The Strange Oeuvre of Coffin Joe, Part 4

The day I thought  nobody ever thought would arrive is here: the day Jose Mojica Marins classic films have been released in HD.  Well, most of 'em, anyway.  Arrow's new 6-disc boxed set 'Inside the Mind of Coffin Joe' features all-new restorations of nine of his most famous films from the 60s and 70s, as well as Embodiment of Evil from 2008, and packs in a whole ton of documentaries, shorts, special features and swag.  For Coffin Joe fans, this is a big deal.

It also has to be noted that a replacement program is currently in effect because the subtitles for Awakening Of the Beast are broken.  And unless you're fluent in Portuguese, you need 'em to watch the movie; it's no small detail.

Update 3/25/24: And now they're here! If you buy this set new, now, you should have the replacement disc already in the package. But to be sure, you might want to double-check against the above photo, which shows the code on the new version with the functioning subtitles (specifically, you want it to end in "V3").

So I've updated the pages where I already covered most of these films with the new blu-ray versions.  Everything else we'll be looking at right here.  So click the links below for the following films:

At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul The Strange World Of Coffin Joe The End Of Man Hellish Flesh Embodiment Of Evil

This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse The Awakening Of the Beast The Strange Hostel Of Naked Pleasures Hallucinations Of a Deranged Mind The Strange World Of Jose Mojica Marins

...But if you just want a lightning quick verdict, I'll spare you the trouble.  They're all solid upgrades.  Some are a little more subtle in their jumps in PQ than others, in large part because some were scanned from their original negatives, while others had to use other sources.  Comparing some of the later films in particular to their old DVDs will really make you say wow.  Yes, they've really made genuine HD upgrades for all of them, despite some suggestion in the past that it would be impossible.  Go see for yourselves.

Now, the biggest thing that leaves to cover here is easily 1972's never-before-released When the Gods Fall Asleep, a sequel to The End of Man.  Our man Fin escapes from the asylum once again, only to this time find himself in the middle of a gang war in the local slums.  After a while he gives a speech about man's ability to reason and breaks it all up.  This catches the attention of a Satanic cult, who decide that Finis must be some kind of representative of Lucifer.  But after a while, he shows up and gives another speech, convincing them to stop their sacrifice.  Then he breaks up a fight at a wedding and another at a brothel.  At this point, the movie's already almost over, and I won't spoil the "twist," but it ain't much of one.

Along the way, though, Marins recruits an impressive amount of extras and does show us some sights: a couple having sex in a barrel, a prostitute pooping in a broken toilet.  Look, I didn't say they were good or appealing sights.  The look is bright and colorful, though, except for a few scenes which inexplicably dip into black and white.  There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason for the switching; it just happens.  Jaunty, needle drop music helps perk up the proceedings, but I don't think I'd recommend this movie to anyone but diehard completists.

2024 Arrow BD.

When the Gods Fall Asleep comes from a fresh 4k scan of the only existing 35mm print, and looks pretty good from such a limited source.  It's bright and clear, though I'm sure it could've been a bit sharper if the original negatives had been available.  But if I didn't know, I would have guessed this was from a closer source, like an interpositive, than just a print.  The colors are strong without being over-saturated, looking faded in only a few shots.  A few of the black and white shots look a little more worse for the wear, too, suggesting perhaps that Marins used lower quality film for a few shots.  The original 1.37:1 is perfectly preserved and damage appears occasionally, mostly in the form of vertical scratches, but it's fairly minor.  And the film grain is thorough and natural, suggesting about as good an encode as you could hope for without an actual UHD disc.

The original LPCM Portuguese audio is a little rough and echo-y, but I'm sure it's as good as the film has ever sounded.  And the English subtitles are removable, with just one or two little errors I spotted throughout (like "liveforms" in the opening monologue).

