This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse

THIS NIGHT I WILL POSSESS YOUR CORPSE is the even more fiendish follow-up to the first film. Escaping death and justice, Coffin Joe (Jose Mojica Marins) returns to his mission of producing a son and heir to his legacy of blasphemous eeevil.

Joe kidnaps 6 women, torturing them with an army of tarantulas, and subjecting the unluckiest ones to a pit of snakes. There's also a head crushing by stone slab for one particular male pest! CORPSE introduces us to Joe's hunchback henchman, Bruno. In addition, we are treated to the infamous, full-color Hell sequence, complete with suffering souls!

Once again, as with the first movie, this is a sadistic, demonic masterpiece...

Following up the success of his first appearance as Coffin Joe, Mojica filmed the second part of his horror trilogy with his character. The story starts exactly where the first movie left off, with Coffin Joe surviving the supernatural attack of the first movie. Being absolved of the crimes he commited, he returns to his city, still in search of the ideal woman to bear him a perfect son, this time aided by the hunchback servant Bruno. Joe kidnaps and tests several women who may prove worthy of bearing his offspring. All of them fail, and as they are being eliminated (with real live snakes!) a curse is set upon Coffin Joe...a curse that will make the funeral agent see hell in colour! A more ambitious follow-up for the first movie, "This night" suffered cuts and alterations on its dialogues by the military dictatorship censors prior to its release in Brazil. The coloured sequence of Joe's descent into hell (the rest of the movie was shot in B&W) are a fine example of the best that Mojica's cinema has to offer: brilliant, raw ideas on a shoestring budget.

This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse (1967)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Sequel to AT MIDNIGHT I'LL TAKE YOUR SOUL, picks right up where that movie left off. Coffin Joe (Marins) survives his ordeal and is freed from all murder charges due to a lack of evidence. He heads back to a small town to search for a bride to give him a son and kidnaps several women for possible candidates but ends up killing the wrong one as she swears vengeance on his soul. Even though this here is a sequel, it does play out more like a remake as both films are pretty much the same story, although its drawn out more here. The film being drawn out to a whopping 107-minutes is the real downfall because it could have lost a good fifteen or twenty-minutes and the pacing would have been much better. With that said, there's still plenty to enjoy here with Marins once again doing a great job on such a small budget. The budget is obviously bigger than the previous film but I'd say the majority of it was spent on the highlight of the film, which is an amazing sequence where Coffin Joe goes to Hell. This is when the film switches over the color and how they created the look of this secret really had my brain rambling in trying to figure it out. The only way I can explain the colors are if you've ever seen a melted bag of Skittles. The way this sequence comes off is never scary but it's certainly an amazing treat for the eyes as not only do we get the great color but we also get all sorts of strange stabbings, beatings and various other bad deeds being carried out by Satan himself. Marins once again gives a great performance and the supporting cast are decent enough for what they have to do. It's worth noting that the kidnapped women were all very brave considering they had to let spiders and snakes all over them. One woman on the bed was obviously terrified as can be seen with her extremely heavy breathing. The ending packs a nice little punch as well as the music score. Fans of the first film will certainly want to check this one out and while it's not as good as the first, it does have enough going for it to make it worth viewing.

This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse, the sequel to director José Mojica Marins' cult horror At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul (1963), sees the return of amoral, blasphemous gravedigger Zé do Caixão (José Mojica Marins), who, having recovered from his seemingly fatal supernatural ordeal in the first film, and having been absolved of all past crimes, returns to his village to continue his quest to find the perfect woman to bear him a son.

Aided by disfigured hunchback Bruno (Jose Lobo), Zé abducts six sexy women, whom he subjects to a horrific trial by spider (this scene is an arachnophobe's nightmare!) to determine their suitability as mates. Only one woman, Marcia (Nadia Freitas), passes the test, but—just a little upset by the fact that the other five women are subsequently killed—she refuses to make love to Zé. He surmises that she is not the superior specimen he believed her to be, but allows her to go free.

Eventually, despite his silly cape, stupid hat, obscenely long fingernails, AND a most magnificent mono-brow, Zé somehow wins the heart of local babe Laura (Tina Wohlers), who is only too willing to have his child. But things don't go smoothly for the twisted loon: he suffers from hellish nightmares after discovering that one of the women he killed was pregnant, goes even more crazy when Laura and his unborn son suddenly pop their clogs, and is captured and beaten by muscle-man Truncador (Antonio Fracari) and his pals, before being pursued by Laura's father and a bloodthirsty mob into a swamp, where he drowns.

Several exploitative scenes of sadism and gory violence, some gratuitous nudity, and an ambitious, surreal, multi-coloured nightmare sequence all go to make This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse marginally more enjoyable than the disappointing first movie, but overall it still proves something of a chore to sit through thanks to the fact that much of its 108 minute running time consists of Zé's interminably dull ranting about the nonexistence of God and his plans to create the perfect child.

This sequel lacks a little of noir atmosphere present in At Midnight I will Take Your Soul. It also reinforces more Josefel "Coffin Joe" Zanatas's logics in prejudice of mistery (all spiritual or magic elements in the former movie are proved to be only his imagination and fears): he believes there is no life after death, then the only way to be ethernal is to have offspring. That is why he seeks the most perfect woman possible to give him a child, "a perfect child" or preferably "a perfect son" (she may be not only beautiful but also share his eugenics belief, have no fear, and refuse any religion). There is also why he kills those who he believes that will not generate good children, and why be cares so much about children and particularly babies and fetuses. However, two of the best filmed scenes of his career are from this movie: the curse of Janaína and the sequence from him on his bedroom until his entrance in hell. The portrayal of hell in colour, constrating with black and white cinematography in the rest of the movie, is interesting but not the best moment.