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The gloss on The Exorcist is a feint, the reflexive tale mines Rosemary's Baby with consequences for Poltergeist. "Who's more important, José Mojica Marins or Zé do Caixão?" "Zé Mojica Marins." The artist blocked and the alter ego who will not be denied, a matter of creative possession worked out during the holidays. Relaxing at a friend's country home, the director enjoys his break from horror, smoking pipes and likening his relationship to his famous boogeyman to that of Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes. Horror finds him all the same, thus a wide-angle lens on the grandfather (Joffre Soares) with bloodshot contacts and distorted growling. "I have a debt to collect in this house!" Mom (Geórgia Gomide) once made a deal with the occultist next door (Wanda Kosmo), her daughter (Ariane Arantes) now must marry the satanic scion under the aegis of a certain top-hatted sadist. Author and character, face to face in the pit. "You don't believe in what you create?" Mojica Marins and the meta-shudder, two decades ahead of Craven's New Nightmare. The scuttling chair that cracks the religious figurine in half is typical of the nervy gags, there's also the Christmas tree suddenly adorned with serpents and spiders, the abode tastefully pale on the outside and demonically crimson on the inside, plucked daisies arranged in the shape of the Devil's trident. It builds to a Zé do Caixão bash doubling as a travesty of matrimonial sacrament, properly equipped with cannibalistic mutilations and oracular pronouncements. "May the spark of thunder strike the slums of nothingness!" The fulsome restoration of normalcy is pricked by a malevolent wink appropriated in The Omen. With Walter Stuart, Alcione Mazzeo, Adriano Stuart, Marcelo Picchi, and Merisol Marins.
--- Fernando F. Croce |