At Midnight, I'll Take your Soul

 At a forum at Lincoln Center, the director of Bacurau, a sort of Brazilian spaghetti-western, said that he admired Jose Mojico Marins, whose work is "vastly underrated."  Jose Mojico Marins was popularly known as Ze de Caixho ("Coffin Joe"), not only the protagonist but also the director of a trilogy of horror films featuring that character.  At the Lincoln Center interview, the film makers said that Marins had, in effect, invented genre films in Brazil, a strange claim that can't be exactly true.  The first Coffin Joe picture was released in 1963, immediately condemned by the Catholic Church, and an enormous box-office success.  That picture is At Midnight, I'll take your Soul.  The movie is zero-budget, shot on grainy black-and-white, with acting that looks like it was perpetrated by friends of the director.  Marins plays Ze ("Joe").  People have large families in Brazil and Marins, in an interview, claims that his film crews were usually comprised of the siblings and kin of his girlfriends.  Whenever he ended a relationship, he had to train a brand-new crew.  

At Midnight... is pretty vile.  But horror films are generally vile and this one is fairly scary and has a few good effects.  Coffin Joe is a local undertaker who seems to have read too much Nietzsche:  he spends most of his time ranting about how crime is the prerogative of the strong.  His obsession is begetting a son since he believes that the "blood-line" is the only immortality granted to human beings.  When Joe discovers that his long-suffering girlfriend, Lenita, is barren, he chloroforms her, straps her to a bed with what looks like duct-tape over her mouth, and unleashes his pet tarantula on her.  (The actress is extraordinarily game, apparently allowing the hairy creature to crawl all over her.)  Of course, the tarantula bites and poor Lenita expires as Ze rants and laughs maniacally.  In the local tavern, staffed by the same set of barflies in every scene, Ze bullies everyone.  When one man refuses to play cards with him, Ze cuts off his fingers with a broken bottle.  Another guy gets whipped repeatedly across his bald head and face.  Ze's best-friend is the gullible Antonio, a man cursed with a beautiful (and presumably fertile) girlfriend, Terezinha.  Ze murders Antonio after first haranguing him about his own superiority and fearlessness.  The bludgeoned Antonio revives in the bathtub where Ze has placed him and so the poor guy has to be killed again, this time drowned in the gory water.  Ze, then, lures Terezinha to his nightmarish house -- it's full of mannequin hands and arms, grotesque statues and stacks of coffins.  There he beats her to a pulp, kisses her bloody wounds, and, then, ravishes her.  Terezinha says that Joe's "ruined her" and that she will commit suicide.  Joe responds sardonically that "this is what they all say."  The next shot is a jump cut to a woman's face shrieking right into the camera -- the woman is peering through a window and a pan shows us that Terezinha has, in fact, hanged herself.  The local doctor plans an autopsy on Antonio.  This upsets Joe who gouges out the physician's eyes with his enormously long, hooked fingernails.  Joe, then, lights the poor whimpering blind man on fire.  It's the Day of the Dead and Joe orders all the barflies to drink with him.  A gypsy woman ,who has the thankless role of baying at all the characters while stroking a skull as if it were her pet cat, has prophesied that Joe will have his soul snatched from him at midnight, after the "procession of the dead."  Of course, Joe is skeptical and mocks the woman as a hag and a witch. A comely  female visitor to town arrives and asks for an escort to her cousin's place, inconveniently located on the other side of the local cemetery.  No one is willing to walk with her past the cemetery -- no one, that is, except Coffin Joe.  He takes the woman to her relative's door, bids her goodbye in a courteous fashion, and, then, of course, is beset by spooks.  He goes mad and, in his terror, flees into the cemetery, a bad idea, it seems.  The promised procession of the dead appears, solarized and appearing on negative film-stock.  Joe goes berserk and ends up in the crypt where Antonio and Terezinha are resting in their coffins.  For some reason, Joe breaks open the coffins and inspects the rotting corpses -- Antonio has Joe's pet spider sitting like a tea-cosy on his face; Terezinha's features sport a dozen busy maggots.  Joe ends up head down, eyes bulging and dead as a doornail.  (I guess he will be revived for two later reboots of the franchise.)

Apparently, the picture was re-released a couple times, most recently in 2002 in which it is tricked-out with a color prologue in which Joe rants at the audience while caressing a couple of zombie-girls.  This is prologue to the film's original prologue in which the gypsy with the skull flamboyantly taunts the audience, daring them to watch the film which, she says, is sure to induce nightmares.  Indeed, at one point, she bellows at the audience that they've made a big mistake buying a ticket to this movie and they would be well-advised to flee the theater.  (Given the shoddiness of the film, she may have a point.)  The movie is pretty barren-- Joe is a pipsqueak wearing a black top-hat and a cape:  he seems to weigh about 120 and is half the size of the thugs that he beats up in the bar.  Before each murder, we are treated to a close-up of his glaring eyes with one eyebrow dramatically raised.  Then, we get an even closer shot featuring his uni-brow, something that Brazilians apparently regard as particularly horrifying.  The sets consist of what looks like a warehouse full of coffins with some smoke and cobwebs in the corner, a miniature forest of potted plants with which Joe keeps wrestling -- for some reason, he's always emerging from behind the leafy branches of these little trees -- and a tavern that would embarrass Ed Wood. Joe's house is full of macabre gew-gaws and he sometimes rants from atop a casket, twirling a weird suspended cage adorned with gothic filigree -- I have no idea what this object is supposed to be, but it is eye-catching.  The best performance in the film is by the tarantula who does what tarantulas do.  There's a weird effect in which Joe's pipe is lit by a corpse who appears in a flickering halo of bright specks -- Marins said he glued glitter onto the negative.  Coffin Joe is an all-purpose bad guy: an avowed atheist, he orders lamb for his Good Friday repast and gnaws on the bones while a religious procession passes under his window (a good effect).  Later, in the tavern, he forces the local barflies to eat meat from a giant lamb drumstick that he wields sort of like Fred Flintstone with his dino-T-bone..  The Catholic Church seems to have been most incensed by the meat-eating on Friday; the rest of the rape and mayhem presumably didn't bother them.  The movie is not so bad as to be funny -- it's just cheap and unpleasant.

Marins, in the first decade of the 2000's was a fat little man with grotesque fingernails, mostly bald with furry eyebrows.  He seems to have been a great fabulist.  He claims his mother was a tango-singer and his father a bullfighter.  In his twenties, he toured the outback of Minas Gerais with a projector and lurid little films featuring rape, torture, and lots of poorly staged sword-fighting.  Apparently, he earned a living projecting these things in tiny impoverished villages.  A Catholic priest apparently gave him one of his first cameras.