The Strange Hostel of Naked Pleasures

Generally speaking, I am a fan of the iconic Brazilian Horror filmmaker José Mojica Marins and his most famous creation and alter ego Zé do Caixão aka. Coffin Joe. I liked the first two Coffin Joe films "À Meia-Noite Levarei Sua Alma" ("At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul") and "Esta Noite Encarnarei no Teu Cadáver" ("This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse") (both from 1964) and I absolutely loved the third film "O Estranho Mundo de Zé do Caixão" ("The Strange World of Coffin Joe") of 1968, which is a morbid anthology in which the eponymous gravedigger only gives an introduction. The fourth (sorta) Coffin Joe feature "O Ridual Dos Sádicos" ("Awakening of the Beast", 1970) already bored me, and I regret to say that I hated this film. "A Estranha Hospedaria dos Prazeres" aka. "The Strange Hostel of Naked Pleasures" (1976) is an insufferably boring affair that is not saved by its unintentional (?) fun-factor, since it just drags and drags way too slowly to be fun to watch. After a never-ending bizarre sequence in the beginning, Zé Do Caixão is apparently not looking for a woman to bear him a son any longer, but has opened a hostel in which, naturally, strange things are going on...

Seriously, "The Strange Hostel of Naked Pleasures" is an excruciatingly tiresome affair. The orgy scene in which a bunch of people in red speedos are yelling "Everybody Naked! Great" for about ten minutes must be one of the least erotic sex scenes ever filmed. A few outburst of morbidity are not nearly enough to make the film watchable. The first three Coffin Joe films (especially the third) were incredibly macabre and controversial for their time. This one really isn't. I have no idea why this is labeled an "Adult" film on IMDb; there is no pornography involved, the film isn't more explicit than any other 70s Exploitation film. I seriously hope that the four remaining films in my 9-film Coffin Joe DVD-Box are going to be better than this one, and preferably more like the first three. 2.5 out of 10 for the cult-value. Overall, one to avoid.

The Strange Hostel of Naked Pleasures opens with a bizarre ritual: a coffin, some bongo players, topless men in a mosh pit, several women in their underwear performing crap dance moves, and deformed creatures (men in unconvincing rubber masks) wailing like banshees while lightning strikes. After what seems like an eternity, the coffin opens and out pops Zé do Caixão (José Mojica Marins), who stands there while his cape and hat (a natty bowler, rather than a top hat) appear out of thin air. Then Zé begins to spout his usual line of dreary philosophy while balls of black modelling clay on wires pass by, and the viewer asks themselves 'Why did they have to bring him back?' and 'What am I doing wasting my life watching this rubbish?'.

So what does Zé do next? Why, he enters the hospitality industry of course, setting up an inn for passing strangers, of which there seems to be plenty: before long, his rooms are full of gamblers, hippies, corrupt businessmen, jewel thieves and lovers, none of whom are put off by their creepy host. The gamblers gamble, the lovers get smoochy, the businessmen make dodgy deals, the jewel thieves check out their haul, and the hippies conduct an orgy just like the one in Marins' earlier surreal oddity End of Man, repeatedly chanting 'Everybody naked, great!' while they strip off—all of which proves tedious in the extreme.

After much surreal strangeness (animals and insects dying, a clock with a beating heart, a burning veil over the camera lens), the not-entirely-unexpected twist ending reveals that all of the guests are actually ghosts, having met with violent deaths before they arrived, that the inn is, in reality, a cemetery, and that the innkeeper is Death (Zé's face transforming into a skull with blood dripping from the eye sockets). Yawn!

3/10 for Marins' hilarious pearls of wisdom, which include: 'There is no redemption for those who want to be blinder than the blind one having his sight to see' and 'The one who searches for the beginning of the end will find an end with no beginning'. Right you are!

