So now that you've seen At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul and This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse, you may think you're ready to move on to Awakening Of The Beast. Well, be aware that Beast ranks among one of the most bizarre and eccentric films ever made. Like the previous Coffin Joe outings, though, it has that hint of brilliance that makes it something very original and fascinating. It bears mentioning that, to this day, filmmaker Jos? Mojica-Marins has never actually finished his ideal Coffin Joe trilogy. Instead, after the completion of This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse, the character of Joe became such a giantic icon that he started "introducing" tales of horror rather than being directly involved with them. From comic books to television shows, Coffin Joe was Marins' twisted version of a Rod Serling or Alfred Hitchcock. Awakening of the Beast follows in that tradition and is not a sequel to the previous works, but rather an extension of Joe's evil aura.

Awakening is set up like a roundtable discussion on drugs, with various panel guests (actual, real life "experts" playing themselves), including Mojica-Marins himself. In an attempt to drive home the fact that the underground drug culture in Brazil is sick and demented, we witness a series of short situations and vignettes in which drug addicts commit all sorts of unusual atrocities. In fact, "unusual" is an understatement, as Awakening is so chaotic, surreal, and freakish that mere words are simply not adequate to describe what is contained within. I thought drugsploitation movies like Alice in Acidland and David F. Freidman's The Acid Eaters were pretty high up on the freaky scale, but this one puts virtually all those to shame. Some sequences are fairly straightforward; people use drugs and wind up doing something they never would normally like commit adultery or take their clothes off in public, but most are considerably more radical, often making little sense.

Don't worry, though, there IS a connection to Coffin Joe. Eventually, one of the researchers debating the effect on drugs on society comes up with a rather bizarre theory: that it is not drugs making society go mad, but rather the effect of none other than Coffin Joe. Mojica-Marins argues that this is ridiculous, it's simply a fantasy character, but the final third of the film sees this researcher puts his theories to the test. Taking four addicts (who appeared in previous sequences), this scientist subjects them to an LSD trip while staring at a poster of Coffin Joe (from a shop selling Joe comic books, identical to the replicas being supplied with Fantoma's DVDs). The resulting sequence, filmed in color, is about the most crazed thing I've ever seen on film. The colored Hell sequence from This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse was brilliant and completely mad, but this LSD hallucination sequence, in which drug addicts are menaced by Coffin Joe, is a masterful mini-film in itself, beyond rational explanation. Though I praise the overall film highly in terms of the insanity Marins was aiming for, it's difficult to discuss as it is simply so eccentric and nightmarish, it would almost cheapen it to go into too much detail.

While Coffin Joe managed to squeak through censor boards by either making cuts or simply delaying release, the government never really took the character too seriously, more as an entertaining diversion that kept the peoples' minds off politics and the crumbling, corrupt police system. Awakening Of The Beast, however, (under its original title, Ritual Of The Sadists) was just simply too much. Too bizarre, too outlandish, and so radically fantastic that it was perceived as some kind of pro-counterculture statement, despite Marins' strong opposition to drug usage. As a result, it was banned. All repeated attempts to get the movie into normal circulation failed. Awakening Of The Beast remained, for the most part, unseen as a theatrical release until its showcasing at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival. The release of this DVD marks the first time Jos? Mojica-Marins has actually seen commercial profit from it in any meaningful way. Thankfully, we finally have the final product, free of cuts or special interference. Keeping things that way may prove a more difficult fight, however.

Still need this night I'll possess your corpse...this one is way to beatnick for me,albiet bizarre though.