Original subtitles

-♪ Hey, everybody, have you heard the news? ♪

♪ Joe Bob is back in town ♪

♪ He's over at the Drive-In ♪

♪ Hangin' around, watching crazy movies ♪

♪ So come on down to ♪

♪ Joe Bob's "Last Drive-In" show ♪

♪ Blood, beasties, boobies, and more ♪

♪ Joe Bob's "Last Drive-In" show ♪

♪ It's a spooky good time with monsters and ghosts ♪

♪ Crazy, kooky fun with the world's greatest host ♪

♪ Joe Bob's "Last Drive-In" show ♪

♪ It's gonna be legendary ♪

♪ Joe Bob's "Last Drive-In" show ♪

♪ It's gonna be very scary ♪

♪ Joe Bob's "Last Drive-In" show ♪

♪ Let's go ♪

-Get the damn coffin out of here.

We don't even need it anymore. I'm still upset.

-I know you are.

-Did you even see this letter from the city of Senoia?

I heard about it.

Don't you think any city in America

would want to host the Coffin Joe parade?

-It was just too big for Senoia.

-First of all, this turkey that wrote the letter says

even if the parade got approved by the city council,

which it did not,

we were gonna have to pay 5,000 bucks

for cleaning up all the spiders and plastic snakes

that Coffin Joe was going to throw

from the horse-drawn hearse.

-The main thing they didn't like

was all the topless girls with the live snakes.

-I -- I told them we were not using actual boa constrictors!

Those were six-foot bull snakes.

I paid a lot of money for them.

And I had eight strippers from Atlanta already under contract,

and that was performance art.

We worked on that thing for three months,

and they were not totally naked.

Waist-down, I had them decked out

in torn, blood-soaked antebellum dresses

so they could dance with the Confederate undead soldiers.

I know. I know.

-Do you know how hard the high-school band worked

on that New Orleans style funeral march?!

-I do. -We were gonna put the entire

band in black-velvet uniforms with skeleton face paint,

and they were gonna start out with the Brazilian national anthem

and then shift over to Black Sabbath

and then finish it up with an Ennio Morricone medley.

I would have had the entire population of Senoia

bawling their eyes out on the town square!

I wouldn't even mention the Coffin Joe float.

-They were never gonna let you chain the women

in gothic wedding gowns to the float.

Just -- Just not gonna happen.

-It had dry ice around it, though.

It was gonna make it picturesque.

They were gonna love it. It was Southern.

-They also did not like the satanic majorette troupe.

-See, that's another rehearsal that was wasted.

You know how hard it is to twirl

that many upside-down crosses in unison?

I had fire-breathers lined up.

-Okay. They didn't like the pyro, either.

-I had stilt walkers in devil horns!

What about those tarantula-totin' nuns?

What was wrong with that?

-They're not big on anti-church stuff around here.

-Oh. How many fake coffins did we end up with?

-I don't even know. They're all stacked up outside.

-See, the third-graders were gonna ride in those.

It's just such a wasted opportunity!

I would have done it just like they do it in Brazil.

-They don't have official Coffin Joe parades in Brazil.

-Darcy, I saw a picture of a Coffin Joe parade in Brazil.

That's how this thing got started.

-That was one dude who built a Coffin Joe bust

and put it on a platform.

-It was? -Yes.

-I thought that was a Coffin Joe float

just at the head of the Coffin Joe...

But Brazil loves Coffin Joe. -That much is true, yes.

-Well, I'll get over it.

Some other city in America will beg for the Coffin Joe parade.

And tonight we have what many believe to be the best

of the three Coffin Joe movies --

"This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse."

-And this night I willpossess your corpse!

-Okay. -Okay.

We don't have to do the cosplay because I'm, you know...

This night I will possess your corpse!

-Okay.

Sometimes you get too carried away

whenever we discuss demons and devils and satani--

-I'm just trying to cheer you up now.

-Oh! You're trying to cheer me -- Okay, I appreciate that.

-Yay! -You know, it has been

62 years since José Mojica Marins

rented a top hat, grabbed a cape

that had been left in the studio by the janitor,

went home to get his black suit,

and became, in a single day, Coffin Joe,

the crazed mortician seeking the perfect woman

to bear him a child

and thereby fulfill his perverted theories of eugenics.

And the only reason he played the lead

is that all the actors he wanted turned down the role

as being too perverted and nasty.

-Hell yeah. -And then the one actor

he did hire backed out at the last minute,

so he had his crew and his sets ready to go

and he had to shoot, and so he took the role himself.

And aren't we glad he did?

Because he didn't mind being perverted and nasty

in the perverted and nasty film that he had written.

And besides, he's the guy in the movie who gets every girl!

Well, every girl that he doesn't kill.

But I have to admit,

I don't know exactly what José Mojica Marins

was going for when he created Coffin Joe.

He's probably the least-likable leading man

in the history of cinema,

and yet we kind of want him to succeed.

-Yeah, we want him to kill everyone and get away with it.

-And this was long before it became fashionable

to be a fan of Freddy Krueger or Michael Myers or Jason.

So explain that to me, Darcy.

There's always one girl in every town

who says, "Impregnate me, Coffin Joe!

I am the answer to your scientific equation.

Soak me with your semen.

And the supreme man will emerge from my womb."

Which is, of course --

Every man is seeking that in every woman, you know?

And there's never any build-up to it.

It's not like he has to talk them into it.

You know, it's -- "Here I am, Coffin Joe.

I know you're the guy everyone hates, but here I am.

Um, and have sex with me right now.

I can't wait."

How does that work, Darcy?

