Crew
Director – Marcelo Motta, Screenplay – Rubens Francisco Luchetti, Story/Producer – Jose Mojica Marins, Photography – Giorgio Attili. Production Company – Producoes Cinematograficas Ze Do Caixao LTDA.
Cast
Jose Mojica Marins (Ze Do Caixao?)
Plot
A sinister figure is resurrected from the coffin in a ritual. He opens a mysterious hotel, hiring only those that he deems belong there. Various guests are admitted and proceed to have orgies, gamble, conduct affairs and the like, unaware of the fate that awaits them.
Jose Mojica Marins (1936-2020) became a cult figure after his second directorial outing At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1964). As well as directing and writing, Marins played the lead role where he premiered his trademark character of Ze do Caixao (which translates into English as Coffin Joe) – a demoniac undertaker who despises morality and religion, celebrates cruelty and nihilism, and takes great relish in killing anyone in the way of his plans. Ze was of such popularity that Marins made a sequel Tonight I’ll Possess Your Corpse (1967). After this, Marins made a variety of ventures into horror and pornography (see below for a listing of these). Several of these are films where Marins makes cameos as Coffin Joe, although he did not return to the role proper for another 41 years with Embodiment of Evil (2008).
It is debatable whether The Strange Hostel of Naked Pleasures can be considered a Ze Do Caixao film or not. Marins comes up with the story and produces through his production company Producoes Cinematograficas Ze Do Caixao. He appears in Ze’s customary black suit, top hat, beard and long fingernails and there are scenes where he warbles his nihilistic philosophy about the meaning of everything. However, the character on screen is never named as Ze Do Caixao – in fact, is never named period.
The film opens on a ten-minute sequence where various women who are either topless or wearing diaphanous see-through gowns dance around, along with old hag-like witches that appear partially nude. The dance centres around Marins’s Ze-alike character as he arises from the coffin – it is not clear if he is being resurrected or if that is just his preferred sleeping place a la a vampire. He then spends several minutes philosophising about the meaning of it all as we get some really shoddy looking starscapes where the planets buzzing by look like chocolate balls strung up on wires.
Ze (or not Ze) then appears as the manager of a hotel. He selects staff, turning most applicants away and seeming to have some kind of prescient knowledge that the two he does choose will return. He also selects guests, turning some away and telling them there is no room, while accepting others. All the time, Marins stands around the desk, looking evil and Ze-like – personally, if he were the manager at reception at somewhere I signed in, I would feel majorly creeped out.
Thereafter, as the guests settle in, The Strange Hostel of Naked Pleasures proceeds at a really slow pace. The bulk of the film is spent cutting back and forward between the various guests – a group of gamblers where one man feels pressured to gamble big to cover his business losses; a group of people who hold a party; a man and a woman who sign in for some sexual assignation (who they are is never made clear); another bickering couple. These scenes go on and on. To hold to the naked part of the title, the various women in the party scenes lose their tops as does the woman in bed with the man, but nothing that goes beyond occasional topless titillation.
These scenes are agonisingly dull. The guests have so little distinction they don’t even get names. Most of their stories and why they are there are unclear. I was hoping that the film might have been akin to The Strange World of Coffin Joe where the stories of the various guests in effect acted as anthology stories with Ze do Caixao presiding over a series of tortures. However, none of the film ever gets that interesting.
The Strange Hostel of Naked Pleasures reaches an ending where we appear in some kind of Deathdream and find that everyone in the hotel is dead. The last scene of the film reveals that Jose Mojica Marins is some type of Death figure as his face is transposed with a skull and it revealed there is a graveyard in the place of the hotel.
Jose Mojica Marins’ other genre films include The Strange World of Coffin Joe (1968), an episode of the anthology Trilogy of Terror (1968), Awakening of the Beast (1970), The End of Man (1971) and its sequel When the Gods Fall Asleep (1972), Black Exorcism (1974), Hellish Flesh (1977), Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind (1978) and The Plague (1980).
Trailer here