Babu – Damned Revenge (1996)

A woman (Helen Wiese?) has some questions about the death of her son. These questions are answered by good old Coffin Joe (of course José Mojica Marins), who may or may not be in the same room as she is while they are having their little chat. A young man we must assume to be said son, in what we must assume to be flashbacks, is drawn into the orbit of a house that may be infested with Satanists, or the memory of Satanic rituals, or the ghosts of Satanists past or all of the above.

In any case, our protagonist begins suffering from increasingly bizarre, generally either school or Satanist themed, dreams and visions that hint at some kind of awful revelation to be about to happen to him in the unpleasant old house.

Ah, sometimes films like this one still hit the spot for me, beyond the realm of ideas like “good” or “bad” movies. Thus Cesar A.’s piece of Brazilian ultra cheap SOV horror – mostly shot in what looks like a school building and someone’s living room and cellar – shambles straight into the realm of ambient horror where many of the markers of objective badness can be exactly what makes a film worth watching. Or perhaps films like this can tune a viewer onto a somnambulist frequency where the rules of filmmaking as we (mostly) know them simply do not apply.

So, the woozy quality of the video made even woozier by the (fansubbed by angels or demons, you decide!) VHS source turns from technical problem to texture as important to the film’s thick mood of sludgy strangeness as the dream-like state its protagonist often finds himself in, the vagueness of its plot details, and the dubious manner in which cause and effect work here. Yes, again, I have to argue a film whose artistical merits most sane people will doubt to be very much constructed like a dream – peculiar, more than a little nebulous, and very much on the non side of sensical.

Adding to this quality are the curious soundtrack – half needle dropped classical music, half random synth noises and shouting – and that at least two thirds of the dialogue scenes here are shot suggesting these actors very often do not share the same physical space at the same time when talking at each other with the tell-tale pauses – even in proudly post-dubbed dialogue! – of people waiting for the director to shout “action!” while the camera is already rolling.

Also worth mentioning are practical special effects that suggest someone involved in the production owned several hand puppets, and the awesomeness of filmmakers who managed to convince Marins to give them a couple of hours of his time.

At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1964)

Original title: À Meia Noite Levarei Sua Alma

Zé do Caixão (José Mojica Marins) – better known as Coffin Joe in English-speaking countries – is an undertaker in a Brazilian country town. He’s also an inveterate bully half of the town is afraid of, sadistically violent, a misogynist of the highest order, an atheist and unbeliever in all things supernatural in a deeply religious and superstitious community, a man with his very own sartorial ideas, as well as someone given to long rants somewhere between Nietzsche, LaVey and John Wayne Gacy.

If he weren’t so murderously dangerous and brutal in his retribution of every slight he himself deliberately provokes, he’d probably already have been driven out of town or lynched. Right now, at least when he’s not violating someone somewhere, Zé is obsessed with the question of continuing his bloodline – given his philosophy, it’s the only way a man has towards immortality, or so he monologues. Since his live-in lover has not been able to get pregnant for years, Zé really is in need of a new breeding option – obviously, in his mind, the possibility he might not be able to have children because something’s biologically wrong with him doesn’t even come up. He already has another candidate for the position in mind, the virtuous Terezinha (Magda Mei). There’s a problem there, or rather three problems: firstly, Zé doesn’t truck with his old girlfriends running around potentially getting pregnant by other men (his logic, not mine), so he really needs to get rid of the old model woman rather more permanently. Secondly Terezinha is the fiancée of his friend – the film never explains how Zé managed to acquire one – the totally normal Antônio (Nivaldo Lima); thirdly, Terezinha really isn’t into Zé at all. Who could imagine why?

Of course, problems one and two can easily be solved with murder, while number three just needs a total disinterest in consent, so they aren’t all that difficult to solve for our protagonist.

The deeply uncooperative Terezinha decides to commit suicide after Zé rapes her, though, and from then on out, the unbelieving Zé is haunted by ghosts and portents that might very well end in supernatural vengeance.