-He's Coffin Joe! -Of course he is.

-The end. -And it's Brazil,

where, once a year,

the entire female population goes topless

and dances in the street, right? -Exactly.

-And so you just -- They just go by pheromones there.

The women sense that Coffin Joe has come to their village

and they start getting nasty in advance.

-That makes sense to me.

-So we've had a lot of requests

for Coffin Joe over the years.

I'm sorry we couldn't have had Coffin Joe himself on the show.

He died in 2020 at the age of 83.

I wonder what kind of funeral service that was.

I can guarantee it wasn't Catholic

because the Catholic Church hated him.

Um, anyway, I think this would be the first Nietzschean movie

that we've ever shown.

-Is that what you call it?

-Yeah, well, it's the first Nietzschean movie

and the first Theatre of Cruelty movie

based on the theories of another guy

that I can't pronounce, Antonin Artaud.

Um... -And all this time,

I just thought it was a psycho terrorizing women.

-He doesn't just terrorize women, Darcy.

He kills men, too. -Oh, I know, yeah.

-But he's only interested in the women

because they can provide him with the race of supermen

that he's trying to create.

He's all about racial purity.

-So he's a Nazi.

-Coffin Joe would deny that he's a Nazi.

He said the Nazis were all about material superiority,

and Coffin Joe wants spiritual superiority.

He wants to purify mankind, get rid of the riff-raff.

-So he's a Nazi. -Yeah, he sort of is a Nazi.

But, you know, there's lots of Nazis

running around these days, so we need a Coffin Joe movie.

-We always need a Coffin Joe movie.

-José Mojica Marins would say he's a Nietzschean.

He believed in the writings

of your favorite philosopher and mine, Darcy --

Friedrich Nietzsche.

-Oh. Yes. I have all his albums. Huge fan.

-Actually, when I was in college,

everybody carried around this book, "Thus Spake Zarathustra,"

which was an English translation of the Nietzsche book

from the 19th century.

But for some reason I always said "Spake" instead of "Spoke."

I don't know why. I'm not --

It's one of those books that undergraduates start reading

when they sign up for a philosophy class,

thinking philosophy sounds interesting,

and then they find out there's this Nietzsche book

that's 600 pages long.

-So everyone at your college read it?

-Uh, they startedreading it.

I've never met anybody who's actually finished that book.

But my point is Coffin Joe finished reading

"Thus Spake Zarathustra."

He apparently thinks he is Zarathustra.

-Who is Zarathustra? -I don't know.

I didn't get that far in the book.

But it's some guy with a beard in Iran

who inspired Nietzsche with whatever he spake.

-Is all this in tonight's movie?

-Every bit of this is in tonight's movie.

All 600 pages of Zarathustra "spaking" is in our movie,

"This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse,"

which is a sequel, by the way,

to "At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul,"

the movie that launched Coffin Joe

into international superstardom.

And 'cause this is Hell Night on "The Last Drive-In,"

we're all over hell tonight.

Because our second movie is "The Church,"

better known as "Demons 3," an Italian classic.

We're gonna wake up hell on two continents tonight.

-Whoo! -And thank you for that cosplay, Darcy.

I love it.

-Makes me want to shoot myself in the head

so I can party with you in hell.

-Um, who said this was cosplay?

-Ah, spoken like the true she-devil that you are.

We'll get into more Nietzschean philosophy later.

-I can hardly wait for that.

-But right now I think it's time to introduce the movie!

-Ya think? Oh, my God.

-"This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse"

is the sensitive story of a sadistic mortician

in a black cape

who roams through the Brazilian countryside

looking for beautiful young villagers he can torture

and terrorize in order to find one worthy of his sperm

which will create the master race

and end the confusion and folly of mankind.

Sure, we've seen it before, but have we seen it

with naked maidens being strangled

by poisonous snakes?! I think not.

So let's take a look at those "Drive-In" Totals.

We have...

"Drive-In" Academy Award nominations for Antonio Fracari

as Truncador, the dimwit village strongman

who becomes a punching bag for Coffin Joe.

Nadia Freitas as Marcia

for failing to understand the importance of Nietzschean sperm

when she had the chance

by saying, "Stop. I can't stand this cruelty."

Jose Lobo as Bruno, the scar-faced hunchback assistant,

for saying, "Boss, she screamed, so I grabbed her neck slowly,

but it was too thin."

Tina Wohlers as Laura for declaiming,

"My womb will take the seed

that will immortalize the perfect man"...

and almost achieving her goal.

And, of course, José Mojica Marins for writing,

directing, producing, starring as Coffin Joe,

for his maniacal laugh

and for summing up all the themes of the movie

when he says, "Is life everything and death nothing?

Or is death everything and life nothing?"

Hmm! Which is it, Darcy?

-Um, I'm gonna go with death, at least for this movie.

-Four stars! Joe Bob says check it out.

And I would be -- If you're interested,

I'd be happy to send you my copy of "Thus Spake Zarathustra."

-Oh. I'm okay on that. Thank you.

-Or I can send you the album. -Okay. I'll take that.

-Richard Strauss --

or "Ree-kard" Strauss did the musical version,

"Also sprach Zarathustra,"

and the musical "Zarathustra Sprachs,"

instead of "Spakes."

-You done now?

-Are you kidding me? Nietzsche in a horror movie?

Can we ever be done with that? Thank you, Coffin Joe.

Hmm.

Ah!

-Oh.

-And so for you first-time Coffin Joe people,

I hope you can see that this character

in this flick is so wrong on so many levels,

and that's what people in Brazil loved about it.

