"Imploding the entire cosmos!" (Embodiment Of Evil (DVD))

Member Name: hogsflesh

Product:	Embodiment Of Evil (DVD)
Date:	17/08/09 (61 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Some quite good bits

Disadvantages: Really over the top violence that's off-putting

A review of the Anchor Bay DVD, which costs about £10 on amazon at the moment.

Brazil in the 60s produced one enduring horror star, even though most European and US fans only discovered him in the last ten years or so. José Mojica Marins played Zé do Caixão (Coffin Joe) in quite a few films. A violent, sacrilegious gravedigger, Zé had a distinctive look (black cloak and hat, beard, ridiculously long fingernails), and the films, directed by Marins himself, are amazing (well, the early ones are). At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul (1964) and This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse (1967) are intense, a bit silly, genuinely unsettling, and unlike anything else I've seen. They involve Zé trying to find a woman on whom he can father a son, and their potent mix of violence and blasphemy got them in hot water with the Brazilian censor. They formed the first parts of a trilogy, but the third film was never made.

Until now. Horror fans are nothing if not sentimental, but really, we never learn. Long-awaited sequels *never* live up to what went before - just ask anyone who sat through Romero's Land of the Dead or Argento's Mother of Tears. The rise of interest in obscure horror has allowed culty Eurohacks like Jean Rollin, Jess Franco and even Paul Naschy to resurrect their careers in recent years. So it was inevitable that we were going to see that final Zé do Caixão film sooner or later.

Zé is released after spending 40 years in prison. He hooks up with his hunchbacked servant from the earlier films, gathers a crew of goth minions, and carries on where he left off, as determined as ever to find a suitable woman to impregnate. He still delights in ranting about the non-existence of God, but doesn't do so at the same great length as he did previously.

This looked like it might be genuinely interesting. Zé is obviously out of place in modern Brazil - his early wander through São Paolo at night, a decaying old-school horror icon walking past junkies and prostitutes, looked like it was going to lead into something quite radical. Marins has always claimed that the Zé films were intended as social commentary, and it could have been a potent mix -old style gothic meets the horrors of modern slum life. Early scenes of police brutality seemed to be taking us in that direction.

Unfortunately, the film completely abandons this approach after about ten minutes, and from then on it's much the same as it was 40 years ago. Except not as good. One big part of the problem, sadly, is that in his 70s, Marins is simply too old to pull this off. His earlier performances, over the top though they were, worked perfectly in context. Now he's a fat old man with a bushy beard and really awkward looking fingernails. He faintly resembles Orson Welles as Falstaff. He still overacts, but he lacks the charisma of his younger self, and he's particularly ridiculous in the action scenes and (saints preserve us!) love scenes.

(There's obviously some self-awareness here, and the strain of odd humour that ran through the earlier films is still present. It's just difficult to appreciate this in the same way. The whole film feels like a reward to an old man who's popular on the horror convention circuit.)

The earlier films had minuscule budgets, and required real inventiveness in order to work - and work they do. Embodiment of Evil probably has the largest budget Marins has ever worked with, but sadly the lunatic intensity is absent. There are a few good bits - Zé is haunted by the ghosts of his victims from the previous films, and they appear as black and white spectres invading the modern, full colour world, which looks great. And there's a decent frisson of unease about two blind witches, at least at first.

But all in all this is a mess. Zé somehow acquires three mortal enemies, none of whom is hugely interesting. At the end, during the lengthy showdown, it's hard to say who we're meant to be rooting for. Zé will have alienated everyone by this point, but his enemies are hardly sympathetic. There's one decent bit of suspense, during a scene in a fairground ghost train, but the payoff isn't nearly good enough. Otherwise it's just about the violence.

And boy, is this violent. The earlier films, made in a more censorious time, couldn't show much, and are all the better for it. This shows pretty much everything. There's also a lot of nudity, all of it female. But it's the violence that stays with you. And it's too strong, given that what we're watching is really only there to indulge a certain type of nostalgic horror fan.

Most of the violence is directed against women (the men who are killed don't suffer nearly as much). Women have their scalps ripped off, their backs flayed; they have cockroaches poured all over them, or are sewn into pig carcases. You remember the nastiest bit in American Psycho? The bit with the rat? Yeah, that happens too. All this, along with gorgeous young things throwing themselves at a paunchy old man, makes for a film that's hard to like. This really deserves the 'torture porn' tag that gets thrown around a lot these days. The character of Zé was never this kind of sexual sadist in the past, and the earlier films aren't misogynistic on this level.

I'd guess that this is the kind of thing that Marins feels he has to do to compete in the horror world these days. There are moments that are effective without being too horrid. The tarantula scene (a Coffin Joe trademark) is done very nicely. Another trademark is the Hell sequence, but it's the least effective of all Marins' hells, and looks too much like a parody of a heavy metal album cover. Mostly the gore effects are very good (apart from the bit where he slices of someone's buttock, which looks ridiculous).

A lot of the violence - most of it - feels like it's meant to be titillating, which isn't my bag at all. Some stuff - a woman having her mouth sewn shut, for instance, which is obviously being done for real - looks like extreme S&M porn. Marins has obviously used real S&M performers for a lot of these scenes, which makes this resemble tiresome, in your face 'transgressive' drivel like the awful modern sequences in Jim VanBebber's Manson film. It feels too much like an old man trying to prove he's still radical. It doesn't work; I found it quite alienating, in a bad way.

It also feels incredibly juvenile. The anti-religion rants feel anaemic after years of Dawkins and his ilk ramming the same message home. Zé's enemies are all Catholic and make a big point of saying so, presumably just so atheist Zé can gloat all the more when he defeats them. It's quite adolescent, especially in all the 'women adore Zé and want to bear his child' stuff. The last two sequences in the film are remarkably self-glorifying and hilariously insulting to women - I hope they're intended as a joke.

There's a Making Of documentary on the disk which is half an hour long and the usual sort of thing. Interviews with cast and crew, behind the scenes footage, etc. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the actress who had to be sewn inside a dead pig became hysterical during shooting.

I'm not sure whether I think this should have been made or not. I didn't get on terribly well with it, but I'm sure it will find an audience (of creepy, mouth-breathing weirdoes who you wouldn't ask to babysit). There are posters advertising it on the London Underground at the moment, a weird decision since Marins has virtually no mainstream name recognition. Technically, it's nice that the old guy got to finish his trilogy, but in practice, it could have done with being a bit less sordid, and needed to try harder to recapture the magic of the earlier films.

(And eight of the earlier films are now available in a very cheap Anchor Bay box set - get stuck in!)

Summary: An old horror star goes too far