Wednesday

For the October Movie Marathon last night I watched José Mojica Marins' Awakening of the Beast (1970),* concluding my Brazilian festival-within-a-festival of the last three nights. The film is introduced the usual way in a pre-credit philosophical assault by Brazilian boogeyman Zé do Caixão (Coffin Joe), addressing us directly from spooky limbo. And then we watch a woman inject some clear hallucinogen into her own foot, and strip before a bleary-eyed audience. And then a teenager is taken to a drug-fueled beatster shindig where she engages in her own consensual sexual fatality. There are many more "and thens" to follow, all the extreme anecdotes of a psychologist illustrating his observations of modern narcotic turpitude. Among his unconvinced audience is this movie's director, Mr. Mojica, who is unsure why he's been invited. "These stories could come from the depraved mind of Coffin Joe," says one detractor. "I left Coffin Joe in the graveyard," says Mr. Mojica, rolling his eyes and examining his four-inch fingernails. There's a lot of deviance anthologized throughout this movie, and most include a miniskirt fetish and rapt fascination with undergarments: frilly unmentionables pile-up by the fistful. After watching Coffin Joe on TV, the psychiatrist explains, he imagined an experiment: give addicts LSD and monitor their crazy reactions while they are stimulated by an image of the controversial villain. Never much more than a stream-of-consciousness onslaught of garish vignettes, the movie seeks successfully to seize-up the viewer's mind. Part Reefer Madness and part creepy voyeur, this biting little art movie is one of Mojica's most ambitious, banned for decades in Brazil. It culminates in a bloody kaleidoscopically psychedelic climax. Are drugs creating a depravity problem, or vice-versa? Is presenting deviance an art? Well, is Coffin Joe art? These are the questions the movie asks of us. [Cavin]