Since Marcia was completely unfazed

by the crawling tarantulas,

she has just become a candidate for being impregnated

by Coffin Joe because she seems to be just like him --

cold, emotionless, an atheist, unafraid,

willing to do anything and everything

that society despises.

And yet we're supposed to identify with her,

or, more precisely, identify with the happy couple

that's about to produce the super race

and get rid of all the idiots and weaklings

that make up the population of the Earth.

So...who was this guy?

I think I should talk about him

because when we announced this program, I was amazed

at how many people were not yet familiar with Coffin Joe.

José Mojica Marins was born

on Friday the 13th, 1936, in Sao Paulo,

and he grew up in the back of a movie theater

that his father managed

after he retired from being a bullfighter.

And his mother was a professional

tango dancer and singer.

His only film education was watching

every movie that ever played at his father's theater.

So at age 4, he watched all the films

about syphilis and gonorrhea

that were screened for the local high-school kids.

And those were brutal and explicit and gory in Brazil.

But he also watched Charlie Chaplin,

who seemed to be signaling in all his films

that the world was a very foolish place.

And he was very precocious, and at the age of 10,

his father bought him an eight-millimeter camera,

and his first movie was about "Judgment Day."

He screened it at the neighborhood church,

and the local priest told his parents

that he was disturbed mentally

and needed to be treated by doctors.

And that would be sort of the recurring theme

in Coffin Joe's life.

He hated authority figures. They hated him.

And he continued to make films that got darker and darker

and more and more perverse.

And he kind of got away with it the first time.

"At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul"

came out in 1964,

and since it was the first Brazilian horror flick

of any kind, it kind of sailed past the censors

and did its wicked work.

But this movie, the sequel,

was closely watched by the Catholic Church

and by the military junta that supported the Catholic Church.

And, in fact, they made him change the ending

to affirm the existence of God.

And that pissed him off so much that he regarded it as a curse,

and he stayed angry about it the rest of his life.

When it came time to make the third Coffin Joe movie

40 years later, he still remembered that,

and he actually went back and reshot the ending of that movie

and used it as the prequel to the new movie,

which was called "Embodiment of Evil,"

which I highly recommend, by the way.

And we will get some very special insights into that movie

later on tonight because our guest is the only person

who ever played Coffin Joe in a movie

besides the real Coffin Joe.

So, anyway, the question I have about Coffin Joe is,

did he really believe this stuff

or did he just create a character

that's intended to be insanely despicable?

And I'm not sure. I can't tell. What do you think, Darcy?

-I think he believes it. -You think he believes

that superior people should rule the Earth?

-Yes and that it doesn't matter if inferior people die.

-Wow. And he's the judge of that.

Coffin Joe is the judge of that.

-All right.

Well, we can't accuse him of not following up

with the logical consequences of those beliefs,

as we're gonna see now

as "This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse" continues.

So...roll it.

Coffin Joe believes that the cruel shall inherit the earth.

It seems like that would not be popular

with the Brazilian priesthood, right?

But they --

They never excommunicated him or anything.

-I don't think they do that.

The Church didn't like "Rosemary's Baby,"

but they didn't excommunicate Roman Polanski.

-I guess they don't want to call attention to the movie, so...

-They just tell you not to watch it.

-You get in trouble if you're Catholic

and you watch "Rosemary's Baby"?

I mean, they do have a "banned movies" list,

but I don't think they're spying on you.

-But if you went to confession,

you would have to confess that you watched

a banned movie, right? -True.

-I got a letter from the Catholic League one time.

They were upset about a joke that I made.

-They were mad at you? -Yeah. They were --

They were steamed.

I was giving a list of "Drive-In" movies

we were showing at a festival, and I said,

"And then we have that great Roman Catholic double feature,

"I Drink Your Blood and I Eat Your Skin."

And, uh, they gave me a stern talking-to in that letter.

-Oh, you made fun of the Eucharist!

-Some jokes are just irresistible.

You have to say it.

-I don't think they tell a lot of jokes in the Vatican.

-Especially Eucharist jokes. That was too far.

-Coffin Joe would have laughed.

-I like to think Coffin Joe would have laughed at that joke.

Maniacally.

-Poor Marcia.

She survived the tarantula test,

but she couldn't deal with his romantic lovemaking.

He was trying to use the screams

of terrified, dying women as an aphrodisiac,

but he lets her go because he detects love in her eyes.

You know, Darcy, if she really loved him,

she would go ahead and have sex to the accompaniment

of mass-murder sounds.

If that's his fetish, you go with it, right?

-You're right. Yes. Sure.

-Anyway, I got distracted at the last break

and I didn't finish talking about José Mojica Marins,

the creator of Coffin Joe.

So, he was this precocious kid who made 80 films

by the time he was 18 years old,

starting out on Super 8.

But most of those were actually 16-millimeter film,

and a lot of them were about religion,

or at least God and the devil, and a lot were about death.

And then he tried to make his first feature

when he was 17 years old called "God's Sentence,"

and he started it, but he never finished it

because two of his actresses died on him,

uh, which sounds incredibly bizarre

if you're talking about anybody except Coffin Joe.

Uh, to make money, he worked in the comic-book field,

and then in 1959,

he did make his first feature, "Way of the Adventurer."

It was this genre they have in Brazil called a bang-bang,

a rural Western.

And, sure enough, the Catholic Church

called for a boycott of it

because he had a scene with two nude actresses.

Then he made a film about children from poor neighborhoods

who get saved by priests.

Couldn't get it released,

so he went back to sex and violence,

and he made a wild-youth movie in 1963.