Being a very poor country, Brazilian’s film industry in the early 60s was a small and struggling thing; being an at the best of times very conservative one, it lacked in horror movies completely. That is, until José Mojica Marins, who at this point had already made a small handful of films in other genres, came upon the brilliant idea on how to get horror through censorship, while also keeping it extremely critical of large parts of the country’s culture: just put all of your criticism, and all of your ideas into the mouth of the most outrageously exalted villain you can come up with.

As an added bonus, this also provided Marins with the opportunity to get as much exploitational value into his film as possible. The violence and the blasphemy and the sex are, after all, the misdeeds of a villain who will be rightfully punished by supernatural forces (though, one can’t help but notice, not the power of Christ), so this is not a way to criticize the way things are and get behinds in seats by being as outrageous as possible, but really a tale told to keep people honest citizens, Mister Censor. Censors being censors, they did apparently buy this argument, and Marins was off to the races, producing a series of increasingly psychedelic and bizarre movies featuring versions of the Zé do Caixão figure, always embodied by Marins himself with the glee of a guy who is getting away with it.

Marins’s portrayal of Zé here truly is a sight to behold. His improbable get-up and style, his long, soul(?)ful rants about often utterly horrible ideas, his mean-spiritedness and his love for often surprisingly gory violence are what holds the film together instead of a more traditional narrative. Marin’s direction and Giorgio Attili’s photography are a little rough around the edges, but they have such a sense for the dramatic, and the macabre money shot technical polish is replaced by the sheer energy of what they are doing. This is the how it looks when a group of people do something new, and exciting, and can even allow themselves jokes like Zé using the crown of thorns of a Jesus statuette to beat a guy up without getting dragged to court for it.

There isn’t only joy in the breaking of taboos on display here, though. The climax in which Zé is dispatched by ghosts looks very much schooled on the way classic kaidan cinema would have realized the same sort of ending – just with a bit more ickiness here – and there are rather a lot of little visual flourishes that suggest a filmmaker who is rather well-informed about what is going on in the rest of the world, incorporating what fits into his aesthetics and discarding the rest.

In short: When I Was Alive (2014)

Original title: Quando Eu Era Vivo

A middle-aged man we will only ever be introduced to as Junior (Marat Descartes in a performance in turns sad, creepy, and infuriating) has hit rock bottom. His wife has thrown him out, he has lost his job, and his sanity is hanging by a thread. Things are so bad, Junior has to move back in with Senior (Antônio Fagundes), a father who neither loves nor understands him and his unloved and misunderstood right back. Things are uncomfortable enough between the two the situation wouldn’t exactly need Junior’s deeply awkward and somewhat creepy attempts at flirting with his father’s tenant, music student Bruna (Sandy).

But that’s really just the beginning. In the old home, Junior’s already precarious mental state devolves rather quickly. His fixation on Bruna becomes increasingly uncomfortable (at least for the viewer, her reaction will be rather more ambivalent than you at first expect). He’s trying to change his father’s interior decorations back to the state they were in when his mother was still alive and increasingly devolves into a childlike mental state, complete with moving into a womb-like space in the house. He also discovers a mysterious song among his mother’s old things, a song that may have an occult meaning.

Brazilian Marco Dutra’s When I Was Alive belongs right into the zone of contemporary films of quiet, slow, intelligent and ambiguous horror that have one foot in the arthouse and the other, well, not in the grindhouse but certainly in genre filmmaking. When you make a film about a man who regresses into his past so much it becomes a peculiar kind of possession by the past, the borders between arthouse and genre blur quite naturally, as the question of the actual reality of the film’s occult elements seem rather beside the point mattering little for much of the film’s running time.

Don’t worry, midcore horror fans, the film does actually take an unambiguous turn into the – metaphorically fitting – occult, with a final couple of scenes nobody with two brain cells to rub against one another would explain with human psychology, however aberrant it may be. They are, of course, also rather fitting expressions of the metaphorical layer of the film, its scratching at the question of family, of closeness as possession and of the horrible lure of the dead past to those among us who have troubles surviving in the present.


All this – as careful, observant and atmospherically directed as it is by Dutra – will not be the sort of thing that’ll engage everyone. If you’re looking for much outward action or blood, or even just a typical thriller structure, When I Was Alive will probably not make you happy; it’s just not that kind of film. I do think it is very good at being the kind of film it wants to be, a metaphorically loaded, psychological piece of occult horror.

