L'éveil de la bête

Awakening of the Beast (1970)

** (out of 4)

Bizarre film from Marins using his Coffin Joe character as a fake thing to try and create a social commentary on society. In the film we see a television show where various doctors are debating the effects drugs have on society. The controversial actor/director Jose Mojica Marins is involved in the debate because people are wondering if his character Coffin Joe might influence people to do drugs. The final twenty-minutes has four people given LSD to see how they react. This is a complete mess of a film but I guess that adds to the surreal nature of the movie and series for that matter. I've read that Marins couldn't get a third Coffin Joe film off the ground so he had other filmmakers send him left over film stock just so he could throw something together and this is the result. The film is extremely well made as I'd be lying if I said Marins directing style wasn't something completely original. The visual look of the film is quite amazing as the director paints a very ugly picture of the underground drug community and its easy to see why the government had the movie banned in Brazil. Marins paints a cruel and ugly world full of abuse, both sexual and physical and the images brought to the screen are certainly unlike any other. There's one sequence where men line up to put their face up the skirt of a woman. Another scene where an overweight pervert tries to seduce a young woman. We get various acts of perversion and then the LSD sequences turn to full color and really give the eyes a treat. The performances are all about what you'd expect, although Marins puts himself above the rest. The movie is all over the place and I'm really not sure how strong the message on society is but those whose who enjoy strange and bizarre movies are bound to eat this one up.

Having recently caught this strange film on Independent Film Channel,it certainly warrants a viewing, if only for the curiosity of Jose Mojica Marins.

Primarily,he uses two scenarios: a round-table of psychiatrists discussing drug addiction,and alternate scenes of the addicts in question, who are given LSD as part of the experiment.

The poverty and demoralization (particularly of women in Brazil) is explored, and the scenes are stark, turning gradually to crude, horrific and even at times humorous. There is one scene in particular where a young woman is interviewing for a job as a maid and she envisions her prospective employer, who is obese and wolfing a plate of pasta)as a hideous looking Pekingnese dog.

Overall a creative and strange commentary on the drug cultures of the late 1960's and 70's.8/10.

In the first half of the film, after an interesting opening lettering simulating comic books, a beautiful cinematography and a cunning edition (often with dark humor) depict a wide range of sexual depravation situations (sometimes combined with mysoginy, violence, and work harassment). Those bizarre cases are interwined with a debate between psychiatrists, in a noir footage, about the possible causal connection between those dire social events and the usage of illegal drugs. One of those experts is José Mojica Marins, the director himself, who is also known as his character Coffin Joe, then merging reality, the story of the present movie and also his previous films (besides a horror comic book character who also appears in a newsstand). It is mentioned that another scentist, Sérgio, made experiments with LSD with four patients to investigate that issue. Then, Coffin Joe appears in a TV show being interviewed by intelectuals about his role as filmmaker in Brazilian cinema, being judged as in a court. After that, the movie continues showing Sérgio's experiment to find out if there is a relation between LSD and perversion. After going with the four patients to watch Coffin Joe's films in a theater, he shows them images of that character and uses syringes to inject the solution on them. That last quarter of the film is partially coloured, what does not happen in rhe whole rest of the film. Situations even worse and weirder than in the beginning of the film take place inside their thoughts and minds. In those scenes, Coffin Joe shows his sadism and mysoginy, and have magic powers that did not appear in his three first movies portraying the character. The four human guinea pigs have macabre hallucinations, and the young woman suffers lots of violence, just like undistinguishable unknown people who are present in that hellish nightmare. Off course the whole film is an excuse to exploitation, and there is very little story between the weird real or oneiric situations. However, José Mojica Marins does try innovative cinema aestethics throughout the film. In the end, researcher Sérgio explains his experience (no spoilers here), when they are also shown in the mentioned TV show. Coffin Joe has the elements to keep making his films.

During a debate of journalists with the renowned psychiatrist Dr. Sérgio and José Mojica Marins a.k.a. Zé do Caixão, Sr. Sérgio presents several cases of kinky sex and orgy associated to the use of drugs. The journalists defend that the cases are related to perverts and criminals, but Dr. Sérgio blames the influence of drugs for the violence. Then Dr. Sérgio invites four persons from different classes to use LSD and analyze the effect of Zé do Caixão's films in their twisted minds to prove his theory.

"O Ritual dos Sádicos" is a weird low-budget movie by José Mojica Marins that begins with disconnected sequences and many perversions, kinky sex and anti-drug apology. Considered cult by fans of hardcore, the film is messy, boring and dated in 2011.

Its greatest merit is that in 1970, the daring and disturbing "O Ritual dos Sádicos" displeased the military dictatorship and was forbidden by the censorship. Then José Mojica Marins introduced modifications, inclusive the title was changed to "O Despertar da Besta" but the film was released only in the middle 80's and never exhibited in movie theaters. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "O Ritual dos Sádicos / O Despertar da Besta" ("The Ritual of the Sadistic / The Awakening of the Beast")

Dr Sergio leads a panel of doctors including writer and director Jose Mojica Martins in an episode of TV programme "Enlightening the Darkness". They discuss the effects of drug use on Brazilian society and discuss a set of experiments that Dr Sergio carried out with LSD and a group of users from different social classes.

What follows is a film in two parts. The first part follows Dr Sergio telling the panel stories of people using drugs and the effects they have. Essentially this is a series of short scenes where the drug takers turn to violent perverted acts after the drugs. Most of these include sexual violence directed towards women, others include sex scenes that have all the sensitivity and direction of soft core porn. Overall the lesson seems to be that drugs cause these perverted scenes and that drugs are bad. For this half of the film the "story" is disjointed and hard to follow - the discussion isn't set in any context and it just feels like an exploitation film - this is easy to believe as Mojica the director is famous for cheap horrors etc.

The second half sees the discussion become more structure as Dr Sergio describes his experiments on four LSD users. What follows a short set up is a 15 minute series of full colour (the rest is black & white) hallucinations featuring the director's alter ego - the evil Ze do Caixo. These hallucinations are quite disturbing and include a lot of violence toward women carried out by Caixo. Director Mojica comes up with very imaginative visions but they are all too gaudy and trashy horror. Again these feel overdone to shock his audience.

Following the experiments Dr Sergio reveals that instead of LSD he used distilled water and presents evidence to the same that is too easily believed ("it says distilled water!"). The conclusion of the experiments (and the film) is that these images came from the people themselves and not the drugs - therefore drugs are harmless and the people who do bad things as a result are sick anyway and you can't blame the drugs. This is a very weak conclusion given the evidence that has just gone before.

The film is an interesting bit of exploitation from Brazil - worth watching once for the film-student style of direction. However the presentation of perverted images and violence linked so closely to drug use makes the film's pro-drug message totally unbelievable and very hard to shallow (even if you agree with legalising drugs).