So let's get into the special features, not just for this film, but the whole set.  It's a long list.  I'm color-coding it to distinguish between those new to this set (red), and those carried over from previous Coffin Joe releases (black):

• Audio commentaries by Marins, filmmaker Paulo Duarte & expert Carlos Primati on At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul, This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse, The Strange World of Coffin Joe, Awakening Of the Beast, End of Man and Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind, and a commentary by producer Paulo Sacramento & co-screenwriter Dennison Ramalho on Embodiment of Evil
• Video essay by expert Lindsay Hallam
• Bloody Kingdom, his 1950 short film with Marin's commentary
• Clips from his other early works The Adventurer's Fate and My Destiny In Your Hands
• Strange World alternate ending (with optional commentary by Marins)
• A 90 minute retrospective by expert Stephen Thrower
• Video essay by expert Miranda Corcoran
• Alternate Awakening Of the Beast opening credits 
• Video essay by expert Guy Adams
• Video essay by expert Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
• Video essay by expert Virginie Sélavy
• Video essay by expert Jack Sargeant
• Interview with Dennison Ramalho
• Archival 2001 Sundance footage
• A Blind Date for Coffin Joe (short film)
• Video essay by expert Andrew Leavold
• Video essay by expert Kat Ellinger
• A second part of that interview with Dennison Ramalho
  
• Footage of Marins at the 2009 Fantasia Film Festival Premiere
• A massive 90-minute Zoom chat with Dennison Ramalho
• Official Embodiment Making Of
• "Experimental" Embodiment Making Of
• Embodiment deleted scenes with commentary by Marins
• Brief visual effects featurette with commentary by Marins
• Brief storyboards featurette with commentary by Marins
• Ten original trailers for the films in this set

TL;DR, they carried over a few things, created a whole bunch of new extras with their own usual cadre of experts, and still left many of the interviews and other vintage materials from the Portuguese set behind, still frustratingly never translated into English.  The real coup are the commentaries, which technically aren't new, but have been subtitled from the Portuguese discs into English for the very first time (though the translations are a bit dodgy), and that definitely counts!  It's too bad they didn't carry over and translate all that other great stuff, but finally getting to listen to most of Marins' commentaries is awesome.

Even stuff that Synapse saved from the Portuguese set, like interviews with Marins and his museum tour, or the crazy new scene he created for At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul, have been left behind.  So we took our two forward, but also the step backwards there.  The Fantoma interviews and Mondo Macabro's Coffin Joe documentary have also been left out.  Demons and Wonders isn't here either, let alone all of the wild, untranslated extras on that disc.  So yeah, you'll have to hang on to pretty much all of your old DVDs.  I so much would have preferred just getting the cool, existing extras carried over and translated when needed than most of the new stuff by experts, but oh well.  There's no arguing that this is a pretty packed set, with at least some absolutely essential bonus features.

not the real Coffin Joe.

Of the expert stuff, it's interesting just to hear all the varying ways they pronounce "Jose."  Stephen Thrower's is less a visual essay and more a lecture towards camera with occasional cut-ins, but it's also the most informational and worth your time.  Some of the other ones are too breezy and feel like they're just giving a brief overview of what anyone who's buying a set like this would already know, or just pointing out what you'd clearly see on screen yourself once you've watched the films.  They tend to all use the same film clips, too.  So you're going to see the same signature shots over and over, which makes the temptation to skip some of these increasingly tempting.  Well, I've watched 'em all and yeah, just watch Thrower's.

The Blind Date for Coffin Joe is a genuinely funny short film that's been on Youtube, but I'm glad it made its way here, and it's cool that we got more Embodiment of Evil stuff than Synapse and Anchor Bay were able to provide, especially the deleted scenes.  The packaging and physical bonuses are impressive, too.  The whole thing comes in a solid box with a lift-off lid housing six amary cases with reversible artwork (though it's a little annoying that each film only gets printed on one side, including the spine, making it an unnecessarily irritating challenge to figure out which films are on which discs).  There's also a double-sided fold-out poster, a substantial, 90-page full-color book, an art card for every film, a bonus art card, an especially fun replication of Coffin Joe's business card as seen in the original film, and a card for another Arrow release (mine was the Spaghetti western Matalo).

And, of course, this still isn't a complete collection of Marin's films.  Between his more recent work and television stuff, there's at least enough material for a Volume 2, if Arrow feels up for it (and if the rights are feasible).  I certainly don't miss his porno stuff, but a few films, especially The Strange Exorcism of Coffin Joe, are conspicuous in their absence.  Stuff like The Hour of Fear, Trilogy of Terror, The Curse and The Plague would be great.  I fear, like with Criterion's massive Bergman box, fans will get it and think they have everything, leaving the remaining work to fade into obscurity.  But also like the Criterion box, I never thought we'd get a release half this fantastic.  I mean, I can remember Synapse explaining how we'd never get the original Coffin Joes in anything better than their DVDs because the film elements had dissolved into dust, and yet here we are - huzzah!

