This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse

                                                                  Written by Mrparka

                “This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse” is the second in the Coffin Joe trilogy. Made three years after the first, the violence, nudity, and insanity is doubled.  The last time Coffin Joe was seen, he had paid retribution for his brutal crimes. Luckily for Joe the escapades of his past did not lead to his haunting death. Once again, Joe begins his passionate quest to create the perfect child, and therefore the perfect race, by alienating and killing all who oppose him.

                “This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse” starts quickly with the kidnapping of six women. These women are subjected to strange tortures involving spiders and snakes. These scenes seem to have a real sense of danger for the actresses involved and are a tad uneasy to watch.  The spider scene is a bit reminiscing of “The Beyond” although not nearly as violent.  I don’t doubt that “This Night” inspired quite a few classics as well as borrowed from others. “This Night” sports a weird variety of tropes from a wide variety of different film genres.  The music box Joe plays feels like it belongs in a Sergio Leone film. The hunchback sidekick, trap doors, crypts, and spiders scream gothic horror. While the gory surrealism that is featured in an amazing nightmare scene that ends in hell (the only scene in color) feels completely different than anything else.  The film almost comes to a complete stop for this scene; it is abundant with nudity, torture, and mesmerizing shots. The most visceral frames from these scenes are the ones of victims screaming, trapped in stone.  The film's major downfall, however, is the runtime. With the first film clocking in at less than 80 minutes, it was a breath of fresh air and gone before it wore out its welcome. “This Night” runs for nearly two hours, and becomes slightly tedious by the end. Although the film is big and transgressive in terms of extremism, it does feel like “This Night” pads the runtime only to add in extra victims and push buttons. “This Night” really plays as a remake of “At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul” while adding to the exploits of our killer and opening his state of mind to the audience a tad bit more.

                “This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse” contains an adequate amount of features, including an interview of Jose Marins, a short film featuring his life, and a look into his macabre museum. The film looks solid on DVD and has been remastered from the negatives.

Plot Summary:
This sequel to the ground-breaking Brazilian horror masterpiece, AT MIDNIGHT I'LL TAKE YOUR SOUL brings back the demented murderous caretaker, Coffin Joe (known as Zé do Caixão, and portrayed by director José Mojica Marins). Surviving the terrors of the first film, Coffin Joe is now joined by a hunchbacked assistant named Bruno to help him on his unholy quest for the perfect bride. After kidnapping and torturing women and submitting them to sadistic trials, Joe thinks he's finally found the right woman to bear him a child. Unfortunately, things don t go as planned and Joe suffers horrible nightmares from killing a pregnant woman. What follows is a hallucinatory descent into the Hellish underworld as Joe struggles to survive his blasphemous visions and the wrath of the local villagers.

THIS NIGHT I'LL POSSESS YOUR CORPSE is even more brutal than its predecessor, and contains the controversial color Hell sequence.

This film is the second installment in the Coffin Joe Trilogy, and is followed by EMBODIMENT OF EVIL (which is also available from Synapse Films).

Special Features:

- 35mm negative scan supervised by director José Mojica Marins
- The Making of THIS NIGHT I'LL POSSESS YOUR CORPSE (8 minutes)
- A visit to the Coffin Joe Museum (5 minutes)
- The Universe of Mojica Marins 'New Release Info Worksheet'! Vintage Featurette (25 minutes)
- Interview with José Mojica Marins (8 minutes)
- Introduction to the film by Coffin Joe
- Original theatrical trailer
- Photo gallery