Strange Hostel of Naked Pleasures, The (1976)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Brazilian horror film has Jose Mojica Marins, the man behind Coffin Joe, running a hostel where a mixed group of people, ranging from hippies to gamblers, show up with nightmarish events to follow. I've heard some call this a Coffin Joe film but I don't see it as such since Marins' character, the hostel owner, is never called that nor is it ever implied that he's Coffin Joe. With that said, I found the film pretty hard to get through for a variety of reasons but the biggest being the dialogue. It really seemed like they were going for some type of Bob Dylan like lyrics because Marins' character is constantly coming up with various sayings, which are meant to be thought provoking but they left me wanting to laugh. After a while these sayings stop being funny and instead just come off as lame and this is what happened to the film as it kept going. For the most part we've got a twenty-minute movie spread out to 78-minutes and that means we get a bunch of scenes, which just replay over and over. This includes one of the dumbest orgy sequences I've ever seen where the hippies are just passing around bottles of vodka while canting an incredibly stupid line about getting naked. The final twenty-minutes is when the violence starts to kick up and we get countless more lines trying to be deep. I'm really not sure what the killings were about since the lines are so dumb but we get a wide range of events with a couple nice sequences. One such sequence is when a man is shot in the head only to have firework sparks come out before the screen turns all red in blood. We have other scenes involving the likes of a snake and crab but these add to very little. The entire movie is strange as you might expect and there's a certain level of atmosphere, especially the first ten minutes, but in the end the movie is just too dull to really work. Fans of the bizarre or surreal will want to check this out but others should certainly stay clear. Original title: A Estranha Hospedaria dos Prazeres.

José Mojica Marins (a.k.a. Coffin Joe) is something of a hit and miss director for me. Sometimes his brand of low budget horror surrealism works pretty well but on other occasions the results are somewhat tedious. Strange Hostel of Naked Pleasures falls into this latter category sadly. It begins brightly enough though with an extended scene of a strange ceremony where Marins character is resurrected from the dead. There are dancing women, drumming men, weird imagery and avant-garde music throughout. The whole segment has a real demented rhythm to it. It turns out, however, that this opening sequence is the best part in the entire movie. After it, the action shifts to a hostel run by Marin's character. More specifically to events surrounding one stormy night. The hostel takes in several guests, including a group of hippies, corrupt gambling businessmen and an adulterous couple. It seems that uncle Joe is some kind of extreme supernatural moralist and he sets about killing his amoral guests.

This sounds all well and good but the problem is that it's all a bit tiresome in reality. Sure it's weird and surreal but it's also dull. It's the latter factor that's the big problem here. The pacing's not too great, which is admittedly a Marins trait in general but there is a lot of unnecessary repetition such as the silly hippy orgy where the same shots are seen over and over and the chant 'Everybody naked! Great!' is repeatedly seemingly endlessly. Otherwise, scenes drag out and the constant atonal music makes it even more unbearable. It's got its moments but overall it's hard work getting through this one.

Probably the worst of José Mojica Marins's horror films, in spite of the good general idea. There is much more noise (what a noisy film! Lots of screams and a very unfortunate music score that mostly does not fit the movie) and no good connections for a chaotic sequence of not very well shot footage (differently from Mojica's best films, despite their low budget). The film also lacks the innovative editing of other movies by Mojica. Here, his famous character Coffin Joe has some different traits, what is by far the most interesting element: his psychic powers are impressive, being able to charm, kill, cause accidents... In the very beginning, he is ressurrected in a ritual (which mixes interesting trance dark scenes of drummers with an amateur performance of beautiful girls in bikini). Then, he recruits employers and guests for his lodge, under a heavy storm. His selection clearly indicated that those who were accepted were destined to. Among them, there were gamblers (one of them being the victim of the other three), a gigolo and his women, an adulterous couple, a man wishing to commit suicide, other characters I could not understand who they were (robbers?), and the worst of them all: a numerous "party hard" group of drunk people who enjoyed to shout "todo mundo nu, oba!" ("everybody nude! Oh yeah!") while dancing naked (they only shut up when make sex!). Perhaps a new cut, shortening it a lot, could have saved the film. However, in the wat it was released, it is hard to understand (not the general trend, which is predictable, but the specific fates of each character) and to keep interested on it.