The Strange Oeuvre of Coffin Joe, Part 3

Sadly, we lost Jose Mojica Marins in 2020.  But a silver lining is that there's more to his story on home video, even English-friendly home video, since the previous entries in my 'Strange Oeuvre of Coffin Joe' series.  A brand new release!  A recent discovery of an actually older, rare Brazillian disc!  And even an autobiographical documentary thought to be previously unavailable in English.  If you're ready to descend even deeper into the bizarre world of Coffin Joe, the releases are out there.

So let's start with The Black Fables.  It's a 2015 anthology horror film by writer/ director/ producer/ effects artist Rodrigo Aragao.  But he's pulled in different Brazillian filmmakers to direct each segment.  He directs the wrap-around and one segment himself, but then the other guys are Joel Caetano, Petter Baiestorf, Marcelo Castanheira and - I hope you guys are ahead of me on this reveal - Coffin Joe himself, Jose Mojica Marins!  The film maintains a very consistent tone: fast paced, colorful, and very gory with a strong emphasis on the practical special effects.  It's not exactly Shakespeare, but it's a low budget crowd pleaser that takes from Brazillian folklore.

A group of kids are playing in the forest and telling each other scary stories: a very on-the-nose allegory about a corrupt mayor who craps all over his people, until one turns into a zombie and gets payback, a period piece about a mysterious werewolf lurking around a plantation, a ghost who haunts a girls' school bathroom... And yes, at almost 80 years old, Marins wrote, directed and acted (though not as Coffin Joe) in his tale of a Saci out for revenge after a young woman and her obnoxious boyfriend disrespect an elder of the forest.  It only has one leg, so it hops around, and generally it looks a lot more like a rubber puppet than the creatures in any of the other segments, though maybe that's intentionally playing into the trickster's lighter side.  But that's an awfully generous reading.  Either way, it's fun.

Dark Swamp

The Black Fables was just released at the end of 2022 by Darkside Releasing on a double-feature BDR, paired with Dark Swamp (a.k.a. Mud Zombies), a 2008 horror flick also by Aragao.  In fact, Darkside has been releasing a bunch of his films on their label if you're interested: The Black Forest, and another double feature of Dark Sea (a.k.a. Bloodbath) and Night Of the Chupacabras.  But this is the only Marins they've got.  It is very in keeping with The Black Fables in a lot of ways (and all his other films, probably): gross but not too serious gore and creature effects, all physical, making use of great natural locations to make up for a tiny budget.  It's not something I'd buy on disc on its own, and definitely not as good as Fables; but taken as a free bonus flick, it's pretty neat.

2022 Darkside Releasing BDR.

Both features are presented in 1.78:1.  One thing you'll notice in the shot of Marins performing his exorcism is that Fables, despite being shot on digital, intermittently uses a fake film scratch effect, often as a transition between segments, but randomly at other times as well.  It doesn't make sense thematically - it's not like the characters are meant to be recalling an old film or something, and I guess it's being used to hide the digital look of the movie.  But anyway, it's not a fault of the disc, it's part of the movie.  And it's a little less certain, but you can probably say the same about a few scenes where the film displays banding or other weaknesses.  Although two features on a BDR-25 is probably squeezing a little tight.  One thing you can definitely hold against Darkside, though, is that the stereo Dolby Digital audio is lossy for both features.  But I can't say I came into this with top shelf expectations, so I'm not disappointed.

It helps that, while there aren't a lot of special features, it's not completely bereft.  First of all, it has to be said, that the closing credits of The Black Fables itself includes a compact but very informative behind-the-scenes documentary with behind the scenes footage and interviews with all the filmmakers.  This is great.  Then separately on the disc is a (very) quick behind the scenes look at the werewolf effects from one of the other Black Fables segments, trailers for both films, and a "mashup" trailer for the rest of their catalog.  It's minimal, but I appreciate that Darkside at least took an interest in adding a little extra value to their release.

