Schmollywood Babylon

Forgotten Naschy: A Werewolf in the Amazon (Ivan Cardoso, 2005)

I don’t know how, but somehow Paul Naschy ended up in Brazil for his next movie, this time directed by notorious smutpeddler, exploitation director and random madman Ivan Cardoso. For a long time, this was way before I really had more insight in the last years of Naschy’s career, I always confused A Werewolf in the Amazon with Fred Olen Ray’s Naschy-epic The Unliving, but they’re two different movies. Maybe it’s because of Cardoso’s being very hard to find it sooner or later in my mind melted together with Fred Olen Ray’s. Anyway, now I’ve seen it. Was it worth the wait? Let’s see…

A bunch of really stupid young people on vacation takes a guided tour in the Amazons with JP, a jungle expert. But what they don’t know is that a series of gruesome murders have been committed in the area, people ripped apart! And not by a coincidence, not far away, doctor Moreau (Paul Naschy) continues his experiments, trying to make a superior species of humans - and believe it or not, he’s been working on a (very small) army of Amazon warriors. And with that he means tall, blonde, bare-breasted women with spears! Oh, and he’s a werewolf also.

It wouldn’t surprise me if Fred Olen Ray have a secret identity as Ivan Cardoso somewhere in Brazil, with one of those rubbery Scooby Doo-villain masks over his head. Except that part of his personality takes down the boob-frequency a notch. I rarely use the word trash, because I think it’s a patronizing expression when it comes to exploitation cinema, but one might wonder if Cardoso actually set out to do a “trash” movie, something sleazy, silly and moronic? I mean, it’s hardly a serious movie. The humorous sequences aren’t that funny, but everything outside Naschy scenes feels more like a comedy, where Naschy in his dungeon chews away the scenery together with man-animals and boob-Amazons. We even get a chance to see Naschy after having sex, which once again proves what an amazing ego he had. Gotta love the guy!

It’s also the comedy that hurts the movie. I would be fine with Naschy doing his stuff in the dungeon and from time to time transform into a werewolf and killing women in the jungle, but we’re treated to more than a few obnoxious characters - including the “American” biologist Scott Corman (Nuno Leal Maia), who only can say “Oh my god” in English, which he does one time too many for my taste. Looking into the talents involved in front of the camera I discover a lot of veterans from Brazilian cinema, stretching their careers from the 50’s and up - one of them is evidently very famous for dubbing Scooby Doo (weird, two references to that in one review!) for +40 years. Kinda impressive.

But how’s the gore then? Nada, I must say. Not a single drop. Well, some blood, but just in quite tame aftermath shots. There’s more boobs, for those who like that. The best sequence, except when Naschy’s not in the shot, is one wacky musical number when a sacred Inca appears from the spirit world doing his best Las Vegas act! Played by veteran singer and actor Sidney Magal, this is the funniest part of the whole movie and it looks like this:

So was it worth the wait, A Werewolf in the Amazon? Not really. It’s a weak comedy with no gore, but it has a decent werewolf in the form of Paul Naschy and the above mentioned musical number. For some of us, like me, that’s enough to watch a movie all the way through.

Dark Sea (Rodrigo Aragão, 2013)

I've been in a Brazilian streak recently, watching genre movies from this interesting country. A while I ago I saw Rodrigo Aragão’s Mud Zombies and Night of the Chupacabras för the first time, two pleasant genre surprises with high integrity, cool monsters and good-looking gore. These are very unique horror movies, set in rural Brazil, in the state of Espírito Santo, with village characters and local beliefs. You could compare them to the regional horror movies from the US, but instead of Bigfoots and Native American demons we here have zombies, Chupacabras and black magic! Oh, how I love this! Anyway, after seeing the two above mentioned movies I felt I had to see the last feature length movie director Rodrigo Aragão made, Mar Negro - Dark Sea, from 2013. Out on a blu-ray with only German subtitles, a good opportunity for me to practice a language I haven’t studied since high school!

It begins with fisherman Peroa (Markus Konká, a veteran actor - who stars in Mud Zombies and Night of the Chupacabras) being bitten by a horrible fish-man monster out on the open sea. After attacking the monster and spreading it’s slime, blood and other unknown liquids over the fish around it the head for shore. Peroa goes home to his family and gets his would stitched up... but something is terribly wrong. He slow turns into a monster, a zombie, and his wound into a gaping, hungry mouth! The infection is spreading in the village, through the fishes they caught, through meat and of course when Perao bites someone for the first time! At the same time we follow Albino (Walderrama Dos Santos), who happens to be an albino and works at a local restaurant - and he’s also, what I can understand, a magician dealing with white magic! So shit really hits the fan when the zombie/monster-infection spreads AND a fucking magician in black magic comes to get him!

Dark Sea, probably the most insane of Aragão’s movies so far; a splendid adventure in splatter and showstopping scenes of total absurdity. Both Mud Zombies and Night of the Chupacabras are excellent movies in their own right, but “suffers” from being a bit too much melodramatic, focusing on drama which not always leads somewhere and makes them longer than they should be. Dark Sea skips a lot of the drama, but not all, and manages to combine an interesting storylines with crazy, motherf**king scenes of carnage.

