José Mojica Marins directed one of the stories in Brazilian anthology Trilogy of Terror, so I was expecting it to be a very strange film, but I never thought for a minute that Marins' contribution would be the story that makes most sense.
The first tale is The Deal, by director Ozualdo Ribeiro Candeias, but I really don't know the deal is with this one - I haven't the slightest clue what it was about. A man acts like a chimpanzee and pulls funny faces. There are topless women with beards. Three men adjust their hats at the same time. A woman laughs like possessed Linda from The Evil Dead and throws a chicken. Someone gets stabbed. People dance in a cave. And a guy wears a crown of thorns. If I could swear on IMDb, this review would be full of expletives. 0/10 for this one.
Luiz Sérgio Person directs the second story, Procession of the Dead, which isn't much better, but is a bit shorter, so we should count our blessings: a young boy, Quinzinho, is in the mountain trapping birds when he discovers a corpse clutching a machine gun. The locals are concerned that the body is related to stories of armed ghosts that haunt the mines at night. The boy's father goes to the mine to show how wrong they are, but bumps into the gun-toting spooks, who smash in his chest. At the end of this tale, Quinzinho returns to where he found the body, where a man gives the lad a loaded machine gun to fire. Your guess is as good as mine... 1/10 for the second segment.
Marins directs the final story, Macabre Nightmare, which deals with a man, Claudio, who is plagued by terrifying dreams of freaky faces and creepy crawlies, and who is scared that he will be buried alive. When Claudio and his fiancée Rosana go to the park, they are attacked by a gang of deformed criminals: Rosana is gang raped and Claudio is left for dead. After Claudio's funeral, Rosana notices something that makes her convinced that Claudio has been buried alive, just as he feared. The mourners rush back to the grave and dig up the coffin, only to find that Claudio has died in terror trying to claw his way out of his coffin. A macumba ritual in which an old dude eats bugs and worms and a man removing women's clothes with a whip is classic Marins weirdness, and the final shot of Claudio's face with bulging bloodied eyes is wonderfully gruesome. 6.5/10 for Marins' tale.
Average score: 2.5/10, generously rounded up to 3 for IMDb.