Next up is a 2001 DVD-R from Fallm in Brazil of a 1997 film called Contos de Horror, or Coffin Joe Tales.  Apparently it was created as a pilot for an anthology horror series, like Tales From the Crypt but hosted by Coffin Joe instead of the Crypt Keeper.  But when it didn't get picked up, they decided to release it as a movie.  And it's... interesting.  It looks to be shot on video and made on the super cheap.  It's also not written or directed by Marins.  But he does appear sporadically in full CJ regalia to host the story, and then also shows up later on as another minor character within the story.  So Marins aficionados shouldn't feel too short changed.

This (again, the only) episode is called A Filha do Pavor, which google translates to The Daughter of Dread.  It's the story of a Satanist who was raped and murdered getting reincarnated as a housemaid and seeking revenge on the men who wronged her, or whoever else crosses her path.  And it just so happens one of the home owners is reading all about that same girl in a book he's got, written by none other than Jose Mojica Marins!  This one leans a little more into sex and nudity than horror and blood.  There's no gore; the special effects consist of little more than the occasional colored light.  A lot of the acting feels pretty amateur as well.  But it's a decent little tale, and Coffin Joe can always be counted on to spice things up. 

2001 Fallm DVD-R.

The film is presented at 1.31:1, but as it was made for TV in the 90s, it's probably meant to be fullscreen.  Even the interlacing, which is bad - every frame is heavily combed - is probably native to the original footage.  So there's not a lot to criticize here; but it sure ain't pretty.  At least the colors are bright?

Fallm's disc is a pretty cheap release in every other respect, too.  The back cover promises an animated menu and photo gallery, but we don't even get those.  The disc doesn't even have a label.  But we do get the film with optional English (or French) subtitles, which is all that's important.

Still, it's nice to jump to a properly pressed disc for our last feature.  You may remember me writing that Cinemagia's DVD of End of Man featured a number of untranslated extras including, "a 50 minute 'autobiography' film by Marins."  Could you guess that film was today's 1987 entry Demons and Wonders, presented in 2013 with complete English (as well as French, Portuguese and Spanish) subtitles by Focus Filmes (the same label that put out The Lost Daughter) in Spain?  It's an autobiographical documentary, meaning it's a documentary about Marins by Marins.  So it's fairly self-promotional, but it's also super entertaining and chock full of stolen music.  It's also mostly done in recreation, where he re-stages the important moments in his life: losing his father, getting arrested, having a heart attack and even going to Heaven; we see it all.  So it's nothing like the documentaries on the Anchor Bay or Mondo Macabro DVDs.  It's not like any documentary, or anything you've ever seen before.  It may actually be one of his greatest achievements.

The disc's a part of a big Coffin Joe boxed set (even available in a coffin-shaped case), which basically includes all the same stuff we've seen in previously covered sets: At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul, Awakening Of the Beast, etc.  But their one exclusive is that they gave Demons and Wonders its own disc, translating it into English for the first and only time.  The English is fairly broken, but that just adds to the wildness.  And luckily, its DVD is also available separately.

2012 Cinemagia DVD top; 2013 Focus DVD bottom.

Besides being English friendly for the first time, it's also a markedly superior transfer.  Unfortunately, both are interlaced.  But the framing has been adjusted from a fullscreen 1.31:1 to an anamorphic and pillar-boxed 1.69:1.  This mattes some vertical information, but also reveals more on the sides.  And just comparing the images throughout, it's obvious the Focus framing is the right one.  Or at least, the righter of the two.  The colors have also been corrected, looking less faded and much more natural.  All in all, a happy surprise.

Focus's DVD also includes a bunch of intriguing extras, but like the Cinemagia set, nothing's English-friendly except the main feature.  So what we get, unhelpfully untranslated, is an interview with Marins about this doc, a special message from Marins to his fans, some kind of audio-only Coffin Joe production (maybe from one of his records?), two photo galleries, and Coffin Joe's Top Hat, a feature-length collection of Coffin Joe odds and ends.  It's a totally random assembly of stuff, like the complete footage of his eye surgery, television interviews, music videos he's in or directed... Again, none of it's English-friendly, but you might want to skip around through this a bit anyway.

Finally, I should also throw in the fact that there is an English-friendly DVD of a Brazillian zombie movie from 2008 called A Capital dos Mortos.  It even has some extras.  Marins did not write, direct or have anything to do with this film apart from a brief - literally, under ten seconds - cameo around the 41 minute mark where he appears as a head in the clouds for a quick gag.  It's a light-hearted, ambitious little film (they made a sequel in 2015), but Marins is only in there for a virtual flash.  Still, if you're a die-hard collector who simply must have everything, you may feel you need that, too.  So I'm letting you know.

Even if you're just a normal Coffin Joe fan, though (or as normal as one can be), you'll probably want these other three discs.  I was delighted to discover each of them.  And hopefully there will be still more in the future (Update/ Spoiler: there have been...!).

The Strange Oeuvre of Coffin Joe, Part 1

Collecting José Mojica Marins movies can be almost as weird and confusing as the films themselves. You'll find yourself encountering unreleased films, double-dips, alternate aspect ratios and untranslated imports. It's as frustrating as it is fun. Marins is a Brazillian exploitation director best known for his iconic horror character Zé do Caixão, or Coffin Joe to us English speakers. His work practically defines the concept "not for everyone," but if you're of the right mindset, there's a lot to be appreciated in his ambitious films, especially the Coffin Joe titles. When you get past those, you're really putting on your "I Am a Curiosity Seeker" hat.

Update 1/30/15 - 2/12/17: It's update time, boys and girls!  Synapse has just released their Coffin Joe Trilogy 3-DVD set.  How are the transfers?  What are the extras?  Is there anything new?  Should we replace our previous editions?  Let's have a look!  Oh, and I have also updated Part 2, but most of the pertinent new Synapse stuff is covered here in Part 1.

Update 2/12/24: Holy cow!  His films are in HD now?  Yes, Arrow has released a massive blu-ray boxed set featuring 4k restorations of his most famous features, which you can read a lot more about in Part 4. But we've done a whole overhaul of Parts 1 and 2, too.  I've been busy!

His films have been primarily available in three main DVD collections. The Coffin Joe Trilogy from Fantoma came out first in 2002, after their success and notoriety via a series of VHS tapes from Something Weird. The titles were all sold separately or available together in a pretty wicked awesome coffin-shaped boxed set. Each DVD also came with a cool, reprint of a Coffin Joe comic book, and you got a bonus fourth if you got the coffin set. It's now long out of print, but was reissued in Australia in 2011 with the same transfers and extras, minus only the coffin box and comic books.

Then, in 2009, in conjunction with the release of his Marins' comeback film, Anchor Bay released another boxed set in the UK called The Coffin Joe Collection, which included a bunch more titles.  And a few years after that, Marins released a huge boxed set of elaborate special editions through Cinemagia in Brazil called Coleção Zé do Caixão. A lot of it was untranslated, including most of the extras (we'll get into all those specifics, don't worry), but the films were.

In 2017, we got Synapse's The Coffin Joe Trilogy, which features the original two Coffin Joe films, plus his 2008 comeback, Embodiment of Evil, as opposed to the Fantoma set, which included Awakening Of the Beast as its third entry.  It also has more extras that the Fantoma set, much of which comes from the Cinemagia box.  Though fan hopes that they'd add subtitles to all the wonderful features there that lacked subtitles are mostly dashed; Synapse did at least do a little something.  But more on all the specifics as we come to them.

And of course, now we have HD versions of all three films in Arrow's 2024 blu-ray set, Inside the Mind of Coffin Joe.  How do those new transfers look compared to what came before?

At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul is the debut of Coffin Joe from 1963, the first of the trilogy. Here we're introduced to the evil undertaker (played by Marins himself) who keeps a small village under his thumb and is determined to find the perfect mate to give him a heir. He defies God by eating lamb on Good Friday and screaming monologues at the sky, treats people terribly, kidnaps potential concubines and even murders those who oppose him. It's a weird and original story, and Joe is a fantastic character. Opposed to those great elements are a low budget and non-professional filmmaking techniques as Brazil really didn't have a film industry. The flaws will drive most people far away from these films, but those remaining will have a huge grin on their face. This is something wild.

1) 2002 Fantoma DVD; 2) 2009 Anchor Bay DVD; 3) 2012 Cinemagia DVD;
4) 2017 Synapse DVD; 5) 2024 Arrow BD.

