Those who are familiar with the two earlier Coffin Joe films would’ve known that they would be in for something very strange indeed when choosing to watch Awakening of the Beast – the third of the initial Coffin Joe trilogy. Though the initial two instalments had been monumentally bizarre, nothing could have quite prepared a viewer for the outrageously insane experience that Awakening of the Beast turns out to be. To describe the movie as bizarre or strange would be a colossal understatement to say the least.

The film has an unconventional format – hardly surprising for a film that defies all conventions at all times! There is a chat show involving a panel of experts – among them director Jose Mojica Marins – and the panel has convened to discuss the controversial subject of drugs and the moral degeneracy that they appear to promote. The audience and panel are shown a series of lurid and shocking scenes where it is strongly suggested that drugs were responsible for the heathen debauchery on display. A young woman injects the veins in her foot in grim close up then dances wildly for a bunch of old men. Later a young beauty attends a wild pot party with some bongo-beating beatniks and ends up dead having had a wooden pole inserted into her by a Moses look-alike! This shocker of a scene is just one of several of quite possibly the most bizarre scenes ever captured on film.

One doesn’t quite know how to react to the gallery of utterly deranged visuals on display – the scene where a person is menaced by a posse of chubby faces that turn out to be bums with faces drawn on them has to be seen to be believed. With this film, if ever there was any doubt, Marins provides perfect proof of his insanity/genius with some of the most stunningly surreal and fantastic images ever conjured in cinema. It is no wonder that the film is referred to as the ultimate cinematic acid trip. Then finally after a breathtaking rollercoaster ride of nightmarish visuals there is the characteristically unconventional conclusion by Marins that drugs are not responsible for degenerate, immoral behaviour – not exactly what a view the establishment would be thrilled by and needless to say the film was banned for 20 years in Brazil!

This third instalment may not be for all tastes to say the very least – the film is an almost logical conclusion of the Coffin Joe trilogy with the ultimate descent into hell. Not perhaps a better film as such than either of the first two Coffin Joe films but this remains easily the most ambitious and the most disturbingly weird of the lot by a considerable margin. Awakening of the Beast is quite an experience and certainly essential viewing for any scholars of weird world cult cinema and is a film that truly showcases the twisted genius and imagination of the incomparable Jose Mojica Marins.