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In a feat of pure will and cinematic street smarts, first-time director Marins took a few scraps of film, a 600 square-foot studio and a miniscule budget pieced together by selling his family's house and car, and created this dazzling garage Guignol masterpiece that rocked Brazil's pop culture and psyche with its extreme violence, taboo-smashing scenes, and the creation of an indelible fully-realized character that would go on to capture the imaginations of horror fans around the world -- Coffin Joe! God-defying and child-loving, philosophizing and self-aggrandizing, sadistic and ballistic, prone to proclamations and exaggerations (usually delivered via maniacally melodramatic monologues in Marins' unique acting style), Coffin Joe debuts here as a fearsome undertaker who terrorizes the citizens with his violent, narcissistic behavior. Just for kicks he ties up a woman and lets spiders crawl over her, and, even more horrifyingly, he voraciously eats meat on Good Friday! One of the great debuts in horror in history.
Dir. José Mojica Marins, 1964, 35mm, 84 min.

After the overwhelming success of At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul, Marins pulled out all the stops for his second picture, making the Coffin Joe movie that was perhaps his masterpiece -- and, oddly enough, a romance of sorts. Focusing on Coffin Joe's "love life," the plot is about his attempt to find a single superior woman to be his ideal mate, one that will help him in his quest to continue his bloodline by creating the "perfect" spawn, using his own perverse selection process—a kind of cross between "The Bachelor" and "Fear Factor". In almost every way, Marins ups the ante from the first film, but without losing At Midnight’s punk filmmaking pleasures (the scratched-on-film title sequence alone is shatteringly cool). You likes the tarantula crawling up a girl’s nightie? Here's an army of tarantulas! Here's a roomful of cuties for them to crawl all over! You like the nightmarish ending of the first movie? Here, in a hallucinatory and bravura dream sequence, Coffin Joe is dragged into an incredibly realized carnivelesque hell, with undulating flesh carpets and Cocteau-like body parts sticking out of icy cavernous walls, all exploding onto the screen in full bleeding color! Viva la Coffin Joe!
Dir. José Mojica Marins, 1967, 35mm, 108 min.