After an altogether rather enjoyable time with ‘This Night I’ll possess Your Corpse’ I was raring to go to see where the next exciting adventure for Coffin Joe would go. I mean, surely the premise was rich for mining beyond just TWO movies…and the flirtation with Colour in ‘Corpse’ really opened things up to even greater possibilities when it came to gore, guts and depravity…

WELL! As you can imagine, I was *thrilled* to find out that the coffin Joe franchise basically did a ‘Freddys Nightmares’ and for the 3rd film, they became an anthology series with Joe opening the film…and thats. about. it.

Now; Im not saying that calling your film ‘The Strange world of Coffin Joe’ after your last two films prominantly featured ‘Coffin Joe’ and this film features him for collectively 2 minutes would be classed as MISLEADING…but once the SEVEN MINUTES of opening titles/60s folk bopping to christian choral music got out of the way and I realised that Coffin Joe wasnt going to be in this film AT ALL…Well, I felt a little mislead to say the least…

Im not entirely against the premise of ‘Coffin Joe’ shifting from being the lead of these films to taking on more of a horror host/curator of horrors role…But heres the kicker…the stories presented in this anthology arnt particularly good either!

For a starters, the film feels like its trying to kill time by ANY means necessary to get it up to runtime. the 7 minutes of lead in is bad enough, but all the stories in this anthology series have opening title cards as well which run for a couple of minutes a piece.

The stories are kind of dull and are basically pretty beige experiences that only really get a *bump* in quality thanks to some over the top (but brief) gore scenes.

The first story is around a dollmaker who has several daughters learning the trade, they’re all captivated by creating the perfect eyes. When a gang break into the workshop and demand protection money from the old man, they decide to take payment via his daughters (if you catch my drift) leading to an extended mass molestation sequence thats quickly brought to a close with a breif swash of gore and its onto the next story.

Which follows a balloon seller tailing a beautiful woman around the city, eventually she misplaces a parcel and the seller figures this is an ‘in’ to strike up a conversation, so he follows her…Only to find shes going to a wedding to get married…and then she dies…and he molests her corpse…but! he gets a commupence! in a gory way…

and finally José Mojica Marins stars in the final story, appearing as an ‘off brand’ coffin Joe lookalike with a ponytail whos a professor in human behaviour. Honestly…by this point i’d largely lost patience with the film…But…as you can guess, the story involved an underground dungeon, MORE molestation and a side order of cannibalism to boot.

All of the stories are SUPER slow burn and lack any kind of serious focus or draw, they all resolve in the most cliche and uninteresting way imaginable, the harsher more aggressive tone and pace of the last two films here has been watered down to, essentially, extended walking sequences with the odd bit of blood thrown in…

It feels like they had 3 short films that were supposed to play before ACTUAL films…but they couldnt get distribution for a ‘coffin joe’ B/pre-picture distribution gig…so they just shot a 3 minute or so pseudo-philisophical intro with José as Joe, stitched the 3 shorts together and called it a day.

they’re bland and plodding with poor dialogue when there IS dialogue (most of the shorts are largely silent or use minimal repetative dialogue)

Honestly, if it wasnt for the direction and cine. This would have been a really poor offering. As it stands the direction isnt as good as EITHER of the first to ‘Joe’ films…but its still VERY creative, with a good attention to detail. theres a clear vision of what is wanted to be seen, even if there isnt a clear script.

Compositionally theres some really nice shots here, the editing is SUPER slack (you could probably drop 15-20 minutes from this thing and it wouldnt touch the sides) but the sequences themselves hang together well enough and theres some REALLY nice lighting present throughout.

That being said, strong visuals do not a movie make, and some drab performances and poor deliveries only further weigh this film down..the one or two campier performances throughout (particularly in the ‘Doll’ short) are welcome, but way too few and far between.

Throw in the same warbling soundtrack from the last movie (presumably as a cost saving measure) and you have a picture that looks pretty…But thats about all there is going for it. a REAL step back in my opinion, I can certainly see the potential in developing this format…But, to me? its a really quite poor first attempt…

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/the-strange-world-of-coffin-joe/