And then he had a life-changing nightmare,

like, a literal nightmare.

The plot of "At Midnight I'll Possess Your Soul"

came to him in his sleep, and he didn't waste time.

He sold everything he owned, including his house and his car,

so he could make sure he would have

the best technicians and camera people

working on his nightmare movie.

And he hired people working at the biggest movie studio

in Brazil called Vera Cruz,

also the most important film studio in Brazil.

And he was ready to go, and his main actor walked out.

So he decided to take the role himself.

Costume was put together at the last minute.

He later said he copied it off the back

of a pack of cigarettes.

Clasico Cigarettes had a man in a top hat

and a cape on the pack,

and that's what he went with for Coffin Joe.

Just like... -Nailed it!

-"At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul"

was the first horror movie in Brazil,

and José Mojica Marins kind of becameCoffin Joe

because of the notoriety.

There were only three Coffin Joe movies --

1963, 1967, and 2008 --

but Coffin Joe was featured in many other movies

that had nothing to do with the Coffin Joe narrative.

Plus, he became a horror host. He published comics.

He did early versions of reality TV as Coffin Joe.

Coffin Joe had his own talk show for a while.

People loved Coffin Joe,

even if they thought the movies were a little too intense.

And, of course, his trademark,

besides the black cape and the top hat and the satanic beard,

was those long fingernails.

And those are really his nails.

He grew his nails perpetually. He never cut them.

In fact, the first time he ever trimmed his nails was in 1998

when he was 62 years old.

When people write about Coffin Joe,

they sometimes called him the Brazilian Dario Argento,

but that is not accurate at all.

He never had the kind of money that Argento had.

He never had the international backing that Argento had.

He was not interested in giallo-type plots.

He was interested in philosophy,

you know, the philosophy that he spouts

every chance he gets in the movie.

So maybe it's time to talk about Nietzsche.

-No! -No?

-No. It's not Nietzsche time.

-Alright. Then let's get back to the movie.

-Okay. -Roll the film.

You're an expert on nails, fingernails.

-Wha...? -You always have great nails.

You go to nail salons. -Yes.

-How much do you think a typical nail salon would charge

to do Coffin Joe's nails?

$1,000?

-$1,000? No. No.

-He was a movie star.

If a movie star has nails this long

and you go to Beverly Hills to a nail --

What do -- Cardi B's nails. How much does she pay?

How much does Cardi B pay? Nicki Minaj?

How much do they pay for their nails?

-Thousands. Thousands of dollars for their nails.

-I think -- -And I've been growing these.

-I think it might be $1,000. -Alright.

There's something sinister, though,

about extremely long nails.

-Not always.

-Do you ever go into an office

and the secretary working the keyboard all day has long nails?

Really long ones?

Or the check-in lady at the airport, you know?

And they're working on a keyboard.

-They figure out a way to make it work.

-I think it's dangerous because, you know --

You know why your screen went blank?

'Cause your finger was on C, but your fingernail was on

345#$% and Delete.

Can you get fired for doing that?

-That would be nail discrimination.

-Is that a category? -It should be.

Bruno.

Ahh!

Ah!

-It's time, Darcy!

-I knew you were gonna do this, but eight items?

-Friedrich Nietzsche was a complicated man, Darcy.

You can't put Nietzsche on TikTok.

-I think you can, but go ahead.

-I remember this time when I was in college

and, um, we were hanging out in the alley

behind Ryman Auditorium,

which is where the Grand Ole Opry performs.

And we were watching Marty Robbins through the back window,

and I realized -- I don't know why it was at that moment.

But I realized I had this paperback

of "Thus Spake Zarathustra" with me

that I carried around in college.

And I thought, "Why do I have a copy

of 'Thus Spake Zarathustra' in my pocket?"

It has no value for me. It has no purpose.

-And what's the point? -This is the purpose!

I read "Thus Spake Zarathustra"

so that I could explicate the works of Coffin Joe!

-I thought you said you couldn't finish it.

-Well, I read enough of it. Okay.

-Okay. -Look.

-Let's do it. -Numero uno, the will to power.

This is what you always start with in class.

Nietzsche says that all humans pursue power.

That's the main thing we do.

That's our motivation.

It's not survival. It's not reproduction.

It's not winning the Nobel Prize.

It's power. So what does Coffin Joe do?

-Pursue power. -Exactly.

-Numero two-oh, the Ubermensch

will eventually rule the world.

This is a superman who creates his own values

and is not subject to the conventional values of the world.

He's more creative.

He's stronger than everybody else.

You see where this is going? -I'm afraid I do.

-Don't mess with the Germans. Right?

So what is -- So what is Coffin Joe doing?

-He's creating the super race. I get it.

-All right.

Numero three-oh, eternal recurrence.

This basically means the only way to live

is to make sure that every single decision you make

is something that you would still make

if you had to live your life over and over and over again.

-Okay. I agree with that one.

-I actually don't get that one.

I must have skipped that chapter.

Anyway -- But thank you. Thus Spake Darcy.

All right. Numero four-oh.

Christianity is slave morality.

It's being wimpy.

-Nietzsche said Christians are wimpy?

-Yeah. Sort of.

He said it's the religion of weakness and meekness.

-And what did he want?

-Strength. Pride. Noble-warrior shit.

-Can't we have both?

-I guess not.

All right. Numero five-oh.

God is dead.

This is a biggie because undergraduates

like to say it all the time.

God is dead. Sounds all existential and deep.

You know? He says science has wiped out belief in God.

So we got to come up with something else.

-And what's the something else?

-Um, thanks for asking, Darcy.

Because that's numero six-oh.

