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A blunt declaration ("He still lives!") resumes the tale, thus the bug-eyed corpse at the end of At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul revived with the promise of "tears of blood." Zé do Caixão (José Mojica Marins) demands an heir, the kidnapped beauties in his harem suffer the agony of serpents and tarantulas and demonic pontifications. A scientist and a savior in his own mind, the sadistic gravedigger sneers at the backwoods superstition around him, "I prefer liberation." The curious heiress (Nadia Freitas) becomes an accomplice while the colonel's daughter (Tina Wohlers) welcomes his seed, the titular curse comes courtesy of a pregnant victim with a snake coiled around her neck. "If you go to Heaven, say hello to the little angels. If you go to Hell, give the Devil my address." Crushing boulders and hunchback sidekicks and bottomless pits, in monstrous kinship to Corman's The Intruder and Buñuel's The Young One. The search for purity suits the gruesome spieler ("You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star," says Nietzsche), the kind of obsession shared by the auteur willing to scratch the film itself to get his barbaric effects. The towering otherworldly envoy (Tourneur's I Walked with a Zombie) kicks off the psychedelic Dantean descent: Ice instead of flames, Cocteau arms joined by disembodied breasts, painted women in upside-down crucifixions, Satan like "the mirror held up to Nature." The hilarity builds toward the joke-epiphany in the swamp as a nation's authoritarian piety is mocked to the very end by Mojica Marins, cursing the Lord even after getting struck by lighting ("I am not convinced!"). With Roque Rodrigues, Antonio Fracari, Nivaldo Lima, and Tania Mendonça. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |