Brazilian Boogeymen and Italian hardnuts

I'm always complaining that I don't get time to watch the vast array of DVDs I've amassed over the last few years. In fact, I've got some that still have the wrapping on, and some box sets (Pinky Violence Collection, The Blind Dead, Phantasm, Bava boxes 1 and 2) that have barely been touched.

A recent addition to this was a six disc Coffin Joe box set, bought direct from the man himself at RIOFAN. Having found the time for a couple of films, I opted for Esta Noite Encarnarei no Teu Cadáver (This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse), the second film in the Coffin Joe trilogy. The titular gravedigger's quest to find a suitable woman to impregnate and produce a son (he never entertains the idea of fathering a girl) continues where At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul left off. Ze De Caixao wakes up in the hospital having recovered from almost being blinded, and no sooner is he well he is absolved of his alleged crimes and is off on the spawning highway again.

This time around he kidnaps 6 women, including a rich heiress and puts them through a series of trials to prove their worthiness and suitability to bear his offspring. This typically involves putting spiders in their beds, torturing them with snakes and the like. Needless to say, he is quite the charmer.

This all gets shifted to the sidelines, however, when the police commissioner's daughter arrives in town, and Ze turns his attentions to her.

A lot of criticism gets levelled at Mojica for making incomprehensible movies, and I do think his work divides in a similar way to Jess Franco. However, despite the miniscule budget of this late-sixties entry, there were a number of key moments that raised it above much of wild world cinema. I'd heard about the famous 'hell' sequence in this film where the action leaps into vivid technicolour, and the film comes alive during this hallucinatory dream sequence. It recalls the surreal extremes of Nobuo Nakagawa's Jigoku, with nightmarish imagery and sound that transcend the film's limitations. The scene was preceded by another classic chilling moment wherein Ze is literally dragged by a ghoul to the graveyard. This captured that awesome feeling that is so rare in horror movies these days; the "what the hell is that" moment. An inexplicable feeling of dread when faced with the unknown, the other. Brilliant. Now I can't wait to continue my journey into the labyrinth that is the cinema of Ze De Caixao, and hopefully the forthcoming closing chapter of the trilogy "The Embodiment of Evil" will be a fine return of the diabolical Coffin Joe.

The second movie in my impromptu double bill was Fernando Di Leo's Milano Calibro 9.
The first part of Di Leo's Milieu trilogy (which is connected thematically rather than in a traditional sense) is powerhouse of double crossing mafia mobsters and small time hoodlums, the likes of which I haven't seen for a long time.

Milano Calibro 9 is an absolute masterpiece of Crime Cinema, with a pre-credits sequence that completely blew me away. At times it sets out its political stall a little too prominently, but you forgive these moments as they are soon superceded by more killer scenes of ice-cold precision. All of the players in this whirlwind of violence and double-crossing are doomed to follow the path they have chosen. Also, being an OST nut, the score by Luis Bacalov and Italian progsters Osanna is sublime, sweeping and orchestral in places and deep and funky in others.

I've now got the pleasure of following it up with La Mala Ordina and Il Boss, the other installments of the trilogy. All three are the RARO editions bought in Rome last year and are worth seeking out. Milano Calibro 9 is a double disc special edition, and Il Boss comes packaged with Killer Vs Killers, another Euro crime movie starring Henry Silva.