The Witch: A New-England Folktale (2015)

New England around 1630. The family of William (Ralph Ineson) and Katherine (Kate Dickie) goes into voluntary exile from their main settlement for theological reasons I never got a grasp on and which the film might have kept purposefully vague, given how focused and clear everything else about it is, even its ambiguities.

In this place and time, this means the family goes right into the wilderness, settling down near a patch of woods. Things don’t go well at all for the family. Katherine’s baby disappears into the woods while Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), the family’s eldest and the closest we have to a main protagonist, is playing with it near the woods. The child is just silently taken when Thomasin closes her eyes while playing peek-a-boo with it. William tries to explain the inexplicable with what we must imagine to be the sneakiest wolf in existence, but in truth, it was taken by the witch living in the woods to do what witches traditionally do with babies.

The loss of the child throws Katherine into deepest depression and certainly doesn’t make for an easy relationship between her and Thomasin. All the while the family’s crops are hit by some kind of sickness and during his attempts at providing meat, William doesn’t turn out to be much of a hunter – or the woods are against him. There’s even worse waiting for the family, and things will truly fall apart.

Generally, stating that a film isn’t for everyone is stating pretty much the obvious, yet I still feel the need to explain that Robert Eggers’s The Witch will most certainly not be for everyone, though for those of us who can appreciate it, this is an incredibly affecting and effective movie. If you’re going into the film expecting something even vaguely following the rules of modern mainstream or the slightly different ones of much of modern indie horror, you might be sorely disappointed, for this is a film that seems very little interested in genre conventions good or bad. In fact, for parts of the running time, The Witch approaches its horrors from the perspective of a historical psychodrama, though one that tries its hardest to share in the historical views of its characters concerning the supernatural.

Herein lies one of the film’s biggest strengths: while all of the supernatural or possibly supernatural occurrences here can be explained as outward manifestations of/metaphors for all the fears the characters’ faith brings with it and/or (the film is very conscious of the fact it is both) just barely helps them cope with, and everything they repress and leave unsaid, they are also presented through the mind set of the film’s characters. For them witches do exist as a matter of course and a black he-goat might in fact be the devil, so the film does indeed show us witches and the supernatural the way the family sees them. Eggers keeps to this approach stringently, successfully putting quite a bit of effort into making beliefs that are a difficult pill for most of its prospective audience to swallow real, even trying to keep the film’s dialogue as close to the written sources of the time to add a further level of authenticity and strangeness.

At the same time, the film – clearly very consciously – avoids treating characters who are deeply religious and superstitious in a way that can sound just plain insane to you or me as the Other, people for us to gawk or snigger at and feel superior to. Not just by sharing their view of the supernatural world for ninety minutes, but also by approaching them with a psychological realism that turns what might be difficult to relate to into something deeply human, with this only further pushing the audience into nearly sharing the characters beliefs and world view and understanding them for ninety minutes or so. These people may believe in things that sound strange or outright insane to us, yet there’s quite a bit less dividing them and us than we might pretend. With this understanding quite naturally also comes empathy, and with empathy comes an intense emotional wallop once things become increasingly intense and horrifying for the characters, who are not only beset by a witch but also their own failings. And, going by William’s Puritanical conviction of the essential sinfulness of everyone, those failings are as myriad as they are painfully human.

In this context, as a (non-New) atheist, I found it incredibly refreshing that the film neither just assumes an audience will (or needs to) share its own spiritual assumptions nor goes the route where beliefs we don’t share are things made for ridicule that make those carrying them less than human. It is very uncommon for a film to show characters like these as anything other than mere fanatics, and fanatics exclusively, so it is particularly affecting how clear the The Witch is about this being a loving family, with William not the clichéd religious patriarch who rules with an iron fist, but a decent man who truly loves his family and cares for them while struggling to keep with the demands of his faith and the harsh life he has damned them to. Of course, love doesn’t necessarily save anyone or anything.