The original Fantoma set boasted of their 1.66:1 widescreen transfer from the 35mm negative and supervised by Marins himself. Unfortunately, the discs are non-anamorphic, but I guess with 1.66 you can just about get away with that; but they're still going to look window-boxed on your widescreen TVs. Especially when, as in this case, it's really 1.53:1.  I'm sure they look heaps better than the old video tapes, but they still look soft and dirty and sound hissy. Anyway, the Cinemagia transfer looks almost identical, but a bit brighter and softer. And as we can see the Anchor Bay set is very different, being both unmatted at about 1.25:1, and... yellow.  The Synapse is fullscreen but at a more traditional 1.33:1 and without the yellow tinting.  It has deeper blacks, like the Fantoma (as opposed to the faded Cinemagia), and it also seems to have been a bit cleaned up - note the absence of most of the dust and dirt in the sky - but possibly at the cost of smoothing some grain.  That may be why Syanpse opted to make these DVD only, where the grain doesn't really bear out no matter what you do, anyway.

The Arrow restoration, a 4k scan of the 35mm interpositive and a print, is sticking with the full frame viewing, at a slightly wider 1.37:1, erring on showing more of the image than less.  It only shaves slivers off the sides compared to the AB and Synapse, and vertically compared to AB.  Grain is still on the soft side, but much more accurate than any of the previous releases.  This is one of the more subtle upgrades - later discs in this set are more distinct improvements - but unquestionably still a solid upgrade.  It has some of the strongest contrast levels yet, with solid blacks but if you look at the clergyman in the second set of shots, the highlights are not blown out for the first time ever.  A naturalism has been restored to this movie, with less dirt distress than ever (that smudge in the upper right-hand sky is finally gone).

The original mono is a bit hissy and noisy on all of these, even Arrow's lossless LPCM.  But the newer track is a better, with dialogue easier to discern.  It's also important to point out that the English subtitles are removable on the Fantoma, Cinemagia, Synapse and Arrow sets, but burned into the print on the AB set.

Extras-wise, the Fantoma disc has an insightful ten minute interview with Marins as its main feature. It's also got trailers for all three films in the set, the comic book (which is a seriously high quality, 35 page reproduction of an original Coffin Joe story - don't underestimate these bad boys), and an insert with notes from his biographer. Anchor Bay has... nothing.

And the Cinemagia disc? Oh man. Well, it starts with a really cool claymation Coffin Joe intro, that appears on all the Cine discs. Then the film opens with a tragically unsubtitled introduction by Marins in character as Coffin Joe. Other untranslated extras include an audio commentary, audio from two Coffin Joe records, a silent short film called Bloody Kingdom (with commentary by Marins) and clips of two other short films, interviews with the editor, composer, two DPs, and the screenwriter, a new (2002) Coffin Joe scene that ties into a scene from this movie, a new interview with Marins, a featurette called Who's Afraid of Coffin Joe where people seem to be asked on the street about their Coffin Joe memories, a short featurette on his website and multiple trailers. There's also the complete, infamous footage of his eye surgery, which has no audio, so English speakers can "enjoy" this feature as much as anybody else, as well as several stills galleries.

Claymation Joe

With all of that said, again, Synapse isn't giving us the definitive boxed set we all hoped they would with all those wonderful extras translated.  But they have given us a pretty sweet package.  First of all, they do have that cool claymation opening.  And next, it has the interview from the Fantoma disc.  Then, it includes the newer interview with Marins from the Brazilian set, finally translated!  It also includes the film intro from that set - finally translated!  It features that new scene - finally translated!  And it features the Bloody Kingdom short with the commentary, you guessed it - finally translated!  And finally, it includes two trailers for the film.  So it's pretty awesome... just try to block all the other, wonderful extras from the Brazillian set, like the interviews with the editor, composer and DPs, that got left behind.

Or you could've just waited for Arrow who... also left most of them behind.  They rescued and translated the audio commentary, though, which is no small thing.  And that Bloody Kingdom clip.  Apart from the trailers, though, none of the other stuff has returned, either from the Cinemagia set or any of the other releases.  We've gone backwards as much as we've gone forwards.  Arrow has included clips from two of Marins' other early works, though, a new visual essay and a bunch of other random stuff on the other discs that I cover in Part 4.  Real quick, though, I'd say the overall summation of the Arrow box is that the commentaries are awesome to finally get, but hang onto your old DVDs.

