I love – and I do really mean LOVE –horror movies and I will always defend my favorite genre against prudish and prejudiced people who keep on claiming it's an overall unintelligent and superfluous type of cinema. Of course, it's very difficult to safeguard a genre and to hold a plea about its strong points when there are mad-raving, block-headed jesters like Coffin Joe out there, whose sole intentions are to shock and repulse audiences with unsettling images of torture, misogyny, mutilation, perversion, blasphemy and even pure hell. "Embodiment of Evil", the final installment of Coffin Joe's trilogy that started with "At Midnight I'll Take You Soul" and "This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse" over forty years, easily ranks in the top five of most unpleasant and most disgusting movies I ever watched in my life and, no, this honestly shouldn't be considered a recommendation! José Mojica Marins' return to the international export market is shamelessly exploitative and sickening just for the sake of being sickening. I've never been much of a fan of the previous films – nor of Coffin Joe's entire repertoire, for that matter – but at least his 60's movies could pass off as surrealistic efforts and/or existential experiments. Numerous sequences and isolated shots in "Embodiment of Evil" are genuinely frightening haunting, like the hanging with the meat hooks or a rape scene with a living rat, but they're just so damn redundant and gratuitous. The make-up effects and smutty scenery also looks very realistic, which makes it all even worse. This definitely isn't a low-budgeted production like the first two obviously were, and I honestly think this money could have served better purposes in a country like Brazil. It's also a worrying thought that this is probably the movie Coffin Joe already wanted to make forty years ago, if I only had the budgetary possibilities. What personally upsets and disturbs me the absolute most is that José Mojica Marins clearly knows what he's doing and almost deliberately seems to inflict his madness onto the people. I'm honestly convinced that this is the type of trash that causes mentally unstable and/or easily influenced people to go berserk and do all sorts of crazy stuff. Marins literally glorifies the violence and perversity that his alter ego Coffin Joe proclaims and practices. Purely talking in terms of cinema, "Embodiment of Evil" is a giant disaster. There's not a trace of continuity, script-coherence or building up tension. The performances are weaker than weak and the protagonist's monologues, that seem to go on forever, are nonsensical and boring. The plot is exactly the same as it was forty years ago, namely deranged freak wishes to obtain immortality by carefully selecting the perfect wife who can then subsequently bear him his perfect son. The gravedigger with the hideous and rancid beard spent all these years in jail, but now a leak in the juridical system set him free. It has to be said, however, the old-age Coffin Joe looks at least a dozen times more menacing than young Coffin Joe. He now looks like an authentic old and sleazy pervert, which also happens to be exactly what he is.
Review of Embodiment of Evil
