Coffin Joe, the cult horror character created by Brazilian writer/director José Mojica Marins, hosts a trilogy of macabre tales.
First up is The Dollmaker, which sees a group of thugs breaking into the house of an elderly doll maker to look for an alleged stash of money. Unable to find any gold, the gang take a different kind of prize, raping the doll-maker's four beautiful daughters. The table are turned on the brutes, however, when the old man pulls a gun on the them, and the girls proceed to pluck out the mens' eyes for use in their new dolls. The plot for this one isn't anything special, with a predictable denouement, but it offers plenty of gratuitous T&A and the gory sight of the thugs' decapitated heads sans eyeballs.
The second story is Obsession, which seriously ups the weirdness ante. A balloon seller becomes obsessed with a beautiful woman, stalking her from a distance, carrying with him the box of new shoes dropped by woman during a shopping trip. On the woman's wedding day, she is stabbed and killed by a love rival. The balloon seller follows the woman's funeral procession to a crypt, which he breaks into after dark in order to fulfil his desires and return the lost shoes. A strangely lyrical tale told entirely without dialogue, Obsession tends to plod for much of its run-time, but ends in a satisfyingly twisted manner, the balloon seller breaking open the dead woman's coffin and stripping her corpse for a spot of necrophilia.
The last episode opens with the broadcast of a television debate show in which Professor Oaxiac Odez (Marins) expounds his theory that love doesn't exist. After the show, the professor invites a fellow panel member and his wife to his home, where he proceeds to shock and torture the couple in order to prove his ideology. As with his earlier Coffin Joe films, this one sees Marins' character waffling on incessantly about his lunatic philosophies, but also features plenty of exploitative content, including a man being spoon-fed molten metal, needles being pushed through flesh (for real), a sadistic acid attack, the wife drinking her husband's blood (fresh from the jugular) to quench her thirst, and a couple of gory scenes of cannibalism.
Probably not the kind of thing to appeal to casual horror fans, but those who dig weird cult world cinema should find this entertaining, especially if, like me, they also particularly enjoy the anthology format. One thing's for sure
Marins' world is very strange indeed.
