A Hora do Medo (1986)

... aka: Hour of Fear, The

... aka: Time of Fear

Directed by:

Francisco Cavalcanti

José Mojica Marins (uncredited)

Made when hardcore porn had all but completely taken over the Brazilian film industry, this sleazy low budget horror / slasher flick seems like an odd man out for its time, especially seeing how director Cavalcanti was a prolific porn filmmaker and many of the actors were carry-overs from sex films. So what possessed these folks to make a straight horror flick? Well, they actually didn't. It turns out this was originally filmed with explicit sex scenes and the current 71 minute version floating around is a different cut of the film. According to a number of Brazilian sources I consulted, horror legend José Mojica Marins was specifically brought on board to up the horror quotient by filming new bloody murder scenes, which then were used to replace the sex scenes for this special re-edit. And just like that you essentially have two different films to release: a sex film and a non-explicit horror film. Despite filming quite a bit of footage, Marins is listed only as a "supervisão" in the credits of the cut version. I was unable to locate the explicit version to do comparisons but supposedly it's around seven minutes longer. Although most websites also list Marins as a cast member, I didn't spot him anywhere in the film.

Considering who the director is, this unsurprisingly opens with some gratuitous nudity as a woman enjoying a bubble bath soon finds herself in a bloodbath when a pudgy, rosy-cheeked psycho with a very punchable face busts through the door and starts frantically stabbing her with a butcher knife, finally finishing the job by sticking the blade all the way through her neck. Immediately after, an older lady who heard the screaming and commotion from downstairs walks in. She seems oddly calm and composed by the blood-spattered crime scene, and not the least bit horrified. Well, boys will be boys, after all, and it's just her beloved son doing what he does best! Mama (Maria Edelgunde Plautz Wichering) then comforts her sobbing psycho offspring, Albert (Albert Karlinski), assuring him that they'll "find more women for you." The pair then wrap the body in a sheet and bury it in their backyard.

Soon after, Salvador (director Cavalcanti) shows up looking for his missing fiancée, Eliana (Ely Silva). She, of course, is the woman Albert has just killed. Salvador checks in with Eliana's older sister, Lourdes (Selma Petronilia), and discovers that his girlfriend, unbeknownst to him, had been working as a maid for Albert and his mother prior to vanishing. However, when questioned, the mother claims she has no clue who Eliana even is. Thinking his girl has run out on him, Salvador goes to drown his sorrows at a bar ("Women are all liars! Women are all fake!") until he sees a newspaper ad placed by the mother looking to hire a chauffeur. Salvador secures the job and uses that as a way to start snooping around the home.

The psycho mom gleefully listens to her son's various sexcapades through the walls and keeps her late husband's remains in a shallow grave in her backyard so she can dig up the skull and cradle it in her arms whenever she's in the mood. She also has a specially equipped umbrella that shoots poisonous darts out of the tip (!) that she uses it to kill a pimp (Darcy Silva), and then lures the hooker he was just slapping around back to their home to meet her son. Albert promptly drags the girl into the bedroom, starts having sex with her and then smothers her with a pillow after having a childhood flashback of a naked, tied up woman (Priscila [Presley]) being tortured by her lover, Marcelo (Walder Laurentis). It's later revealed that the woman in the flashbacks is his mother in her younger years while Marcelo is his father. After witnessing mom being beaten, having a lit cigar put out on her and getting her ass burned with a red hot iron, young Albert (Fabricio Cavalcanti, the director's son) shot his dad to death.

After setting up an unoriginal and silly, though at least coherent, premise, this turns into a fragmented mess. Albert has some woman over named Cassandra, whom he dubs a "Nymph of the Sacred Bath" (?!) He bathes, dresses, wines and dines her, and then slashes her to death with a broken wine glass. Meanwhile, Mama is seen in the backyard dragging wounded topless blonde Lisa (Regina Andrion) to their ever-growing graveyard. She buries the girl alive, but she manages to dig her way back out so the mother chops her up again, reaches inside her gaping back wound, rips out her heart and then squeezes it ("Stop breathing, whore!") until she finally falls over. Next up on the chopping block is an obnoxious woman they find getting beaten up by a bartender (Clery Cunha) for refusing to pay her tab. She's lured back to the home, where things come to a head when Salvador finally confronts them.

From a quality filmmaking standpoint, this thing is terrible across the board. The plot is weak, the photography and lighting are poor, the acting is bad, most of the score was stolen from THE HOWLING, the editing is awful and the camerawork is mostly static, with lots of long, boring takes used to pad out the time. There's one medium shot set-up looking into the killer's bedroom that's used over and over again, as if they left the camera sitting on a tripod in the same location for the entire day. Actually, that's probably exactly what happened since most of the sex action takes place there.

Even though this isn't good, I'll give it a little credit for one thing: Delivering what fans of sleazy slasher flicks really want to see. There's blood and there's nudity and there's plenty of both. While the gore (including an axe to the back and scissors stuck in a forehead) is OK-ish, the sheer amount of constant full-frontal male and female nudity is through the roof! Nearly everyone (aside from the mother, director / leading man and a few minor characters) gets naked, including the psycho-son, who hilariously spends his last ten screen minutes freaking out, trying to kill another woman and then fighting the hero all while sans clothing. There are also plenty of graphic female nude shots in here.

I could find no evidence that this film was officially released on home video anywhere in the world, even in Brazil. The VHS quality print currently floating around has been recorded off a Brazilian TV station. English fan subs are available. I wouldn't be too horribly surprised to see a better print of this turn up in a Coffin Joe box set one day.