This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse (1966) is a the direct sequel to At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul, and Coffin Joe is back to up the ante. I hope I'm not giving too much away when I say that this is the film where Coffin Joe goes to Hell! I mean, literally, we see him walking around there and interacting; and those scenes are in full color, too. Holy shit, it's amazing! And no, that's not the ending. That just happens midway through; because Joe gets out to wreak more havoc on his quest to sire an heir and defeat God. And this time he has a hunchback assistant, too.

1) 2002 Fantoma DVD; 2) 2009 Anchor Bay DVD; 3) 2012 Cinemagia DVD;
4) 2017 Synapse DVD; 5) 2024 Arrow BD.

The first thing you'll notice is that This Night looks much better preserved than At Midnight. Probably partially because the negatives were kept in better condition (they were even able to be used for the blu), and partially because he had better equipment and more money this time around. Still, the differences between the transfers in At Midnight still seem to hold true here. The Cinemagia disc is still softer (possibly a compression issue with all the extras), though maybe not any brighter this time. AB is yellow again, full-frame (though a closer to normal 1.31:1 this time) and the subs are still burnt in.  And as with At Midnight, Synapse basically looks like a 1.33:1 version of the Fantoma set, which had at least been the best of the bunch.

Even the color scenes look a little off on the AB disc, with the blacks looking blue. Worse, though, is the fact that Anchor Bay also has this crappy interlacing issue going on, which is possibly the result of a poor NTSC to PAL transfer. Fantoma and Synapse clearly had the superior picture (in this rare color section, we see the colors are a little more natural on the Synapse version), with Cinemagia a reasonably close second, while Anchor Bay's are a mess.  But I say "had," of course, because Arrow has come and blown all past editions out of the water.  It's a 1.37:1 4k from the original 35mm negative and interpositive, even without clicking through to the full-size screenshots, the more natural grayscale speaks for itself.  It's a much more vivid picture, even if the colors are a little more muted than you might expect in the Hell sequence.  It feels like they could've cranked the saturation a bit more, like past DVDs have, just to make the image more gloriously spectacular.  But I suppose this is more accurate.

For extras, Fantoma once again has a Marins interview, plus the trailers, comic (they're all different) and another insert. And Anchor Bay has nothing.

Cinemagia continues to blow the others away, except for the fact that they're untranslated. It starts out with a new Coffin Joe intro to the film. There's another audio commentary. There's two more vintage recordings. There's six interviews, a featurette of Marins giving a tour of his museum, outtakes from a Coffin Joe commercial for Cinema Trash, a special effects make-up demonstration from some Marins project called Bruno (I think), a screaming test with a couple of actresses, another interview with Marins, a bunch of trailers, a website interview which might be the same as the last one and another episode of Who's Afraid of Coffin Joe. For us English speakers, well, there's a bunch of stills galleries... oh and an almost 30 minute documentary called The Universe of Mojica Marins! It has subtitles and it's pretty neat. It's a vintage doc about Coffin Joe from 1978 - if you've got the set and have been skipping the extras because they're not in English, go back and watch this.

And once again, Synapse comes in with a nice set of extras, but still leaving so much awesome Cinemagia stuff behind.  But we do get the Fantoma interview.  And we get one of the few already translated extras from the Brazilian box, the Universe documentary.  But newly translated from the Brazilian box are the new interview with Marins, the museum tour, and the introduction.  All those other interviews and stuff are not carried over, though we do also get the trailer and a photo gallery.  Again, Arrow drops that, and doesn't add much that's specific to this film besides the commentary... which is, of course, a great addition.  Other extras just on this disc could just as well be on any disc, as they relate more to Marins in general; and I cover that stuff in Part 4.

Now, Fantoma calls their set The Coffin Joe Trilogy and the third film they include is Awakening of the Beast (1969). But it's really just an unrelated, totally wacked out Marins film that, like many of his movies, has a strong hint of the Coffin Joe character in it. Marins himself has often said the trilogy was unfinished, and it was only in the late 2000s, when he made Embodiment of Evil (well after the Fantoma set had already come out), that he finally finished it. If you've been enjoying the Coffin Joe horror films so far, prepare for a huge shift and possibly a major disappointment. But if you can get past the fact that this isn't Coffin Joe 3, or even a horror movie at all, it's still pretty good, or at least interesting.

