This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse

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.

Hose Mojica Marins is definitely a director whose films are many times overlooked. His character Coffin Joe is almost like the Freddy or Jason of Brazil. "This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse" is the second Coffin Joe film. After the evil undertaker has been cleared of his crimes, he's back to causing trouble yet again. He kidnaps beautiful women and looks to impregnate one of them to start a perfect race. After the ladies get tormented by spiders and snakes he kills them, leaving only one lady. What makes this scene horrifying is the 100 snakes and spiders that the actresses had to endure. The ghost of the one women vows to return from the dead and take vengeance on him, or is it just his imagination? It's never quite clear. Coffin Joe is an angry atheist who finally finds his evil mate which is the colonel's daughter. Even after him and his hunchback assistant smash her brother's head with a rock, she still likes him. She even skips her brother's funeral to get it on with him. The film's most memorable scene is it's surreal psychedelic ten minute Technicolor vision of hell. Death takes Coffin Joe to hell and he sees people scream in agony as they are whipped and tortured. In the scene fire, brimstone and snakes surround him wherever he goes. "This Night I'll Possess your Corpse" is chilling, gory, bizarre and subversive in it's religious and social themes. It's definitely a classic work of Brazialian cinema that deserves more attention.

Zé do Caixão (José Mojica Marins) survives and is absolved in court from his crimes. He moves to another small town, seeking out the perfect woman to deliver his son. Zé do Caixão and his deformed hunchback minion Bruno (Jose Lobo) abduct six women from the village and he submits them to a creepy experiment, trying to find the future mother of his offspring to keep alive his bloodline. The pregnant Jandira curses him and only Marcia (Nadia Freitas) survives, but Zé do Caixão concludes that she is not a superior woman. When Zé do Caixão sees the newcomer Laura (Tina Wohlers), who is the daughter of the powerful Coronel, he concludes that she is a superior woman and adequate to deliver his offspring. Meanwhile the Coronel asks his henchman Truncador (Antonio Fracari) to hire a gang of criminals to eliminate Zé do Caixão. But the undertaker seems to have a deal with the devil and never dies. However Laura dies with her unborn son and the population joins to expel him from their lands.

"Esta Noite Encarnarei no Teu Cadáver" is the perfect sequel to "À Meia- Noite Levarei Sua Alma". This creepy low-budget black and white film is more ambition than the first one and blends colors in the journey of Zé do Caixão to hell. It is also supported by a good story, performances, effects, dialogs with blasphemy and gore. The contradictory conclusion with the atheist character summoning God does not spoil the film. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Esta Noite Encarnarei no Teu Cadáver" ("This Night I Will Incarnate Your Corpse")

The idea of going bigger and bolder when tackling the sequel to a surprise hit is nothing new, as evidenced by Jose Mojica Marins' follow-up to cult Brazilian horror classic At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul. The first film managed to achieve cult status in its native country and with anybody lucky enough to see it elsewhere in the world, so director, co-writer and lead star Marins managed to bag a noticeably larger budget and used this to further explore the darkest regions of his mind. The result - the wonderfully-titled This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse - is little more than a shameless re-hash of the previous story, but as a piece of psychedelic gothic horror, it manages to outshine its predecessor in every way. At the end of Midnight, Marins' Ze do Caixao, or 'Coffin Joe', was left for dead by supernatural forces. But now he's back, and more determined than ever to find the perfect bride to carry his child.

While the villagers hid in fear of Joe last time around, they have since grown weary of his superior attitude and suspect him of the many disappearances that took place in their community. However, without sufficient evidence to bring him to trial, Joe is released to carry on with his undertaker duties and his search for the mother of his future son. Assisted this time by a hunchback named Bruno (Jose Lobo), Joe imprisons some of the village's most beautiful young ladies and tests them in order to prove their worthiness. Sadly, the test involves an army of spiders, and while one woman, Marcia (Nadia Freitas), remains calm, the others panic and are thrown into a pit to be killed by snakes. While Marcia is deemed unsuitable to bear his child, she is employed as a spy while Joe sets out to seduce the beautiful Laura (Tina Wohlers), the daughter of a local colonel who shares Joe's twisted outlook and logic.

Marins only stepped into the role of Coffin Joe when the original actor dropped out before the first film started production, but this proved to be a stroke of luck as it's difficult to imagine anybody else donning the top hat, neatly-trimmed beard and grotesque, talon-like fingernails. Joe is more cunning this time around, using his wits to frame a local strongman for the murders and to escape some violent confrontations. A curse placed upon him by one of his victims slowly drives him mad, leading to one of the film's most exceptional set-pieces. In his dreams, Joe journeys into hell, a cesspit of cruelty and torture shot in bold colour (the rest of the picture is grainy black-and-white). Bloody limbs and body parts emerge from the stone walls and poor souls are whipped and beaten continuously is a never-ending carousel of savagery. It's a nightmare that even terrifies Joe, and this segment provides a disturbing window into Marins' imagination. This second entry into the Coffin Joe series moves a mile-a-minute, offering everything from phoney-looking backdrops to smoke-machine special effects as it touches on almost every taboo imaginable, but this excess is all part of its charm, and what makes the world of Ze do Caixao so unique.

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...