This is the something else we come up with.

Nihilism.

Well, Zarathustra, um...

Nietzsche is a nihilist, but that's a good thing

because if you believe in nothing,

then you can create new values.

-Then nihilism is a good thing. -Yeah.

Makes people commit suicide, actually,

unless they're Nietzscheans.

But, um, you notice how Coffin Joe

is going straight down the line on Nietzsche bull stuff?

And actually -- You know what?

I think -- I think Coffin Joe thinks he isZarathustra.

You know how he keeps yelling, "Instinct! Only instinct!"

I think the reason they put that in

is I think Coffin Joe is saying,

"Trust yourself and make people get out of your way."

Right? That's what the superman does.

And that's number seven on the chart.

Traditional values are wrong.

And then number eight is basically

don't tell me what to do.

No objective truth.

If I have to smush a guy's head with a giant rock

to get what I want, then the church and the police

should have nothing to say about it.

I need it? I do it. -Wow.

Okay. So Coffin Joe believes all this?

-Yes. -Okay.

-Smart people like him

should run the world by these rules,

and the stupid people don't matter.

-And who are the stupid people?

-Pretty much everybody. I mean, us.

-Yay! -Anybody who doesn't have power.

Fortunately, we live in America where you can't do that.

And speaking of, uh --

-Speaking of spaking and spraching,

um, you know, the Richard Strauss --

Actually the "Ree-Kard" Strauss music

called "Thus Sprach Zarathustra"?

It's the theme from "2001: A Space Odyssey."

-Yes. -All right.

Who did it better -- Stanley Kubrick or Coffin Joe?

I'm going with the Brazilian Ubermensch.

-Are you proud of your poster?

-I am very proud of this poster.

-You should be. -We even got the...

-Ubermensch. -...Third Reich font on here.

It explains the mind of Coffin Joe.

-And we needed this for tonight.

-Yeah. Now what we need is a trip to hell.

But that's coming up very soon in the movie.

-Yes! And I am all about that.

-All right. Back to the movie.

Roll it.

See, now I'm thinking that in the future,

we should limit the amount of Nietzsche

that we put in "The Last Drive-In."

Ya think?

-Or at least bring somebody on who finished the whole book.

-This is the place where the movie switches

into lurid Technicolor and we see the tortures of Hell.

But before we go there, we have a special guest with us.

This man may be the world's leading expert on Coffin Joe.

But not just that, he actually played Coffin Joe

in the third Coffin Joe movie, which came out in 2008

and is called "Embodiment of Evil."

From Saint Charles, Missouri,

Please welcome Raymond Castiel. Come on over, Raymond.

Yeah. -Welcome.

-Raymond, welcome.

Hello.

-Raymond, you have one of the weirdest stories

in the history of horror fandom, and it all stems from the fact

that you were a dead ringer for Joseph Mojica Marins.

You're older now, so you look like Mojica

when he was in his 40s or 50s.

But, Austin, put that picture up of Raymond

back when he was first cosplaying Coffin Joe.

Early Coffin Joe. Look at that. Wow.

But let's start at the beginning.

When did you first discover Coffin Joe?

-I was first aware of Coffin Joe in the '90s,

reading magazines,

but I thought he was a horror host.

I didn't know that he was a movie star,

that he made movies.

So the first time I really became aware of the phenomenon

of Coffin Joe was when the "Fantomas" DVD set

came out in the early 2000s.

That was the first time that I saw the movies,

and they captured my imagination.

-What attracted you to the Coffin Joe movies?

-They were very transgressive. They were very rebellious.

And I did notice a resemblance to the character.

I did see -- Not that I identified

with anything he believed in,

but I identified with him as an outsider,

as someone who stood against authority,

and just simply the physical resemblance.

-So you realized that you did look like Marins,

and you started dressing up like Coffin Joe, at some point?

-Yeah. So, 2004, I created what we now would call a cosplay.

I didn't even know that word at the time.

I just was such a fan. I wanted to express my fandom.

So I created this Coffin Joe costume just as

an expression of, "Wow, I love Coffin Joe,

and I want to wear..."

-Where would you wear it? At, like, Halloween or...?

-Yeah, I wore it at, like, a party or something.

But mainly I wanted to do a photo shoot,

which I did with a friend of mine.

We went to a graveyard, and I did a photo shoot

in this costume, and I posted it online.

I did a website, and that was my fan page for Coffin Joe.

I just wanted to spread the word about Coffin Joe.

You know, when you fall in love with something,

you want to tell the whole world about it.

You want to get people interested in it.

And that was my way of trying to do that.

-And so then, down the road, at some point,

you got an actual e-mail from Coffin Joe,

who had seen that photo shoot.

-Yes. -Right?

-I got an e-mail from his assistant director,

Dennison Ramalho, as Coffin Joe didn't speak English.

And Dennison said, "Coffin Joe was amazed.

He was so impressed with your --

with your website and your costume."

Apparently, Coffin Joe had been interviewed by a publication

that used pictures of me to illustrate the interview.

They thought it was pictures of the real Coffin Joe.

And then Coffin Joe Mojica

saw the interview when it came out, and he said,

"I don't remember shooting these photos.

When did I do this photo shoot?"

And his partner went online and discovered me

and said, "It's not you. It's this guy from Missouri."

And he was very -- very pleased, very impressed.

I was afraid he might be mad or something.

No, he was very happy.

That was it for about six months.

And then I got another e-mail, again from Dennison,

and this time the subject said,

"Do you want to be Coffin Joe?" in all caps.

-Oh, wow. -With a question mark.

