Awakening of the Beast (1969)
Cast: Andréa Bryan, Annik Malvil, Graveto, Ítala Nandi, José Mojica Marins as Coffin Joe, Lurdes Vanucchi, Ribas
Director: Jose Mojica Marins
Synopsis: The ultimate descent into Mojica Marins’s unique vision of hell! incredible.
Reviewed by: Omar Khan

 

Anyone familiar with José Mojica Marins' first two Coffin Joe films will already know to expect something decidedly unusual from Awakening of the Beast, the third instalment in the original trilogy.

What they almost certainly will not be prepared for is quite how astonishingly strange it actually is.

The first two films were undeniably bizarre, but Awakening of the Beast pushes Marins' already warped imagination into entirely new territory. To describe it simply as "strange" or "bizarre" would be a monumental understatement.

It is one of the most deliriously surreal films ever committed to celluloid.

The film adopts an unconventional structure—hardly surprising for a director who seemed to regard cinematic conventions merely as obstacles to be ignored. The framework revolves around a televised discussion programme in which a panel of doctors, psychiatrists and intellectuals—among them Marins himself—debate the effects of drugs and the moral degeneration they supposedly encourage.

As the discussion unfolds, the audience is presented with a succession of increasingly lurid and deeply unsettling vignettes, each apparently illustrating the consequences of narcotic excess.

A young woman injects herself through the veins in her foot before performing a wildly erotic dance for a room full of elderly men.

Another attends an increasingly surreal marijuana-fuelled party populated by bongo-playing beatniks, only to meet a memorably grotesque fate involving a wooden pole wielded by a figure resembling Moses himself.

Trying to describe these scenes almost makes them sound ridiculous.

Watching them is another matter entirely.

One scarcely knows how to react to the extraordinary procession of deranged imagery that follows. Perhaps the single most unforgettable moment involves a terrified victim apparently surrounded by a crowd of grotesque, grinning faces, only for the horrifying revelation that the "faces" are in fact human buttocks with expressions painted upon them.

It is one of those moments that simply has to be seen to be believed.

Whether one considers José Mojica Marins a visionary genius or a complete madman is almost beside the point.

With Awakening of the Beast, he provides compelling evidence for both arguments simultaneously.

Few filmmakers have ever possessed such a fearless imagination, and even fewer have been willing to commit those feverish visions so uncompromisingly to film. The result is less a conventional horror movie than a cinematic hallucination—a sustained nightmare in which logic steadily dissolves into dream imagery.

It is hardly surprising that the film has frequently been described as the ultimate cinematic acid trip.

Eventually, after this extraordinary rollercoaster of grotesque visions, Marins arrives at an ending every bit as unconventional as the journey itself. Rather than condemning drugs as the source of society's moral decay, he provocatively suggests that humanity's capacity for depravity exists independently of narcotics.

Needless to say, such conclusions found little favour with the Brazilian authorities.

The film was promptly banned for two decades.

Awakening of the Beast is emphatically not a film for every taste. Indeed, many viewers will find it almost impossible to categorise, let alone enjoy in any conventional sense. Yet viewed as the culmination of the original Coffin Joe trilogy, it represents the logical endpoint of Marins' descent into a personal cinematic hell.

Whether it is a better film than At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul or This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse is open to debate.

What is beyond dispute is that it is by far the trilogy's most ambitious, most uncompromising and unquestionably its strangest achievement.

For devotees of cult cinema, surreal horror and truly original filmmaking, Awakening of the Beast remains essential viewing.

It is perhaps the purest expression of José Mojica Marins' extraordinary imagination—and a fitting testament to one of horror cinema's most singular and uncompromising visionaries.