{"id":4729,"date":"2009-06-24T12:11:15","date_gmt":"2009-06-24T20:11:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/?p=4729"},"modified":"2009-06-24T15:36:18","modified_gmt":"2009-06-24T23:36:18","slug":"embodiment-of-evil-jose-mojica-marins-2008-brazil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/?p=4729","title":{"rendered":"Embodiment of Evil (Jos\u00e9 Mojica Marins, 2008): Brazil"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Richard Feilden<\/a>. \u00a0Viewed at the Majestic Crest Theater as part of the 2009Los Angeles Film Festival.<\/p>\n

\"embodiment_of_evil-still\"Embodiment of Evil<\/a> is the\u00a0\u00a0third in the Coffin Joe series of Brazilian horror films from actor, director and writer Jos\u00e9 Mojica Marins.\u00a0 Released over forty years after the original two films, the character returns, complete with the long fingernails that Marins grows for the role, to continue his bloody trek to immortality.\u00a0 Though the story is hard to make sense of, the film certainly delivers what is required of it in the blood and gore department.<\/p>\n

Coffin Joe has spent the last forty years locked in a Brazilian prison.\u00a0 Granted parole by a doctor’s report, he is released back onto the streets by an unwilling and terrified police department.\u00a0 There, immediately reunited with his hunchbacked servant, he returns to his scheme to find the perfect woman with whom to unleash his terrible spawn (higher than God and lower than Satan, we are told) upon the world and, through this blood link, ensure his place in perpetuity.\u00a0 It isn’t going to be a bloodless pursuit!<\/p>\n

What follows is a rather confusing (at least for this Coffin Joe neophyte) descent into increasingly bizarre acts of violence and a correspondingly large number of naked women.\u00a0 Certainly, judging from the reactions of the late-night Grindhouse crowd, the lack of coherent plot is not a problem for everyone.\u00a0 Each act of horror (a woman’s scalp is pulled over her head to form a deadly blindfold, another is fed her own buttock) was greeted with a louder cheer than the one before.\u00a0 While I could certainly understand the excitement in the outrageous spectacles, I was confused by their cheer when the woman charged with defending Coffin Joe in court was beaten senseless by a group of baton wielding police officers–though strangely the crowd didn’t have the same reaction to their later attack on Joe’s evil manservent.\u00a0 Perhaps they were simply caught up in the blood-letting, but, though it reinforced the depravity of the police (though having seen them rounding up and slaughtering street kids earlier in the film this was hardly necessary!), this was the moment in the film that I found the most disturbing. (If you look back to my review of Iron Man though, you’ll see the impact that a crowd can have on my perception of a film).\u00a0 While acts of violence are committed against men in the film, a vastly disproportionate number of the most foul ones are committed against women and, spectacle aside, the misogyny here is harder to stomach than the violence itself.<\/p>\n

The gore–and that is what this film is about–comes thick and fast, with one scene giving Sam Rami’s exploding wall-of-blood in Evil Dead 2 a run for its money in the pint stakes!\u00a0 But that is really all that this film has going for it. \u00a0If you want to spend ninety minutes in a blood-bathed hell, then this film will satisfy your desires beyond your wildest dreams.\u00a0 If you want something a little more cerebral, or simply a story that you can follow, then there is better out there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Richard Feilden. \u00a0Viewed at the Majestic Crest Theater as part of the 2009Los Angeles Film Festival. Embodiment of Evil is the\u00a0\u00a0third in the Coffin Joe series of Brazilian horror films from actor, director and writer Jos\u00e9 Mojica Marins.\u00a0 Released over forty years after the original two films, the character returns, complete with the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,94],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-films","category-los-angeles-film-festival-2009"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4729\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}