-So you saw that before you even opened the e-mail?

-Yeah. So, even now, thinking about it,

the hair on my neck stands up. Just that was --

I was thinking, "What is this going to be?"

It was -- you know, it was almost like

Willy Wonka giving you his chocolate factory.

So I read the e-mail.

I knew that he wanted to link this to, uh,

"This Night I'll Possess your Corpse."

But he was saying he wanted to re-create that last scene.

As you said, he felt a curse had been placed on him.

He was very angry that --

-He was upset about the ending of the -- of this movie

that we're watching tonight.

And so he wanted to -- He wanted to redo it, right?

-Right. He'd been forced to put an ending on there

that he didn't believe in, that he didn't support,

and he felt like that haunted the rest of his career.

It was a big deal to him.

I knew that was a big deal.

And he said he'd been -- through this e-mail,

he said that he'd been looking for actors

who would look exactly like him to make it seamlessly match,

and no one in Brazil looked like Coffin Joe except me.

So would I come to Brazil

and play the young Coffin Joe in this scene?

And together, we could break this curse.

-Wow. -Wow.

-And it was a perfect match.

They actually did make you --

I mean, you would have to watch the next movie,

"The Abomination of Evil," to know what I'm talking about.

But they did make you look exactly like

the original Coffin Joe from this movie.

And, uh -- And you spoke Portuguese --

the Portuguese dialogue? -No.

Well, I did for the movie,

but, I mean, I didn't beforehand,

I didn't speak Portuguese. I learned it for the movie,

and Mojica sent me a video of himself

saying the lines over and over

so I could learn exactly how to enunciate them.

In the movie, "Embodiment of Evil,"

like almost all Coffin Joe movies,

the voice is dubbed by someone else,

even the one we're watching tonight.

It's not Mojica's voice. -Oh, okay.

-Yeah, he wanted -- Part of the reason,

I think, the character comes off as kind of uncanny

and larger than life is, I think, subliminally, you know,

that that voice isn't coming from that body.

He wanted a certain kind of a voice for Coffin Joe.

So even in the original films,

he would have another actor do the voice,

and he did the same thing with me, again,

so it better matches the original.

So there's another actor

that sounds more like what you expect Coffin Joe's

voice to sound like that, that dubs my lines.

But I was saying the lines, you know, enunciating them on set.

-Okay. Well, Raymond, we are about

to watch the Hell sequence

of "This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse."

And where does this rank among the Coffin Joe set pieces?

The Hell sequence.

-It's probably his most famous set piece.

It's the one most people talk about.

This movie is generally considered

to be the best Coffin Joe movie.

It's probably the best movie of Mojica's career.

"The Strange World of Coffin Joe"

is also very highly regarded.

But this is the -- this is the set piece,

whenever anyone studies Mojica or writes about Mojica,

they always come to this set piece

as being unlike anything that anyone in Brazil

had ever seen before, and, really, anywhere else.

I mean, this scene in particular was groundbreaking

and kind of mind-boggling for the audience at the time.

-Okay. Well, stick with us a little bit longer

'cause we need your expertise.

And now we're gonna go back to the movie.

Darcy's favorite part -- the tortures of the damned.

So, roll it.

You know, I did watch your YouTube show, Raymond.

You do a regular show about movie memorabilia,

and I watched the one about Coffin Joe.

And I think the audience should know this

because it indicates your level of devotion to Coffin Joe.

It took you 3 1/2 hours just to show off

all your Coffin Joe merch.

Yes.

My show is -- often runs very long.

I think my audience likes that.

But, yeah, I have a lot of Coffin Joe collectibles.

And, you know, that's a --

Not very many people in the U.S.,

at least, collect Coffin Joe.

So it took me a long time to amass this stuff,

and I think that was a rare chance

for the viewers to see some of this.

They probably never saw any of it.

-Oh, I'm sure.

And that's some kind of Guinness World Record.

But then again, the word "fan"

is just an abbreviation of "fanatic," right?

Yeah.

I'm definitely a Coffin Joe fanatic.

-♪ Alleluia, alleluia ♪

♪ Alleluia ♪

♪ Alleluia ♪

♪ Alleluia ♪

-♪ Alleluia, alleluia ♪

-♪ Alleluia ♪

♪ Alleluia, alleluia ♪

♪ Alleluia ♪

♪ Alleluia, alleluia ♪

♪ Alleluia ♪

♪ Alleluia ♪

-♪ Alleluia, alleluia ♪

♪ Alleluia ♪

♪ Alleluia ♪

♪ Alleluia ♪

Aah!

Oh!

-Aah!

-Ha!

-Wow. Can Coffin Joe reach out from the grave

and turn "The Last Drive-In" into lurid, Technicolor Hell?

Hell yes, I can.

-Cool.

Might as well take the tour.

It's like being at the Smithsonian,

just with more eternal suffering

and fewer sawdust stuffed critters

shotgunned by Teddy Roosevelt.

-Who's a good boy?

Boop!

-Oh, look! It's the wall of wretched arms.

Thank you. Yes.

Doomed to an infinity of isolation and unrelenting pain.

It's like they took all the guys at Gold's Gym

and told them, "Clean and jerk this, stud boy,"

and then sardined them all together

on the other side of the wall.

Say hey, guys.

Okay, let's see what we got here.

We got -- oh.

Yeah, this lady here is guilty of a cardinal sin

against mankind, God, and nature.

In life, this sorry excuse for a female

stuck her stanky feet into the little gap

on the side of the airplane seat in front of her.

So we've all read Dante's Inferno.

We know what happens when you do that.

Satan loves irony.