I was also deeply impressed by the actors, who have to bring life to dialogue written in – and at least partially quoted from – the style of the time and place as it has come down to us in primary sources and need to go through intense, often painful, emotional scenes without sliding into the melodramatic or overly artificial. Anya Taylor-Joy is absolutely brilliant, and even the younger kids – Harvey Scrimshaw in particular - do some fantastic tour de force stuff here.

Eggers’s direction is on the same level as his script and the actors are, bringing all kinds of feelings to life – the loneliness and oppression of the woods (a place that can’t help but suggest the supernatural), the hard life the characters live even without folkloric witches besetting them, but also the moments of joy and love. There’s so much going on here without the film ever feeling overloaded that it’s a joy to watch. Or rather, a harrowing experience full of emotional tension and horrors, but you know what I mean.

The Witch also happens to be rather brilliant at being a horror film, creating a world so real – even if it is very much un-real – its horrors become just as real, even if they are as strange as those in the film’s folkloric sources. I, at least, won’t forget this one quickly.

In short: The Black Fables (2015)

Original title: As Fábulas Negras

Four kids play and bicker in the jungle. From time to time, they tell each other stories – about the monster from the sewers that munches the fat corrupt mayor’s guts, a werewolf, the curse of a saci, violent shenanigans at a boarding school, and the gruesome, devil-inspired revenge of a betrayed wife. Blood, guts and undetermined bodily fluids flow and splatter.

For various political and cultural reasons, Brazil has always been a particularly difficult country to make horror movies in. There were of course the films of José Mojica Marins (Coffin Joe/Joe de Caixao), but otherwise, genre entries have been few and far between, and the idea of “mainstream horror” as it exists in the US, where big studios involve themselves in the genre (though usually on the cheap compared to everything else they do), seems pretty much unthinkable. So Brazilian horror generally happens independently, on lowest budgets, and probably without much fanfare, making German genre filmmaking look as if it were in a happy place.

One of the more successful – at least in so far as you can actually see his films outside of Brazil – genre filmmakers in the country is Rodrigo Aragão. Aragão is also the lead writer and instigator of this anthology film that brings together himself, Petter Baiestorf, Joel Caetano, Marcelo Castanheira, and the great José Mojica Marins himself for a film with segments based on Brazilian folk tales and dollops of gore.

Marins’s segment about the saci, exorcism, and assorted bizarrery is the film’s highlight. It’s clearly cheap, but it’s also sharp, funny, and strange, cut to the best soundtrack of the anthology and made with the sort of off-handed verve you’d forgive a director of Marins’s age not to have anymore. There is – as with some of the other segments – also still a degree of subversive, angry political subtext to Marins’s piece, a deep distrust of authority carried by the sheer joy of transgressing against the rules of polite, conservative society.
That latter part all of the segments have more or less in common. Unlike many movies featuring the sort of gloopy gore on display here, the blood and guts are not exclusively symbols of nostalgia for the 80s or the mere fulfilment of genre expectations (though they certainly are both of that too) but also a sort of rebellion against the status quo. It’s actually pretty punk rock.

Given that, it actually seems to miss the point to complain about sometimes amateurish acting or the general simplicity of the stories here – this one’s really not at all in the market for being a tasteful bit of filmmaking, but still understands horror as a thing to provoke the polite classes with. The Black Fables does generally good work with that, and it’s the kind of anthology movie where even the worst segment (that would be the werewolf one) has at least on great thing in it (that would be the reverse werewolf transformation).

I found myself enjoying The Black Fables much more than I usually do with gore-heavy movies, perhaps because the gore isn’t pointless posturing as actually part of the point here.

Killer Fish (1979)

If you’re gonna steal a bunch of diamonds from your former employers, go big, thinks Paul Diller (James Franciscus), so while he’s having a nice game of backgammon as an alibi, a power plant and other stuff explodes as a distraction while his nurse-turned-lover Kate (Karen Black putting way more effort in than anyone else on screen) and a group of professional criminals lead by professional criminal and semi-professional ladies man Lasky (Lee Majors playing that character he’s always playing lest horrible things will happen on screen, one supposes) do the actual stealing.

