments of surreal imagery that would have made Buñuel proud.

The film then cuts to a discussion panel, where people are debating drug use. The injecting girl we just saw was a case study being recounted to the group by a Professor. The first two-thirds of the film is made up of weird little drug episodes that the group discusses. That?s about it as far as plot goes: lots of five- to ten-minute episodes interspersed with very brief panel discussions.

The second episode is probably the best. A schoolgirl (who actually looks about 30) is lured into an apartment by some beatniks. There she encounters all kinds of hilarious beatnik behaviour, like a man quacking like a duck, another man playing drums, and yet another man who seems to believe that he?s Jesus. At this point, I must admit, I?d have been out of there like a shot. I hate beatniks. But someone tells her that "everyone?s cool here" (I beg to differ). She immediately relaxes, smokes some pot, gets a bit risqué with the beatniks (who for some goddamn reason start whistling Colonel Bogey when she takes her knickers off - lousy beatniks). And then she accidentally suffers a horrible fate, because drugs are bad. This "orgy of addicts" is hilarious stuff, and is described as being a bit like Dante by the discussion panel.

And so it goes on. An ugly middle
aged man takes some unspecified drug and starts spanking three topless women. ("What kind of message is there in such filth?", someone asks rhetorically.) We witness drug deals and prostitution, along with arrests. A woman watches her black servant seduce her daughter as she suggestively strokes the head of a donkey (no obvious drugs on display there). Episode after episode, all featuring either sex or drugs, usually both. The sex is often heavily flavoured by domination, masochism or weird fetishism, and the drugs seem to be interchangeable - there?s no indication that the filmmaker really understood that different drugs have different effects on you.

Then, an hour in, the film switches direction slightly. A professor contributing to the discussion panel describes an experiment he performed, giving four guinea pigs LSD. While tripping, he made them focus on the character of Coffin Joe. The build up to this is a big advert for the Coffin Joe character, featuring footage from a Brazilian TV show where Mojica is forced to defend himself and his films against critics. Later some (extraordinary) clips are shown from This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse. Then they take acid. And the 25-minute sequence depicting their trip is amongst the most astonishing things I?ve ever seen.

Basically, all four acid-takers end up in a version of hell run by Coffin Joe. The film switches to colour for this sequence (it?s in black and white otherwise), and the level of visual inventiveness on display is astounding (especially the people with bottoms for faces). This is the only properly horrific section of the film, and it?s actually quite creepy at times, although eventually all of its uncanny frisson is drowned in the tide of colourful weirdness. Coffin Joe himself appears, directing the four trippers, prot
ecting them against some seriously deranged creatures, and spouting half-baked Nietzschean philosophy. Although obviously very low-budget, like the rest of the film, with its papier maché walls and so one, the hell sequence alone really makes this film worth checking out. When I was younger I was somewhat prone to opening my own doors of perception, and this is the most accurate depiction of the experience of taking acid that I?ve ever seen on film. The too-bright colours; the creepy sounds; the ever-present threat that things are suddenly going get overwhelmingly odd; the replacement of normal, everyday logic with something completely new that seems deeply significant at the time but in retrospect means absolutely nothing - it?s all here. This is an astonishing achievement, and if the rest of the film is kind of negligible (and it is), it really makes up for it in this last half hour or so.

Anyway. The picture and sound quality is a bit dodgy, especially in the black and white scenes. The acting, what there is of it, is ropy in the extreme (although Coffin Joe himself is charismatic). The editing is, um, well, perhaps "unrestrained" would be the kindest thing to say. The music is fantastic, ranging from amazing pop songs (there?s a great song about Coffin Joe that sounds like a Latin flavoured version of "Jack the Ripper" by Screaming Lord Such) to fairground organ music, to silent-movie style piano.

Since this is an exploitation film, there is a fair bit of female nudity (although no full frontal or lesbianism, two staples of contemporaneous European exploitation). In fact, the whole thing is pretty sexist. Of the four acid trippers, guess which one ends up stripped down to their underwear. Is it the ugly middle-aged man? The chubby young man? The middle aged lady? Or the pretty young blonde? Answer
s on a postcard, please. But the whole film is so damned peculiar that I really don?t think anyone bar the most po-faced puritan could take offence at it. This is popular cinema from a very different culture to what most of us are used to, and, at the risk of sounding patronising, it?s madder than a sackful of weasels.

The DVD only has one extra feature (although the cover tries, rather desperately, to pass of sub-titles and interactive menus as special features). The Mondo Macabro TV show about José Mojica Marins is included. It?s about 40 minutes long, and features some good footage of his films, and a long interview with the man himself (now old and slightly wizened) about his life and career. This is a pretty good documentary - all the Mondo Macabro documentaries are good - and a fine addition to the DVD.

I kind of wish they?d released one of his more straightforward horror movies. Awakening of the Beast is superb during the acid scene, but kind of irrelevant (in a fun way) before that. Still, it?s great that there are companies devoted to getting this kind of film to a wider audience. The film is 93 minutes long, and rated 18.

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