Her tootsies get tickled for the rest of recorded time,

although I hope she's not into that,

'cause I can think of a couple dozen massage parlors

in Sao Paulo where people pay top dollar for the same thing.

Are you into that?

-Oh, good. Okay. Let's move on.

-Oh. Ugh.

Ugh!

Aah! Ow!

-Oh, yeah, this is more like it.

An old-fashioned flogging.

I remember you. You worked for the MPAA,

deciding what sex and violence to either cut out entirely,

or the worst sin of all, make it suitable for network television.

I remember you from that exploding head

by basketball shot in "Deadly Friend 2."

It was never seen on TNT,

and you massacred three of Jason's massacres

before they even hit the theaters.

So keep up the good work, boys.

-Aaah!

-Can I take a turn? Let me take a rack at that.

Yeah.

Aah!

-So, uh...

that was mildly disturbing and wildly satisfying.

Um, Coffin Joe always gets away, though.

He always escapes. He has amazing ninja skills.

But, Raymond, I wanted to ask you what seems

like a paradox in Coffin Joe's character.

He has this love of children,

like they're the most important people in the world,

even though we know that, as soon as they grow up,

he might kill them.

So what's going on with that?

-Well, I think he's attracted to the purity and innocence

of children as a model of what he would like

all of humanity to be if they were as perfect as he is.

-All right. Coffin Joe is a rough translation

of his Portuguese name,

which is spelled three words -- Z-E D-O C-A-I-X-A-O.

And as many times as I've heard that,

I still can't pronounce it.

So how do you say Coffin Joe in Portuguese?

-"Zay do Cah-sho."

-"Zay do Cah-sho." -"Zay do Cah-sho."

-"Zay do Cah-sho." -"Zay do Cah-sho."

-I'm not gonna be able to say it.

All right, so, um,

the first Coffin Joe movie came out in 1963,

and then, in early 1964,

the Brazilian military, staged a coup d'état

and established a military dictatorship

that lasted 21 years,

and during that time, the media was heavily controlled,

as you might expect.

You get thrown in jail

or exiled if you said or wrote the wrong thing.

So this movie was made in 1967, four years into the junta,

and I'm a little surprised that --

I know it's a dictatorship, but I'm surprised

that they were watching exploitation films so closely

that they would tinker with the ending of the movie.

-Well, this was a recurring theme in Mojica's career,

and even after his death,

because, I mean, without getting political,

Brazil has had some recent issues with that,

and the archive where Mojica's films were stored,

well, the government tried to shut it down,

shut down the climate control so the films would rot.

So even after Mojica was gone, he's still fighting this --

-Still fighting the censorship.

-The new dictatorship, let's say.

-Okay. But all those years of the military dictatorship,

Coffin Joe was popular with the Brazilian people.

He was doing TV shows and comics.

He was everywhere.

So they couldn't have been too hard --

the military guys couldn't have been too hard on him, right?

-Well, he has a story where, uh,

supposedly, a death squad came to get him.

-Wow. -And he sweet-talked them

and gave them all roles in the movie he was making.

-He gave him roles in the movie,

and the death squad went away?

-Yes, that's -- -That's a Brazilian death squad.

Okay.

But I know that they called Coffin Joe a

"threat to public morality," which he probably was,

but he resisted government control,

and he allied with some fellow independent filmmakers

and established a cinema group called Garbage Mouth Cinema,

which was named after a slum red-light district in Sao Paulo.

And so all these low-budget exploitation films

full of sex and violence were eventually tolerated.

I mean, not anything that would challenge Christianity

or the Brazilian church. That was the no-no.

And that's where you came in, Raymond.

He needed you to be him in the scene

that he originally wrote for this movie.

So, um...now tell us what happens in your scene.

Tell us the ending that we will notbe seeing tonight.

-"Embodiment of Evil" ties directly to the movie

we've seen tonight.

And there's a flashback in "Embodiment of Evil"

that repeats the last scene of this film,

where Coffin Joe drowns in the swamp,

but then instead of cutting, it keeps going.

And then, he comes back up,

and you see his hand coming out of the water,

and he rises back up.

And that priest is still --

Because there was a priest in the scene.

The priest is still there, and he says,

"Give me the cross, Father," as if he's seen the light.

He's going to convert.

And the priest gives him the cross,

and Coffin Joe stabs the priest to death.

Then a police officer tries to arrest Coffin Joe,

and Coffin Joe attacks the officer and gouges his eye out.

And we don't see him finally be subdued and dragged away,

but we assume that's what happened.

Then it cuts back to the modern Coffin Joe,

who's remembering what happened back in the '60s.

-Okay. So that's the proper ending of the movie,

as intended by Coffin Joe.

You'll see what the Brazilian church

and military junta decided should be the ending

when when you see the ending tonight.

All right, Raymond,

we really appreciate you being here tonight.

And if Shudder ever gets "Embodiment of Evil,"

maybe we'll see you again. -That'd be great.

-And now the military junta, Catholic church conclusion of

"This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse."

So, roll it.

I also wanted you to ask,

did your friend Mojica actually believe the stuff

that Coffin Joe says? -No.

No. Definitely not.

He was -- He was a very compassionate, sensitive man.

-'Cause it's kind of wack. -He was --

And he was very left-leaning.

I mean, he hated this right-wing dictatorship.

And Coffin Joe was really like a funhouse reflection

of the establishment at the time,

the government and the church.

Things that he had a big problem with,

he was taking their own venom and turning it back at them.

-So he didn't believe in a master race.

He was not a -- -No, he was the opposite

of everything Coffin Joe is.

