Tag Archives: Brazilian

As Boas Maneiras

This movie is way too easy to spoil, and so I report with a great deal of satisfaction (both for myself as a viewer and also for myself as a writer) that I do not have to give anything away by explaining what random elements came together for this to be my next podcast horror movie. The scare was mythological, and the style was from the 2010s. See? Nothing. And the title of the movie, Good Manners, is if anything more opaque, to the point that I still do not fully understand how it fit with anything I watched, at least not in a specific way.

The movie is essentially a play in two acts. In the first act, a pregnant woman who is recently isolated from her former life hires a nanny about midway through the pregnancy, with the intent to get her help around the house and at appointments leading up to the birth, and then transition her from helper / housekeeper to full time actual nanny. The prospective nanny, herself rather isolated from her own former life such as it may have been, forms a fast bond with her employer. But then she starts to notice certain oddities.

In the second act, seven years later, an isolated mother and her son navigate their isolation, his allergies and related special needs, the secret that lies between them, and his growing dissatisfaction with the carefully crafted strictures that fence his existence. Also, mostly but not exclusively in the second act, there are random musical numbers that come across as Greek chorus-like, even though main characters are often the ones singing.

The movie: mostly pretty great. Solid slow boil tension, compelling characters, sense of impending, unavoidable doom. The music numbers: weird, but also very distinctive.

À Meia Noite Levarei Sua Alma

It started, like it does a lot more than is probably apparent from the individual offerings here at Shards of Delirium[1], with Joe Bob. The first episode of The Last Drive-In this month was a sequel movie about Coffin Joe, a Brazilian villain (or anti-hero, back before that was a thing people said) I had never previously heard of. The two-pronged catch was, a) I have of course never seen the first movie, and b) I could not stay awake past the first 20 minutes of the sequel because of having had three vaccines earlier in the day.

Obviously, I decided to watch the first movie first, which I now have. My conclusion is that the choice to not air At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul was the correct one. Joe is a mortician, and he’s a pretentious self-absorbed dick, but in a way that is initially hilarious. He strikes dramatic poses from on high, he mocks the superstitions of the plebes (including faith), he beats his wife at only period-appropriate levels, that kind of thing. …okay, the last one wasn’t hilarious, but ultimately this is my point. Coffin Joe of this first movie is, as soon as his plan kicks off, supremely unlikeable.

That plan is to have a son. The downside is, his wife is barren. So he gets rid of her, picks a new girl, gets rid of anyone standing in the way of acquiring her, and so on until he gets caught up in some kind of consequence, and I ultimately did not understand why people like him or would watch sequels. Then I did watch the sequel, wherein he’s an anti-hero with likeable qualities instead of just a wife-beating dick, and even though he’s still clearly a villain, he’s a lot more fun, and so ultimately, I would say it’s fine to give This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse a try, even if it has one of the worst endings of any movie I’ve ever seen. (But that was not Joe’s fault[2], and is undone in the third movie [which I have not seen], so yay.)

The sequence in which Joe is walking alone at night on All Hallow’s Eve[3] and runs into or maybe hallucinates the annual procession of the Dead is pretty great, though.

[1] And like is probably eminently apparent from the site in aggregate
[2] Joe the director, not Joe the character, although it turns out they are portrayed by the same human person.
[3] or maybe it was the Day of the Dead, but since it was at night and what I’m about to say happened, I assume it was the night before

Skull: The Mask

With a sample size of two[1], I can say reliably that modern South American audiences and filmmakers are mostly afraid of demons, with an undercurrent of being afraid of corrupt police. Skull: The Mask is about waking up some demon dude who wants to either help the intestines of the earth move (because that would be bad) or stop them from moving (because when they’re moving that’s a good thing), I am really unclear as to which.

After a throwaway gorefest scene with Nazis, we fast forward to modern times, where the top stories are Bolivian children gone missing[2] and a murder spree that started at the home of an archaeological professor and her way too young girlfriend, both of which cases are being investigated by the same lady cop who was recently cleared of murder charges in some as far as I know unrelated case, but man is the press well-informed on these matters, giving out specific details of the murders and showing graphic footage, and I really do have to wonder if it’s done that way down there, or if local audiences would be rolling their eyes a bit.

But so anyway, there’s this mask which is kind of a six horned skull that wraps around your face and now you’re possessed with the demon, and if you guessed that this has some tie-in with the Nazi shit and the archaeologist and the earth’s intestines, then I’d say you’ve been paying attention. There’s plenty of gore, plenty of weird dream sequence stop motion animation, and a respectable number of breasts, all gratuitous, as though the dream of the ’80s is alive in São Paulo.

My intent here was not to give everything away, but I’m torn right now between feeling like I should say more, feeling like I’ve already said too much, and feeling like honestly I’m not sure I’d know how to spoil the plot fully even if that were my intent. In any event, this was an experience and a half, and I’d say check it out.

[1] The other is an unreviewed Joe Bob showing of a movie whose title I’m blanking on, I think Argentinian, and with some serious darkness to it. Like whoa. If I remember the name of it. I’ll mention it.[3]
[2] Maybe something to add to the things South Americans are afraid of?
[3] When Evil Lurks, about which I should add that another fear, if perhaps not of the public but for sure of the writer, is custody battles / divorce.