On the Arrow streaming channel in February, there is more macabre entertainment with another batch of Coffin Joe movies. With his iconic long fingernails, top hat and cape, Zé do Caixão (Coffin Joe) was the creation of Brazilian filmmaker José Mojica Marins, who wrote, directed and starred in a series of outrageous movies from 1964 to 2008.
Newly restored from the best available elements and packed with new and archival extras, the documentary Inside the Mind of Coffin Joe is a love letter to one of the great iconoclasts of horror, who forged his films in the face of military dictatorship and religious censorship to become Brazil’s national Boogeyman.
The rarely-seen When the Gods Fall Asleep continues the series’ blackly comic trajectory as our messianic cult figure sets out to right wrongs, expose corruption and end social unrest. The Strange Hostel of Naked Pleasures brings Zé do Caixão back to the screen as the proprietor of an isolated guest house where, on a dark and stormy night, an eclectic group of strangers seek shelter.
In Hellish Flesh, Dr George Medeiros is a brilliant scientist, but a neglectful husband whose wife takes a lover and plans to murder George for his fortune, but the doctor is only disfigured and returns with a plan for revenge! Meanwhile, in Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind, the colleagues of a psychiatric doctor driven to insanity by nightmare visions of Zé do Caixão enlist the character’s creator, José Mojica Marins, to convince the patient that Zé does not exist – but all is not as it seems!
Finally, in Embodiment of Evil, Marins returns to the role that made his name one last time, as Zé do Caixão emerges onto the streets of São Paulo in 2008, haunted by ghostly visions and the spirits of past victims, and still in pursuit of the woman who can give him the perfect child.
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