Okay.

See, I kept thinking the ending was gonna be,

Laura has the baby, but it's a girl.

'Cause I kept thinking, "It's gonna be a girl.

It's gonna be a girl.

It's gonna disappoint Coffin Joe."

And he's not gonna be able to live with the guilt,

and so he commits suicide.

Oh, no.

-But you had a good idea for an ending.

-Well, yeah, see...

I don't think that baby's dead.

Because the doctor --

Well, the doctor doesn't say, "The baby is dead."

He says, "Laura is dead."

The doctor never shows us the baby.

"I'm sorry, Coffin Joe. Your child is dead."

The doctor just pronounces Laura dead.

-Okay. -Coffin Joe isn't a doctor.

He's not gonna know if the baby inside of her

is alive or dead.

He takes her to the crypt and leaves her there.

Now, I think the baby is still alive at that point.

Then Coffin Joe appears to drown in the swamp,

and then the villagers are going to find Laura in that crypt.

I think one of them examined her body, listened to her,

and said, "The baby's still alive."

And I think they had a C-section, took the baby out.

And I think the mayor, as his final act

of vengeance against Coffin Joe,

said, "This baby is never going to know who his father is.

Coffin Joe is never gonna know that he has a son.

So I have family in Missouri."

"I'm gonna send this baby to Missouri

to be raised by another family.

He'll never know.

-Okay. -And here's the baby today.

-All right. I think you're right.

It had -- It had to be. How else can you explain?

Because now you still look like Coffin Joe.

All these years later, you still look like Coffin Joe.

That's great.

Aah! Aah!

Unh!

-And so there, at the end of the movie,

Coffin Joe shouts, "God is the truth!"

because the government made him say it,

and he never got over that.

He thought it was a curse on his movie.

I've read a lot about the influences on the filmmaker

when he was writing this one, and besides Nietzsche,

you had Artaud,

who invented what was called the Theatre of Cruelty,

which called for direct confrontation with the audience,

and then Buñuel and Surrealism

and the tradition of Grand Guignol,

which was blood and gore for the sake of shock effects,

and the style of expressionism

that was used in many early horror classics,

with a lot of shadows and ghost images.

And then what's called the Gothic grotesque,

which would be the tortures.

It's as though Coffin Joe wanted to be as offensive

as possible, and he used every type of horror movie

that does that

and leave absolutely no hope at the end of his movies.

But then, along comes this bunch of military generals

and Catholic bishops who say, "Nope.

Got to put hope in there,

or we're gonna put you in jail and ban your movie."

What did you think, Darcy?

-Honestly, I liked it a lot more than I expected to.

And I love his nails.

-I know his nails are truly awesome.

If you want more Coffin Joe, go back and watch the original

"At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul,"

and then, the third movie -- it was made 40 years later --

"Embodiment of Evil," which is excellent.

And if you want more journeys into Hell,

just stick around a few minutes for our second feature,

which is Michele Soavi's "The Church,"

the movie made right before "Cemetery Man."

But right now, we should probably peak into the mailbag.

You want to look at that? -Yes, indeed.

Here you go. -All right.

-Since we're showing a rare movie from South America,

I found a letter from South America.

-Wow. Okay. -It's from Francisco Carballido,

of Buenos Aires. -Okay.

Okay. Somehow people do find us down there in South America.

"Dear Joe Bob, hello from Argentina.

Just dropping a line

to send this picture of my copy of a local --"

Do we have the picture? -Yeah, I'll pop it up.

-Okay. "We have a picture of my copy

of a local 1992 VHS release

of "2000 Maniacs,"

apparently starring a then 10-year-old Joe Bob."

And then he's attached this photo of the video box.

And sure enough, I have star billing

in the 1964 classic, written and directed

by Herschell Gordon Lewis

and co-starring Playboy Playmate of the Year Connie Mason.

She was my co-star. What do you think this is?

-Just confused South American distributors.

-Connie was so nice to me on set.

She helped me with my homework and everything.

-You so wish, dude.

-And that's it for me, Joe Bob Briggs,

and for Darcy the Mail Girl.

We will be at Fantastic Fest, in Austin, on September 19th

for a special showing of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre."

Because we're going to -- they're doing a tribute

for the 10th anniversary of Shudder.

And in the meantime,

I want to remind you that life is simpler

if you plow around the stump, and the drive-in will never die.

Guy gets on an airplane, takes a window seat,

hoping nobody will sit next to him.

But suddenly he hears all the flight attendants gossiping

that the Pope is gonna be on the flight.

So, sure enough, he looks up and they're

seating the Pope in the aisle seat right next to the guy.

Well, the guy smiles, he looks out the window.

He's hoping he won't have to talk.

And after a while, he hears the Pope rustling some papers.

Pope opens USA Today to the crossword page.

Moments later, the Pope says, "Excuse me,

but would you know a four-letter word for a woman

that ends in U-N-T?"

And the guy busts into a sweat.

He's like, "Oh, my God, I can't say that word to the Pope."

And then he goes, "Oh, yes!"

He says, "The word is 'aunt' -- A-U-N-T."

And the Pope says, "Oh, yeah, you're absolutely right.

Do you have an eraser?"

So, I went out drinking on Labor Day, so I took a bus home.

That may not seem like a big deal to you,

but I've never driven a bus before.

Mm.

Should've stopped at the first one.

-How do you get an old lady to cuss?

You get the old lady next to her to shout, "Bingo!"

-You had it at the first one.

-Okay. One more. One more, I promise.

How do you cancel an appointment at a sperm bank?

You call and you say you can't come.

-They liked it.