Human stories have always been the centerpiece of Aragão’s films, and that’s the case even here. Albino is an original character, hopelessly in love with a woman beyond his reach, Peroa is a tough fisherman who loves his family, but can’t afford to stop fishing because of his wound. We have a high politician who loves prostitutes and in between all these characters Madame Ursula, a extremely tough drag queen who shows ‘em what to do when all hope seems lost! Even without English subs I could understand them and care for them - not all of them of course, like it should be in the movies. The story intertwine these characters and as one by one of them gets eaten or killed in another way, we follow a new character who brings us all to the twisted end!

Yeah, the end. I wish I could spoil it for you, but it’s the craziest thing I’ve seen in quite a while. So absurd and outrageous, but still it fits with the rest of the show. And this is a show with one showstopper after another. The German title is Bloodbath, which is very fitting, because there’s a lot of that liquid on display here! Sometimes just splashes of blood, painting walls and floors like it was Peter Jackson’s Braindead, and sometimes more graphic with some really cool gore effects. Oh, and the monsters! What the hell is this? It’s fantastic! The fish-monster that opens the movie is awesome, but that’s not all! There’s some other weird creations stumbling around killing people later on, but I won’t spoil anything!

I can’t understand this movie isn't talked about more, because it’s not just VERY gory and insane, it’s also a good movie with some fine acting and well-written drama. Just like I prefer it! The German blu-ray looks gorgeous and if you can stand no subs or have some knowledge in reading German, buy it dammit! But I hope it will get picked up by an English-speaking country someday, so more people can enjoy this glorious madness!

A Capital dos Mortos (Tiago Belotti, 2008)

It’s not often you run into a indie film with a miniscule budget who actually takes a worn-out genre and makes entertaining again. Alright, I’m not one of those who bashes zombie movies just because it’s cool and trendy. If it’s good it’s good, and that doesn’t stop me from liking a genre fan boys of a certain age and hipness despise. I’m sounding bitter, but I’m not, because just don’t give a fuck. But I must confess I was a bit skeptical when I heard about A Capital dos Mortos, which seems like a zombie movie shot by a some friends with what looks like some very simple home video camera...in Brazil. The Brazil-part is just fine, but you should always be careful when friends makes a zombie movie together.

But don’t worry. Not in this case. A Capital dos Mortos might look terribly cheap and having some questionable editing choices, but take a closer you look and you’ll find a movie with a heart and edge. That’s a rare thing. The story is not much to tell your mom about, but works fine considering the budget: we follow some friends - most of them slackers - who ends up in the middle of a zombie infection, foretold 120 years ago by a priest the day he died. I’m quoting IMDB’s plot summary: “In 1883, in Italy, Father Dom Bosco had a visionary dream about the building of the city of Brasilia, capital of Brazil since 1960. It was revealed to him that, at the day of his death, a process of three generations of sixty years each would begin. In the first two generations, mankind's attitudes would be evaluated, and its consequences would start over the promised city after 120 years.”

Doesn't seem mankind did that well during those year, because now all hell breaks loose in Brazil. Should they escape the city or keep themselves locked in their apartments? A Capital dos Mortos toys a lot with zombie cliches, or maybe more how people react in movies when zombies attack. They do every mistake in the book, and never realizes even if they talked about just those mistakes minutes before. And it’s not bad writing, it's written with a tongue in cheek approach, including cut-away-style jokes and some very dark humour.

As often with these kind of films the acting is very up and down. Here it’s slightly better than usual and it’s easy to notice the chemistry among the leading actors. Maybe they’re friends since a long way back, at least they seemed to have found each other in front of the camera. I’m not sure you care about them, but they’re non-annoying enough to follow them to the bitter end. In a small but fun - and very unexpected - cameo we see José Mojica Marins (aka Zé do Caixão aka Coffin Joe!), which might not give that much to the film itself, but comes at a time when we the audience need a gimmick to keep going, and it works.

How about the gore then? It’s simple, not that spectacular, but there’s a lot of blood and intestines, bullet holes, stabbings and more fun for the whole zombie family. At least there’s much of it, and the movie is never boring. The drama/dialogue exists to transport us to yet another zombie scene and that’s the golden key to what genre cinema really is. Like an action movie should be carried by it’s action scenes to tell the (good) story, in horror we need the HORROR to carry us to the end.
A Capital dos Mortos might not win any Oscars, but that’s an unfair thing to say. It’s not made to win Academy Awards, it’s made to win zombie fans. And if you’re one of those who love ambitious indie films made with more passion than money, A Capital dos Mortos is the movie for you. This zombie adventure have gore, laughs and a high body count, what the hell more do you want?!

And if you want to see it, hold your horses until december when Last Exit Entertainment unleashes it here in Europe! They’ve released a fabulous DVD of Andrey Iskanov’s Nails (here’s my review of that movie!) and you better get it before it’s OOP - and also to support these small companies who’s giving us old folks what we want; physical releases of unique genre films!

