God-hating, pompous and misogynistic undertaker Ze do Caixao (AKA Coffin Joe) is miraculously back and still out to find the perfect woman to give him a son. He kidnaps a bunch of local women and holds them captive, torturing them to test them out and see if they are the perfect candidate. He meets and is smitten with the daughter of a prominent local, and this chick might spell his downfall, for she is nuttier than he is.
This follow-up to the 1964 Brazillian classic ‘At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul’ isn’t as much fun, but is still disturbing, entirely watchable, and rather avant-garde at times. Director-star Jose Mojica Marins gives yet another wonderful turn as Ze (A sort of Dracula meets Rasputin, who wears a typical undertaker’s hat, denounces religion as silly, and has the longest fingernails you are likely to see), who is even more pompous and thoroughly revoltingt than he was last time, the scene where he tortures the women with spiders is horrific, horribly misogynistic, and bloody marvelous. Also, there’s a brilliant intercutting between Ze’s love making and the rest of the women being tortured by snakes. I just love this guy, even if he is a total a-hole, and perhaps not as imposing or scary as he was last time. Instead, he’s painted as a foolish, rather pathetic bully with delusions of grandeur that make Hitler seem modest, perhaps.
There is still the homage to the Universal horror cycle I so enjoyed in the first film, with Ze having a hunchbacked assistant here, but mostly this film is worth seeing for its off-the-wall finale, a representation of Hell, the likes of which you are unlikely to have seen before or since, a colour sequence in this otherwise black and white classic. The film’s personification of the Devil is particularly interesting, and given I thought Beelzebub looked like Aboriginal actor David Gulpilil, it’s a sequence likely to spark much debate.
OVERALL SUMMARY
The finale at times copies the first film a little too much for my liking, but this film series is still unlike any other horror films I’ve ever seen, it’s got a kind of nightmarish quality that I adore, and some old school horror trappings to boot. Definitely worth seeking out.