This is a very 60s film, showing the shocking things people might do while on LSD. Lots of dancing to bad music, sleazy sex... mostly those two things. Basically the film is a series of vignettes. Characters come, have their shocking LSD-induced moment, and then disappear, all being narrated by a couple of doctors talking about the effects of LSD. What would've been shocking in the 60s is tame now, making this pretty plodding and dull if you ask me. But the film picks up in the third act when Marins starts to get involved, playing himself. He experiments on some people, showing them his comics and movies (we even watch a clip of This Night), and talks about his work having strong psychological effects on people. It sounds like BS until he injects them with LSD and they hallucinate a crazy, full color sequence of Coffin Joe menacing them. It's trippy, imaginative, and a total blast. Coffin Joe walks across a bridge made of screaming humans, butts talk. Honestly, now that I've seen this film all the way through the first time, I tend to just skip to this part. It's got a great ending, too, which always makes me smile. The first half is just so rough to get through. So, I really don't think it has the broader appeal of the other Coffin Joe movies at all. But it is the most released of his films, not only included in all three sets, but as an individual release by Mondo Macabro. That's right, this next comparison is going to be a four-way.

1) 2002 Fantoma DVD; 2) 2002 Mondo Macabro DVD; 3) 2009 Anchor Bay DVD;
4) 2012 Cinemagia DVD; 5) 2024 Arrow BD.

Things get different here, and not just because we've added an extra disc into the mix. Anchor Bay, you'll notice, isn't full-screen and yellow... well, faintly more yellowish than most of the others, but not like before. Its subtitles are still burnt in, though. Cinemagia still looks very similar to Fantoma but a bit fuzzier. And Mondo Macabro actually looks the softest and fuzziest of all. Online sources sometimes cite MM as being fullscreen (example: filmaf), but all the DVDs are framed exactly the same at 1.66:1. They're all actually pretty close, with Anchor Bay rivaling Cinemagia. But Fantoma still looks the clearest, while Mondo Macabro looks almost VHS sourced.

But they all look like junk compared to Arrow's new 4k scan of a 35mm interpositive (and a print).  The framing has again opened up to 1.37:1, and it's curious how much bluer the color scene is here than it ever was before.  But it's just a whole different work of natural contrast, lossless audio and a genuinely crisp, filmic look.  I'm actually surprised Marin's footage ever looked this good.  And this is one of the films where the negatives didn't survive!

Mondo Macabro gets back into the race in the extras department, though. They've got a nice, little documentary called The Nightmares of Coffin Joe, which runs about 26 minutes and interviews not only Marins, but some of his collaborators, who we normally never get to hear from (they're on the Cinemagia set, sure, but not translated). If you're a big enough Coffin Joe fan, and starved for material like we all are, Nightmares is worth the price of admission alone. It's why I've got. Fantoma, meanwhile, comes slow but steady with another Marins interview, comic book, insert and set of trailers. And Anchor Bay - wait for it... has nothing.

And what has Cinemagia got for us this time? Another untranslated intro, commentary, pair of recordings, a 15 minute doc film on Joe called Fogo-Fatuo, five interviews, some kind of visit to the national archives about Marin's films, a weird orientation where Marins yells at what looks like college students and they squirm in their seats (hey, don't look at me), another Marins interview, another episode of Who's Afraid, more trailers, more stills galleries, and that website thing again (I don't know, maybe they are different on every disc). Nothing in English, though; move along.

And again, yes, Arrow has finally translated that commentary, but little else.  The trailer's back, and there are alternate opening credits in addition to their pair of expert video essays.  One of them is really just a shameless excuse to talk about himself using Marins as a framing device.  Meanwhile, Cinemagia's interviews are left rotting on the vine...

Marins from the Fantoma interviews, say goodbye to these

Well, that gets us through the "Coffin Joe Trilogy" (really two-thirds and a bonus Marins film), but there's still plenty more to go. But this post has started to get unwieldy in length and we've still got a lot of crazy movies to look at, so let's go ahead into Part 2...