 

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Awakening of the Beast (José Mojica Marins, 1970)

Coffin Joe is back...almost, because in José Mojica Marins Awakening of the Beast he’s a part of the pop culture which made him a legend, and Marins plays himself in one of the braver set-ups I’ve seen in an exploitation movie. In a way it feels like an anthology film, but yet I would say it’s not. It’s just a very odd way of using the Coffin Joe mythology and still make a statement about the human psyche - which is the trademark of the Brazilian master of nihilism.

It begins as a talk show, Marins and a couple of other men are discussing drugs and their impact on society. The men; doctors, politicians, guardians of morality, tells us and the views of the TV-show one horrible story after another, more bizarre than the last, about the horrors of drugs. They involve every kind of perversion, violence and drug known to man - my favorite being the housewife snorting a line of cocaine, makes her butler rape her daughter while she’s standing the doorway watching it all… petting her horse more and more passionate! There’s also a longer story, a main part of the the movie, about one of the guests who lets four human guinea pigs test LSD and experience Coffin Joe in their hallucinations!

Once again Marins uses the medium to make a statement. In his theory, which is explained more detailed in the movie, the evil and sickness of the humans comes from themselves, because humans are evil from the beginning, and not necessary from the drugs. While the doctors and politicians blames EVERYTHING bad in society on drugs, Marins wants the humans themselves to take responsibility for what they’re doing. Awaking of the Beast is a pro-drug film, with a little twist. And it’s also a fantastic experience.

Marins uses an old trick to make the impact bigger. Most of the film is shot in the style he seemed to have favored at the time (and probably because of budget reasons), in black & white, but when the LSD-trips hits us during the end, he uses explosive color film! The experience is magnificent, and even if the sets and effects looks cheap, they’re a blast from the beginning to the end. We’re talking full contact surrealism here, very European! The ass faces for example, great idea and even if they’re just painted faces on asses, they’re such bizarre creations!

Watching a movie by José Mojica Marins is like watching someone who’s not of this earth telling a fairy tale. Someone who’s born free. The ideas of Marins isn’t far from Anton LaVey, a very gritty, cynical form of atheism where the only ones we can blame is ourselves. I like that. No pretending, no polite dishonest kindness. Just pure humanity.

The Strange World of Coffin Joe (José Mojica Marins, 1968)

It’s really fucking time to dive in the wild world of José Mojica Marins again, after quite a lot of years away from him! I will try to watch all his classics, but I’ll start with The Strange World of Coffin Joe, a movie I’ve never seen before - which is weird, because I love Marins and I love anthology horrors! It wasn’t until me and Jason, when we recorded the last episode of The Human Centipod, I fully understood it was an anthology - but in the end we didn’t watch it, so I guess it’s time now. Marins is a true visionary, talented director who seamlessly mixes arthouse with exploitation - a difficult art if you ask me, and this gritty, but elegant, anthology is a good example of his talents.

First out is THE DOLLMAKER, a simple, but very effective story about a four robbers who finds out an old dollmaker stores all his money in his home...where he also have four beautiful daughters. The robbers decides to have some fun with the girls, but finds out the really gruesome way how the dollmaker can create such realistic creations… in OBSESSION we follow the adventures of a poor and very out-of-luck balloon seller when he finally meets the dead girl of his dreams and makes sweet love with her body. In THEORY a certain doctor Oãxiac Odéz (which, of course is Zé do Caixão backwards, aka Coffin Joe - or as he’s named in the Swedish translation, doctor Eoj Niffoc, not as catchy…) wants to prove that basic instincts such as hunger easily can beat that silly thing called love.

The Strange World of Coffin Joe is easily one of the more nihilistic pieces of cinema I’ve seen, on the surface a silly anthology film - but far more gritty and dark than most in the genre (I would say Jeff Burr’s From a Whisper to a Scream is another good example). The thing is that expect the first story, The Dollmaker, there’s no real twists. This is instead quite twisted morality tales which tells us there’s not hope for humanity, people are animals. The middle story for example is more of a dark, sad fairy tale about the lonely balloon seller finding some kind of love in death. The last one, probably the best, most Coffin Joe-esque story, is downright sadistic with an incredible downbeat ending.

What seems odd at first is the ending, where the bible is quoted - among other things - which kinda takes away the film its power, but this is - I learned a few hours ago - something Marins had to add to the film to fool the deeply religious censors in Brazil. It’s not the only film he had to do it with, but he kinda took revenge with his recent masterpiece Embodiment of Evil, where he once again claims back evil to where it belong: in the world, without any religious fool being able to do anything about it.

The Strange World of Coffin Joe is a fucked-up movie, but also a minor masterpiece. Sometimes corny, a black and white comic book in the vein of EC Comics, but often with a serious, deeply philosophical and cynic message of the human nature. The budget is often so low it borders to annoying, but if you - like me - can look beyond wobbly sets and fast camera set-ups, you’ll find real movie magic in this collection of gory, gruesome tales.