Embodiment of Evil

To celebrate the career of Brazilian horror icon José Mojica Marins, Anchor Bay Entertainment have not only released the five disc, nine film boxset The Coffin Joe Collection but his most recent film, Embodiment of Evil (Encarnação do Demônio) from 2008. This film was apparently written in the 1960s at the same time as At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul (1964) and This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse (1967) as the third instalment in the trilogy. It has taken forty years for it to be made and Mojica Marins is older and having to come to terms with modern technology, such as filming and recording the sound.
 
Embodiment of Evil begins with sadistic undertaker Zé do Caixão being released from prison where he has served his forty year sentence and has won his freedom despite killing a further thirty people in jail. On the streets and reunited with his hunchbacked assistant, Bruno, Zé do Caixão recommences his search for the perfect woman to bear him a son which will continue his bloodline. Standing in his way are numerous people who he injured or whose relatives he killed.
 
Taking up residence in a favela and assembling a motley crew of like-minded individuals who believe there is there is nothing after death, continuing the bloodline is a sacred duty and Zé do Caixão is the most important person in their lives, willing to die for him, he begins his search and thinks nothing of doing the most unspeakable things to those who stand in his way.
 

 
After sitting through eight feature films directed by José Mojica Marins I thought I had a pretty good idea of what to expect and wasn't wrong. This is a film where the narrative is fairly straightforward so no twists, turns or shocking reveals and the director revels in extreme brutality making it as uncomfortable a watch as possible. It isn't every day where you watch a movie where the cast includes masochists who really have hooks put through their skin and are winched up to the ceiling or have their mouths sewn shut! This serves to shock and horrify so when a torture scene involves special effects make up, you're not 100% sure whether what you see isn't real thus making the film all the more effective and gruesome.
 
Mojica Marins made his name as a theatrical presence, sometimes as an actor and sometimes as a host in the same way as the Crypt Keeper or The Creep and his performance varies between histrionic and verisimilar but at no point does he reach the heights of verisimilitude but that's probably part of Coffin Joe! The supporting cast are fairly good and extremely brave with one of the women being sewn into a dead pig so that Zé can cut her out, a second has her head repeatedly forced into a large container full of cockroaches and another dunked into a vat of (fake) blood and body parts. If this sounds like a pretty unpleasant film then I'm sure that Mojica marins would agree completely - I don't think it's supposed to be.
 

 
The story is quite interesting with the mad undertaker desperate for his perfect woman and, surprisingly, not short of volunteers so he must test them to find out who is truly worthy of his seed.
 
I've sat through some very nasty horror films in my time but I can't remember any where the director employed real 'freaks' to torture with bona fide persecution that made me wince as much as I did watching this. Despite the unpleasantness of the more extreme scenes, I actually quite enjoyed it and, whilst it's not the most accomplished of horror films, Embodiment of Evil is reasonably well put together and involving in all its weirdness.
 

The Disc

 
Extra Features
Aside from a trailer, the only extra is a half-hour making of which comprises interviews and behind the scenes footage so you see how some of the more extreme effects were done and experience José Mojica Marins' struggles with direct sound as he doesn't pronounce his plurals very well and occasionally messes his lines; this wasn't a problem in the 1960s when he recorded his dialogue later but led to many takes until he got his lines right.
 
There is a good mix of interesting and funny material with footage of an actress painted yellow head to foot and dangling from a tree whilst enjoying a cigarette break in between takes one of the highlights as it seems to sum up what being on set with the Brazilian horror maestro is like!
 

 
The Picture
Considering the small nature of the film it looks very good and is handsomely shot with a High Definition transfer that doesn't disappoint. There are some clever uses of CGI to make those haunting Coffin Joe appear strange colours (painting them in a way that the computer will turn them a different colour, such as white from yellow) and the scene in purgatory with incredible vistas and bizarre colour schemes is extremely surreal, this is before you get to the mutilation!
 
*The pictures contained in this review are for illustrative purposes only and do not reflect the image quality of the disc.*
 
The Sound
Both the Dolby TrueHD and Linear PCM tracks are excellent with the surround just having the edge due to the increased use of the surround to truly make this a harrowing watch - it's one of those where you can close your eyes and still sense the terror. The subtitles are reasonably well written though there are a few typos, not as many as in the Coffin Joe Collection, but enough to grate.
 

 
Final Thoughts
Though this is the third part in a trilogy, there is enough exposition and use of flashback to make it possible to watch Embodiment of Evil as a stand-alone film though it will obviously help to have seen the first two. This is probably a film for fans of Mojica Marins' work and is a good companion to the Coffin Joe set, showing that the Brazilian has lost none of the ambition that he had forty years ago. Some scenes will test even the most hardened of horror fans with a combination of extremely loud sound and tough imagery and, for this, it will have a curiosity value. If you're at all interested in what Coffin Joe's all about, then renting this is probably the way to go before splashing out on the collection.