Things go well enough, and the successful criminals sink their loot in a lake to let it wait there for sixty days until the heat dies down. Alas, not everyone – namely some of Lasky’s buddies - is too happy with the idea of waiting two whole months in a tourist town in Brazil (there’s obviously no accounting for taste). They learn all too soon that Diller has taken some precautions for this case, for he has infested the nicely dammed off lake with piranhas who proceed to eat the untrustworthy criminals. Despite this not hanging well with Lasky, he still finds time and space to romance visiting model Gabrielle (Margaux Hemingway, not able to act as usual) and say stuff like: “Historically, bisexuality is a lot older than any of my blocks” (seriously). Obviously, everyone involved is still trying to pull one over (though it’s clear Lasky and Kate would both have preferred to play fair) on each other, an activity that gets decidedly more dangerous once a storm destroys the dam and the surviving cast find themselves on a sinking boat on a piranha-infested lake.

As long-time readers among my imaginary audience might remember, I’m predisposed to like any old crap Italian director in every genre known to Man and some known only to Italian cinema Antonio Margheriti did, so it’ll come as little surprise to these chosen few that I did indeed like, as well as deeply enjoy, this somewhat misbegotten mixture of heist film, post-Jaws something-in-the-water horror, men’s adventure, and disaster movie that mixes so many genres it’s no wonder it can’t do any single one of them terribly well. Instead, the movie is a series of barely connected events, cool ideas, horrible ideas and the mandatory in about half of its sub-genres boring modelling scenes. Somehow, this film-like entity still manages to have something like a discernible plot – mostly because it is entirely made out of clichés, one might suspect.

On the other hand, the film’s cool ideas lead to some fine library footage explosions, later on some of that patented Margheriti model work for the dam destruction sequences, and many a scene of actors getting eaten by fish. That’s rather enough to keep me entertained at least, and while I’d never pretend Killer Fish is anything like a brilliant movie (or even among the best third of Margheriti’s films), its mix of absolutely archetypal genre clichés, but from a bunch of different genres just thrown together, is rather irresistible to someone like me fascinated by the way the content of 70s men’s adventure books made it into the movies (without said movies ever actually adapting them). There’s a somewhat grimy charm to the resulting film that’s certainly enhanced – the charm part, this is - by it being actually shot in Brazil, the generally lovely cast, and the curiously likeable quality most of Margheriti’s movies (even those in the sleazier genres) have for me.

In short: A Noite do Chupacabras (2011)

Somewhere in the Brazilian countryside (that is to my German eyes, the jungle), a violent family feud between the Silva and the Carvalho families has been smouldering for a few years even though both families have gone into a truce after the Silva's pretty much lost the fight.

When wayward Silva son Douglas (Joel Caetano) returns to the family home with his pregnant girlfriend Maria Alicia (Mayra Alarcón) in tow, he couldn't have come at a worse time; there's a story hanging on this return having to do with Maria Alicia's drug problem and his study of medicine, but that sort of thing is harmless compared to what the couple finds at home.

Something has been attacking and killing the family's goats for the last few weeks, leaving the father convinced a chupacabra (played by Walderrama Dos Santos with a well-developed body language that often manages to make the monster suit threatening and always manages to make the monster feel alien) is at work in the area. The old man's right, too, but that truth will only be revealed once circumstances consisting of chupacabra-spoiled meat, projectile vomiting, his own death by exploding ancient gun, and all-around insanity reignite the family feud with the added complication of a really ill-tempered monster.

When last we met Brazilian director Rodrigo Aragao, he made the flawed yet entertaining Mangue Negro (please excuse the quality of that particular review) for obviously little money but with a lot of enthusiasm. It doesn't look as if Aragao's budget has risen much for his second feature A Noite do Chupacabras, yet neither has the obvious enthusiasm declined.

The film has some of the typical problems of independent horror cinema from all around the world in form of amateurish (but at least enthusiastic) acting, problematic pacing (the film's at least twenty minutes longer than it needs to be), and a plot that is more ambitious than the production circumstances actually allow it to be. Of course, I do prefer a film that is ambitious yet can't fulfil its ambitions to one that doesn't ever bother to have any ambitions, but there is something to say for actually pulling off one's more ambitious ideas.

