Embodiment of Evil (Encarnação do Demônio) is a reasonably useless film that doesn’t hold much for the viewer except to disgust. It is is a movie that is almost fetishistic in its execution, providing the best in over the top gore and publicizing that that gore is real, not good special effects. Beyond this, it has little point, even though the filmmakers thought enough of the main character to make it.
The movie starts as Coffin Joe, a mass murderer with really ridiculously long fingernails, is being released from prison for reasons that no one, including the prison warden, can explain. After he is set free he goes home to his dungeon where he is greeted by a new generation of slaves, ready to kill themselves at any moment should their master deem them worthy enough to demand it of them. Coffin Joe begins his journey to find the perfect woman to carry his child anew, after having left piles of bodies in his wake 40 years ago when he was imprisoned for his original crimes. What follows is a bloodbath.
And that’s it folks. There’s literally nothing more to this movie. There were a number of sequences where he is haunted by his past victims, but these sequences seem to have little point since he just does it all over again. There are a number of flashback scenes – to the previous film – which only served to infuriate, since that movie looked like something I would want to actually watch.
In a sense, this movie seems to be the logical progression of the torture-porn movement, except that this would have been the original torture-porn. It postures that only those willing to die at any moment are free and that those willing to torture themselves are the only members of society who truly understand themselves. Sound like ‘Saw’ anyone?
I found this movie to be extremely fetishistic and grotesque, but not to the point of actually disgusting me – even though that was its aim. The director José Mojica Marins trolled S&M clubs for people who were willing to have pieces of their skin torn, burned or cut off, allowing him to boast that the gore in the movie is not actually prosthetic, but real. Again this was meant to disgust but instead had the amusing effect of those medical surgery shows you can’t look away from when you’re channel surfing and happened on it by accident – only bemusing, not disgusting. It would have been interesting if that has been the film’s goal, but it wasn’t and so, it simply failed to achieve even the basics of what it set out to do.
I don’t really have a recommendation here, since I would never recommend anyone see anything this bad. Even more disturbing is that Coffin Joe is played by the director, so basically he makes these movies so he can have an excuse to legally do horrible things to people. Niiice.
Toronto After Dark runs from August 14 to 21, 2009 at the Bloor Cinema in Toronto. Click here for our coverage.
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