★1/2

A Mulher Que Põe a Pomba no Ar (1978)

... aka: Woman Who Makes Doves Fly, The

... aka: Woman Who Put Doves In the Air, The

Directed by:

"J. Avelar" (José Mojica Marins)

Rosângela Maldonado

Here's one from the Coffin Joe universe you may have missed. Unlike some of his better-known / distributed cult titles, this has never been released here in America nor is it available in English. I actually couldn't find evidence of a VHS release in any country, including Brazil, and ended up viewing this on Youtube using their auto-translate function for the Portuguese subs. As per usual, these translations are a mess and often incomprehensible but they were just enough to get me through this. Furthermore, the only available copy of this title isn't in very good condition (soft picture with a green and sometimes yellow tint) and has a time clock near the bottom of the screen at all times so I had to both enhance the image and crop the bottom third off of all these screen caps. I did this for the same reason I erase film company logos and such whenever they're present: aesthetics. I simply don't like looking at them!

Marins is listed as "technical director" under the name "J. Avelar" but he has a co-director on this outing: Rosângela Maldonado. Maldonado had been a collaborator with Marins starting with his Finis Hominis ("End of Man") back in 1971 and also appeared in his 1972 adventure Sexo E Sangue na Trilha do Tesouro ("Sex and Blood on the Treasure Trail") prior to this. Though she shares directorial credit, this and her follow-up, A Deusa de Mármore / "The Marble Goddess" (1978), which involves a 2000-year-old woman preserving her youth through a Satanic pact, are technically the very first genre features made by a female director in Brazil. In addition, she also has the lead role, wrote the script, produced, did the art direction AND composed some of the music!

Things center around a platinum blonde lesbian scientist named Adelaide (Maldonado) who runs a secret organization of women who work out of her mansion. She has three faithful assistants - Rosângela (Luandy Maldonado), Diana (Dallas Kayan) and another whose name I didn't catch (Marta Lupiani), plus a chauffeur named Nelson (Arlindo Xavier) and a flamboyant male servant (Ivan Lima) in lieu of your traditional female maid. The gay servant is used for extremely embarrassing comic relief as he prances around dusting, singing and acting like a sex-crazed queen. He's secretly in love with Nelson (who slaps him in the face and pushes him down at one point cause he keeps coming on to him) and even has a homemade Nelson sex doll in his bedroom.

Adelaide is working on some kind of secret formula that will help cure men of their wandering eye. To gather data, she also runs a feminist support group full of angry women whose husbands have all been caught cheating on them. Their stories are all written down by the assistants. While working in her lab one day, Adelaide accidentally drops a test tube and the fumes infect her and Rosângela. The result? Well, it appears the formula has somehow transformed them into flying dove monsters who then go around attacking unfaithful men and their mistresses!

The hilarious dove costumes include round papier-mâché bird heads with floppy beaks, white feathered crop tops and panties, fabric flapper wings, body paint and go-go boots. They show up at a "picnic" of one of the cheating husbands and karate chop him and his mistress. They then go to a bawdy banquet / swinger's orgy (where Coffin Joe makes a brief cameo being fed grapes) and start beating people up. A dove woman breaks into a hotel room, cock blocks a man by climbing into bed and pecking his mistress and then is seen flying above the city by pedestrians. Word soon gets around town and newspaper headlines are wondering whether the creatures are ghosts or beings from Mars and wondering whether or not the dove women's reign of terror will end adultery once and for all.

If only this would have kept its focus on the dove women it may have been pretty consistently hilarious but sadly much more time is spent elsewhere. There's a long and seemingly pointless scene at a soccer match where a fight breaks out in the audience. The gay servant has a bizarre erotic dream where Adelaide and her girls are dyking it out as he (dressed in drag) and Nelson watch, which prompts the object of his affections to finally accept his love. After waking up and finding out it was only a dream, he destroys his sex doll during a temper tantrum. Three cheating husbands rent a boat for them and their mistresses to mess around on but their party is crashed by the wives, who attack them with whips and force them to abandon ship at gunpoint. And so on.

Adelaide has a flashback to when she was seventeen and in love with a boy who (kind of?) raped her by a waterfall. When his parents found out they sent him away to live elsewhere. Presumably this traumatic event has turned her into a man-hating lesbian (cause that's how it always works in real life, right?) and so she's taken Rosângela, who is young enough to be her daughter and may actually be her daughter since the actress playing her has the same last name, as her new lover. A white pill is introduced that seems to give the dove girls special powers but it's only shown in one scene. This just completely peters out by the end when the police get involved.

More of a lightweight sex farce than anything else, this has lots of terrible juvenile comedy and topless nudity plus serious underpinnings that they're completely unable to pull off in any kind of interesting or compelling way. It doesn't help matters that this is horribly-made across the board, with especially awful photography and editing. There are tons of close-up shots, zoom shots, shots going out of focus, jerky camerawork and rapid fire cuts. The acting is terrible and the script is poorly-written. There are too many characters and the attempts at humor are almost always embarrassing. While this provides a couple of unintentional laughs and crosses into WTF?! territory a number of times (and I know it sounds pretty amazing), it's not consistent enough in either area to really make it a good SBIG film.

The cast includes Heitor Gaiotti (from The Extra-Terrestrial Cat in Boots) and Marins film regulars David Húngaro and Walter Portela. Instead of your usual boring text opening credits, this has an announcer clad in a leisure suit and bell bottoms at a disco reading off the names of the stars, who then enter from off-stage and wave as animated birds fly across the screen with their names on banners and an audience cheers. That was a cute touch at least. I also laughed out loud when test tubes in the doctor's lab are shown spinning on a record player instead of a centrifuge.

★1/2