I am becoming aware of just how popular and influential the character of Coffin Joe is. This movie is considered the first horror movie from Brazil and it is also the genesis piece of a trilogy. Jose reviewed the second one called This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse. The third film is called Embodiment of Evil. In these films Ze (known as Coffin Joe to us), is a mysterious dude clad in black, with a top hat, pipe, and full beard. He works as a funeral director but his true mission is finding a woman to bear him a child. In the meantime he walks around town terrorizing people and philosophizing.

The background of the character is that he had been in WWII and returned home faithless and disillusioned about everything, especially with his wife Lenita cheating on him and still unable to bear him a child which seems to be the main thing he’s after. Now he revolts against most anything especially mocking the traditions of religion and the Catholic Church.

Encountering his friend Antonio’s fiancé Terezinha he offers to escort her home and tries to kiss her on their walk. She bites his tongue. Later at a bar he cheats on a card game and smashes the players hand down with a broken bottle when he won’t pay up. Then after the brawl he started he promises to charge double to bury anyone he kills. It sounds to me like we’ve got Satan’s badass on our hands. When he gets home he drugs and ties up his wife to the bed and watches her die from the lethal spider bite of the critter he placed on her. The violence continues as he kills Antonio with a fire poker to the head in the man’s living room and then finishes him off by drowning him in the bath tub.

Now he can move in on Terezinha and perhaps achieve a spawn. He visits her late at night and slaps her around even punching her hard in the face when she resists his advancements. He manages to rape her but by the next day she’s hanged herself in defiance of bearing him a child. Nobody in town really liked Ze, except maybe for his wife Lenita and two friends: Antonio and Terezinha and Ze decided to kill them off. Well one was a suicide, but Ze was to blame. It seems to me all his philosophies are manure and in the end he can’t stand himself.

Later Coffin Joe has a breakdown during a thunderstorm because he doesn’t have a child and philosophizes about everything under the sun for eight minutes with no one to listen to him. The next time we see him he’s causing trouble at the bar again but finds himself a lost woman to escort home. No one else would since it’s the "Day of the Dead", a holy, day. After he’s done with her he gets caught up and frightened by a procession of ghosts and some dire prophecies of a gypsy witch from earlier in the film are coming true. At midnight they will take Ze’s soul! Bewildered, he wanders into the crypt where Antonio and Terezinha are buried and opens their coffins. He goes insane and dies either by fright or being hit by thunder. Some say the spirits got to him. I say good riddance!

I was beyond impressed with this simple film. The movie opens up with the gypsy witch warning us about the film and we are taken on a dark ride into the mouth of agony and hate. The philosophy of Ze and the film itself are bold and timeless. The darkness in the soul of Ze is unmatched by any other film villain I have yet to see. Although I do recommend this film I must warn that the themes and depictions of hate are truly both frightening and deeply disturbing.

- Jorge Antonio Lopez