Much of what we see in the film's first half or so is a curious combination of horror movie clichés, said ambitions, and moments that actually work, and if the film had continued in this manner, I would probably not even have written any of this, for the film up to that point is too much of a likeable effort with too little pay-off to write even a grumpy piece on it. But then the film and its characters basically lose their shit for forty minutes or so beginning with the projectile vomiting scene. From then on, it's all people screaming, killing each other in home-made gory ways, high melodrama, sudden cannibal black magician appearances (that guy is actually part of the backstory, but that's just another case of the film being too ambitious for its own good), chupacabra birth dream sequences, cursing, and chupacabra carnage. It's certainly not high art, but it's also always far from being boring.

Add to that the fact that some of the film's jokes are actually funny (favourite moment: the teachable moment about the uses of religion), some good camerawork, an unconventional percussion soundtrack, the excellent use of locations (tickling my old love for horror films making use of the local instead of trying to appear universal), and again the feeling of enthusiasm, and you have yourself a flawed yet fun horror movie.

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In short: Fear X (2003)

This is the movie that drove Nicolas Winding Refn's production company into bankruptcy in the director's first attempt to get a foothold in English language cinema without betraying his aesthetic interests.

And really, it's not much of a surprise Fear X flopped pretty hard, for where the film's basic plot description ("lost man played by John Turturro attempts to understand the murder of his wife by finding her murderer") suggests your run-of-the-mill vengeance thriller, the actual film is working hard to subvert the vengeance thriller with the power of the Weird and the metaphorical. Refn uses a rigorously composed visual style that hints at the surreal despite - or perhaps even because of - its rigidity. That style turns the quotidian into the unreal by the sheer power of hyperstylization, pretty clearly not caring one bit for mainstream interpretations of how "suspense" or "excitement" are built in a thriller. That doesn't mean that Fear X isn't suspenseful or exciting, for these seemingly lost elements reappear once a viewer has accepted the non-generic way the film is built, and just goes with it.

After a point (ironically shortly after the film pretends to become clearer and more "realistic"), it becomes utterly unclear what part of the film is a dream, or a hallucination, and what part "real" (as much as anything in a film ever can be real, of course); questions of truth and reality are, as they often seem to be in Refn's movies, completely dependent on one's interpretation.

To - depending on one's position on this sort of thing - either add insult to injury or cheese to your wine, Refn's film refuses the easy way out of an ending that explains anything at all. In fact, the ending Fear X delivers so steadfastly refuses to even show the audience an important part of what is or isn't happening (though there are enough hints to build one's own ending if one is so inclined) I can easily imagine a nice percentage of the film's audience actually hating the director for it. I for my part rather want to applaud him.

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Ritual of Death (1990)

His friend, the dubious occultist sleazebag Jim, convinces the boss of a theatre group that the best way to get at a new play to stage is stealing a book containing a sacred Indian/Egyptian ritual that is supposed "to make the pharaoh immortal" from an old man. After a dream sequence with dancing Indians, a hairy book, a man with a bowler hat and cough syrup coloured goo, the deed is done. Jim celebrates the success by having sex with his girlfriend and a blood-dripping goat's head in his bathtub while the bowler hat guy looks on and an Indian howls and dances. Afterwards, Jim and Mickey the director have a nice little chat about sacred rituals, or rather if they make for good theatre. They certainly make for good rehearsals.

The longer the rehearsals for the play with no plot go on, the weirder lead actor Brad starts to get. At first, he only develops a compulsion to eat raw meat and sleep surrounded by candles, toads and our old friend the blood-dripping goat's head, but soon he's getting all bloody, pus-y and gooey and starts to kill women in gruesome ways. It all is supposed to have something to do with bowler hat guy's wish to be reborn in Brad's body, but neither the film nor I know what that's all about.

At least the old man whose book it was seems to know the score. That's something, at least.

It'll only end in pus and goo and the selective blindness of protagonists for what's happening right in front of their eyes anyway.

In theory, (The) Ritual of Death is the American dubbed version of a Brazilian movie made by (softcore?) porn director Fauzi Mansur, but you might as well tell me that it was made on Pluto for all the sense that it makes.

