Why, why, why do I keep coming back to these retarded Coffin Joe movies??? If it wasn't for you guys, the loyal obscure movie fans of Strictly Splatter, I would disavow any knowledge of the ridiculous Coffin Joe and his bullshit antics. I hate the guy, I really do! However, if his damn horrible movies are made readily available to me then I am powerless to resist the urge to watch them. Does that make them good or compelling to me on some deep, dark, unconscious level? No, I'm just a bad movie masochist and I shall suffer the slings and arrows for you, my fiends, so you can live a carefree life enjoying the finer bad movies out there and avoid the incomprehensible slush that is a Coffin Joe opus. With that in mind, lets discuss what I consider his best film.

The opening credits play over some kind of comic book while the brilliant (note sarcasm) musical score tries to be scary by consisting of screams, moans, and explosion noises. The first image of the film, after Coffin Joe's dumbass intro where he says he is the master of darkness and only maniacs can be a part of his world or some crap, is a woman actually injecting herself in the foot, presumably with drugs. She proceeds to strip naked for the 5 ugliest guys in Brazil and then pees in a pot for them (but it could have been a shit, all I saw was her ass lowering onto the pot). Not the most promising start, but this is a Coffin Joe movie so weird crap is expected. The film turns out to actually be more of a docu-drama about the psychology of drug use. A group of doctors are discussing the exploits of degenerates. We then get the disturbing short story of a teen girl who is kidnapped by some guys after school, taken to a house where five other guys are waiting, and she starts smoking pot. She gets so turned on that she lets the guys go down on her, then a guy dressed like Moses shows up and shoves his staff up her cooch, killing her.

The point of this pointless movie is to show the horrible effects of drugs on modern society. Jose Mojica Marins appears as himself in the film and he participates in the discussion of the use of drugs and their escalation of depravity. We basically get scene after scene of debauched drug use and sexuality. There are so many and they are all 'WHAT THE FUCK' moments, but I will spare you the lamer ones and just give the highlights reel. There's the story of the woman who watches her black butler fuck her daughter while she snorts coke and pets a pony (no joke). Or the one about the guy who gets off washing a girl's bra. The film abruptly switches from The Red Shoe Diaries to a surprisingly standard plot about the lead doctor explaining how he tested the effects of LCD on four patients by making them watch Coffin Joe movies. The four unlucky bastards pretty much spend the last twenty minutes of the movie hallucinating.

The film switches from black and white to vibrant color for the hallucination sequences. These feature a stairway of half-naked men, a funeral with freaky mourners, faces painted on asses, and some other random crap that tries to be scary. The movie was actually getting interesting until this dull, prolonged hallucination clusterfuck. When they come out of it, it appears as if Coffin Joe has actually communicated to them his gothic wisdom, which makes no sense, because he isn't real. The doctor then reveals to his peers that the experiment was fake. He never used LCD. Instead he injected them with water and their hallucination proves that drugs are an excuse to release the darkest instincts within us. Meaning that if someone commits a crime while on drugs, it was only because the mind was already fucked up and the drugs just gave him permission to act on his or her sick fantasies. Then Marins walks outside after the meeting and watches a woman get into a guy's car (???). FIM!

An anti-drug movie by Coffin Joe? The first half of this movie was more soft-core porn than a "horror" movie in the Coffin Joe sense of the word. The second half was kind of interesting as the doctor went about his experiment and the film followed a logical, understandable flow of events. But then Coffin Joe sticks his big, fat, pretentious foot in it and gives us the boring and lengthy hallucination scene where he tries his hardest to be scary. I've never seen someone try so hard to be a scary badass and come off as a chia pet-faced dork that is as threatening as a stomach ache. The only effective things in the movie are the shots of people actually jabbing themselves with hypodermic needles. The film gets one coffin because in my estimation it is Coffin Joe's best film. It starts as sexual depravity and transforms into an interesting piece of metafiction. It may be uneven, and not a true Coffin Joe movie, but it is well made and it fits in quite nicely with the films of Goddard and whatnot. In the end, however, it still had a ton of WTF moments and was incredibly boring. This is not your typical Coffin Joe movie, so if you're looking for some of his gothic-bullshit movies stay away. Unless you're a completist, or a drug addict.

- Jose Prendes