Tuesday

Zé do Caixão (Coffin Joe) returns as the monster of yesternight's Creepy October Fest-o-Rama title This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse (Esta Noite Encarnarei no Teu Cadáver, 1967),* the sequel to Monday's movie. Warning: because this film picks right up where the previous movie ended, there are unavoidable spoilers ahead. After replaying the final gory moments of the first film it's revealed that Zé still lives. Instead of killing him right there, menaced co-villagers inexplicably take him to the doctor, where he convalesces while the credit sequence previews the coming sadism in a charmingly punky, surfin’ sixties way. Healthy again, Zé's up to new tricks: he steals seven of the town's most beautiful heathens in an attempt to find the perfect mother for his coming son. The harem is then locked in the dungeon of Zé's, um, cemetery mansion, and tested with live spiders. Those who fail this bravery test are given to the humpback or trapped in the snake-pit below Zé's master bedroom. Otherwise, the movie presents a kinder, gentler Zé: while again murdering and torturing along his merry way--no victim escapes being riddled with philosophy--he now draws the line at rape, preferring to percolate an ideal, evil, ultimately consenting bedmate from the overall stock. He waxes poetic about the importance of children, the blood rather than the soul being his true route to immortality. The success of the Coffin Joe character is evident: this movie is larger and less set-bound, Zé's methods have grown rather more baroque: a cemetery laboratory deathtrap, a hanging rock deathtrap, and, by god, quicksand. The film stock is better, so the picture's less contrasty and more textured. The tone has grown more experimental, too: Zé's nightmare trip to hell in the fourth act is a stone psychedelic jaw-dropper. Recommended. [Cavin]