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mst3kproject · 2 years

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This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse

It's mainly the title that caught my attention, but this is also another lesser sequel to a fairly well-received horror film, the film in question being 1963's At Mightnight I'll Take your Soul. You might never have heard of it, but it did pretty well in Brazil and the main character, Zé do Caixão or “Coffin Joe”, has at least as much cultural purchase in that country as characters like Freddy Krueger do in North America. The sequel, however, has been described as preachy and over-long... so let's have a look.

No, I'm not gonna watch Take Your Soul first. The denizens of the SoL didn't get that luxury with The Robot vs the Aztec Mummy or Creature from the Black Lagoon, so why should I?

So in the last movie, Coffin Joe killed a bunch of people as part of his quest to father the perfect son, and was blinded and driven mad by their ghosts... but socialized health care doesn't make exceptions for supervillains, so he got better. He thus resumes his quest, kidnapping beautiful women and then killing the ones he doesn't think are good enough to swap chromosomes with. After a bit of this, he sets his sights on Laura, the musically talented daughter of a wealthy Colonel, who shares his nihilistic atheism. Her father and brother are determined to save her, but Laura doesn't want to be saved. She wants nothing less than to bear a child for the devil himself!

This movie is hard work, you guys. It is a slog. It reminds me of one of those Escher paintings where the little guys are climbing infinite stairs and ending up back where they started. This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse is a hundred and eight minutes long, when it really didn't need to be any more than two thirds of that. They've got an extra half-hour to kill and they fill it mainly by showing us the same things, over and over again.

Some of this is just Coffin Joe being gratuitously cruel. There's a scene in which he lets a bunch of tarantulas into the room where his captive women are sleeping, and the spiders walk all over them for a while before they wake up and start screaming, whereupon Joe declares them cowards unworthy of his seed. This takes a couple of minutes, which doesn't sound like much but feels like ages. Shortly thereafter comes a bit where he makes out with his chosen bride while the others get strangled by a pit full of snakes. Again, it goes on way too long and it's really little more than extremely softcore torture porn, as the women writhe and scream in a way that's far more about being sexy than about escaping the animals.

At the end of the spider sequence, Joe's hunchback assistant Bruno (obviously a guy like this has a hunchback assistant) picks the spiders off the women's nightgowns and just tosses them in a box, which is a nice demonstration of how docile tarantulas really are.

In other places, the movie fills time by having Coffin Joe make speeches about his personal philosophy. He is very fond of strapping his captives into some sort of extremely low-tech death trap, and then ranting away like a Bond villain. He does not believe in god or in life after death, and says he pities the 'idiots' who do. Since immortality of the soul is impossible, and so is immortality of the body, Joe hopes to achieve immortality of his bloodline, with the perfect son his perfect woman will give him. He sometimes talks about this son being physically immortal, but I'm not sure if this is supposed to be literal or metaphorical.

He gives a speech like this to the women before tossing them in the snake pit, and several to other characters, such as Laura's brother, Laura herself, and sometimes just the audience. The ideas in them never quite make sense, and I wonder if that's because the audience is assumed to be Catholic while I'm an agnostic potato growing on a Protestant vine. Perhaps I don't properly understand what's supposed to be shocking and horrifying about his rants... or maybe they really are just nonsense. Either way, what the movie is primarily interested in is the relationship between Joe's atheism and his evil. It presents the two as inextricably entwined, each unable to exist without the other.

Joe's atheism is a justification for his abhorrent behaviour. Human lives are short and pointless, and people are ignorant and superstitious, and there's no higher force to care if they suffer. Without a divinity to arbitrate good and evil, the only thing that can make a deed worthwhile is the results. Joe's goal is immortality in whatever form is available to him, a personal escape from this brief meaninglessness by stepping outside the endless cycle of it, and so anything he can do to get there is necessary and indeed admirable. Conversely, the behaviour also justifies the atheism. Several times, Joe tells a victim that if god exists, He has the power to save them from whatever death trap they're strapped into. God never intervenes, and so clearly He doesn't exist, and that in turn means what Joe has done is okay.

In order to be sure that his child will inherit perfect, rational genes, one of the criteria Joe insists on in his mate is 'godlessness' – the women he kidnaps are all atheists or at least agnostics. It seems, however, that at least two don't quite meet this requirement. One clearly believes in some kind of supernatural power, because as she is strangled by the snakes she uses her last breath to place a curse on Joe, telling him he will never have the son he wants and that she will have her revenge from beyond the grave (she is the one who speaks the title). Another, Marcia, is an agnostic, and she almost becomes his chosen babymama before rejecting him on account of his cruelty. Joe then simply lets her go, confident that she will not go to the police because she has no conscience.

Marcia does have a conscience, however, and her conscience is a major factor in Joe's undoing. After witnessing five murders and being an accessory to another, she poisons herself and confesses the truth on her death bed. Upon hearing this, the already restless villagers finally break out that torch-and-pitchfork mob they've been keeping in their back pockets this whole time and hunt him down. What's more surprising is that it turns out Joe himself also has a conscience, and how that conscience manifests is what's really gonna make you hate this movie.

See, Joe has no problem with the fact that he killed the women... they were useless, brainwashed cowards. What upsets him is to learn later that one of them was actually pregnant at the time of her death, meaning he also murdered her child. For some reason this sets him off (insert snide comment about conservative politician of choice), and he has a nightmare in which he is bodily dragged to hell, the movie suddenly changes to colour, and he gets to see the devil zapping people with cartoon lightning from his fingers! I think this is supposed to suggest that despite his explicit rejection of Christian teachings Joe really does believe deep down, and that is why things like the death of the fetus bother him (even if the murders of actual grown-up human beings evidently don't). In the end his atheism is mere stubbornness, as he demands a sign from god and then, when a tree is struck by lightning and falls on him, he declares it a coincidence!

The sequence of hell is not very impressive and consists mostly of naked, genital-less demons whipping people who are stuck in the walls and making halfhearted moaning noises. I wonder if that's the audio that gets passed off as the time Soviet scientists accidentally drilled through to hell.

At the very end of the movie, Joe finally admits he believes and begs for forgiveness as the skeletons of his victims rise out of a swamp to drag him to his death. The priest then nods in satisfaction because it means Joe's soul has been saved... but why should it be? He's a horrible person, a selfish murderer, liar, and rapist! We don't want to see him saved, we want to see him get what he damned well deserves! Him getting drowned by skeletons is great, but knowing he'll go to heaven afterwards is distasteful. I don't wanna share heaven with Coffin Joe, especially when he's never even apologized for all the horrible shit he did.

If you actually watch the movie (which if you do, I want you to remember that I warned you it was long), you will probably come away with a list of things you're surprised I didn't mention in this review, like how Laura agrees that the baby's life is more important than hers, the fact that the devil has Coffin Joe's face, the movie's rather strange definition of 'love', or even just the fact that Joe’s fingernails are like five inches long. To that I can only say that I wish I had the space for it. I try to keep these reviews to not much more than two pages of single-spaced Times New Roman, or around 1500-1800 words, so I stuck to what seemed most relevant to the film's obsession with atheism and morality.

Religious people seem to think these two concepts are inherently at odds. They're not, really... atheist morality is very simple. If there's no afterlife and all we get is a few fleeting moments of consciousness in the uncaring void, then nobody should have to spend that brief existence in pain. Be nice to people. Enjoy yourself. In the words of the prophets: be excellent to each other and party on, dudes.

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