The quality of the English dub alone would render the film unintelligible, what with it consisting only of mumbled sentences without much coherence. However, the way the actors make bug eyes and mug into the camera whenever possible hints at the possibility that the original dialogue doesn't make much more sense.

I still don't understand why the film pretends the native population of Brazil and the Egyptians are somehow the same thing. Jim does start to explain it at one point, but just babbles about something completely different after a sentence or two as a perfect mirror of the way the whole film is structured - not at all.

The beleagured viewer needs to broaden her definition of the word "film" if she actually wants to call this one a film. It is more like a very loose conglomeration of scenes, vaguely connected by the same actors, a genuine love for pus and goo and fog and breasts, filmed in weird angles and sprinkled with dancing Indians and a guy in a bowler hat. Oh, and mock Egyptian sacrifice ritual jazz dance.

Of course, I'd be all on board with that and howl like the monkey who is providing the film's music by hitting a synthesizer and trying to sound "Indian", if not for the dreaded curse of the second half.

Until today, I thought this only concerned Bollywood films. Ritual of Death however managed to teach me something new in this respect. The film's second half tries to alleviate its weirdness by becoming a conventional slasher film. As a film that uses things like a pimped wind machine as a murder weapon, it doesn't manage conventional too well and gets a little slow and boring, fortunately without losing its power of "what the hell?" completely. Beside the wind machine of doom, there is still a creepy scene with all of Brad's dead victims wrapped up in plastic, moaning and writhing to look forward to. That should be enough for most discerning friends of the insane, yet I couldn't help but feel a little disappointed that the incomprehensible madness of the first half turned into mere gory strangeness.

At least I'll always have bowler hat guy.

 

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Mangue Negro (2008)

aka Mud Zombies

The people of a small, impoverished 19th century community (or so I guess going by the weapons people are using) in the Brazilian rainforest has a hard time staying alive. For decades, they have survived on the fish, crabs and oysters the mangroves provided them with, but in the last years there have only been slim pickings.

The bad times are getting worse when Batista (Reginaldo Secundo) stumbles upon a putrefying corpse instead of the crabs he is hunting. The icky thing might look dead, but it moves and bites in a rather sprightly manner. Batista escapes from the attack, but not before he is bitten and scratched by the zombie. We all know where that leads.

Unsurprisingly, the handful of people in the area has to fight a full-grown zombie outbreak. The emotionally stunted Luis (Walderrama Dos Santos) turns out to be the hero of the hour when it becomes necessary to protect the annoyingly useless village beauty Raquel (Kika de Oliveira) from the hungry undead. That's the power of secret infatuation for you!

As far as shot on digital low budget zombie films go, Brazilian Rodrigo Aragao's Mangue Negro is downright classy.

That doesn't mean that the film hasn't some glaring flaws, it just means that it has enough virtues to make at least somewhat up for them.

Most problematic is the director's puzzling decision to cast every woman except Raquel with a man in drag under really atrocious age make-up. It's not too hurtful in the case of Raquel's mother who isn't on screen much and does speak even less, but the local witch and exposition machine Dona Benedita as played by Andre Lobo is just plain annoying. Lobo's inability to understand that his old woman's voice is a terrible abomination is perplexing, Aragao's decision to not just let a man serve the same function in the plot when he hasn't an actress at hand even more so, but hey, what do I know, I just watch this stuff.

Still, even Lobo's best efforts can't ruin the film completely, as can't the less than convincing day for night scenes or the fact that the film's second half just drags badly. There's just too much obvious enthusiasm thrown on screen for me  to be too hard on Mangue Negro.

The first half hour or so is even quite wonderful in the way it uses extreme close-ups and a mood of decay to build up to the zombie action. And the zombies themselves aren't too shabby, either. Well, most of them, that is. As we all know, not every zombie has been created equal and so the zombies here go from thin make-up zombies to silly but cool animatronic creations everyone would be proud of.

Also of note are Aragao's additions to the zombie myth. There is a zombie fish and possibly zombie oysters to gawk at and even (gasp!) the truth about the cure for zombiefication. It's globe-fish gall!

And elderly drag queens and badly dragging last half hour or not, Aragao shows himself to be a creative and promising director, using his obviously limited funds well for most of the time.

Which is really more than you can expect.

 

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