Something of a return to form for José Mojica Marins. ‘The Strange Hostel of Naked Pleasures’ is a flawed, but ultimately kind of enjoyable picture…and if anyones been reading my reviews of José’s films as i’ve been slowly working my way through them, you’ll almost certainly know what this review is going to say almost verbatim.

The plot? revolves around the mysterious and semi deranged happenings within a Hostel, and its unusual and hypnotic owner (played by José) who may know more about the unusual building than he’s letting on…

Cue 50 odd minutes of hippes dancing and grinding on each other semi-nude. an extended love making scene, a group of gamblers getting philisophical and plenty of spiders and psudo philisophical discourse from the ‘Hostel owner’.

And, as mentioned…its an improvement over ‘When the gods fall asleep’, but the same issues that have plagued my thoughts on José’s work are (while improved!) still as prominent as ever.

From the off, While I appreciate the fact that this is a self contained anthology entry over his previous anthology efforts (the film almost entirely takes place on the grounds of the hostel and deals with the various guests situations…rather than it just feeling like a random grab of short stories stitched together…or worse (in the case of ‘gods fall asleep’ where it felt like the offcuts of ‘The End of Man’ were just stitched together and released) The films still struggles to muster much enthusiasm.

Essentially this is just 50 minutes of naked gyrating married up to psudo intellectual waffle about the human condition. something José has done now for the last 6 movies…and something I personally havent gelled with for at least the last 4 of them…It was an interesting play on existing horror tropes in the days of ‘At midnight I’ll take your soul’ or ‘This night i’ll possess your corpse’ but it’s 1976 now, and whenever a reverberated overdub of José presents itself, I go glassy eye’d as I know what follows is 5-10 minutes of, what might as well be, waffle.

While this one DOES actually have a 3 act structure, an overarching story which DOES resolve and several subplots to help hold my interest. it drags HARD in the second half of the first act and for most of the second act…Only really finding it’s thread again in the third act and the finale…

The dialogues either pretentiously over worded, or reduced to monosylabisms…theres no middle ground, and everythings distorted through the viewpoint of arthouse cinema, so its hard to really get a grip of exactly WHAT José wants us to think and feel about the random chatter he’s been springing forth.

The characters are all pretty one note, José’s ‘Hostel owner’ is basically just ‘Quiet, not *QUITE* as evil ‘Coffin Joe’ Theres little variety here and it becomes quite easy to quickly lose track of who’s who and whats really supposed to be going on.

Though; this film did give me enough time to chew over a nice little fan theory, the idea that since ‘This night i’ll possesss your corpse’ all the films we’ve seen since have ACTUALLY taken place inside the psyche of a now hellbound ‘Coffin Joe’, and that all of José’s appearences in these films are ACTUALLY aspects of Joes personality, you have Pias Joe in ‘End of Man/Gods fall asleep’ Evil Joe in ‘Beast Awakens’ and Morally turmoil Joe here.

If that is the case, it helps me personally feel more comfortable with the art house presentations, given this is supposed to be the addled fantasies of an morally ambiguous plunderer. But I get the feeling that this wasnt José’s intention…STILL! if it makes the films more palettable, it’ll do for me!

As mentioned previously, the cine and direction are once again on top form. They’re a little dated visually for 1976, but I would argue that this is the nicest looking film that José has produced since ‘This Night’, we have a strong colour identity, fantastic lighting, some really moody abstract pieces, fantastic compositional choices all round, decent attempts at atmospheric scene building and the edit is probably the tightest these films have had in a LONG time. it’s probably the most professional looking film José has made in AT LEAST 10 years at this point, and it goes a LONG way in instilling the goodwill that I continue to have with him as a film maker.

As mentioned the performances are largely muted. Even José cant quite seem to muster the bombasity that has previously saved the day here, and alongside his muted performance we have a LOT of…what can only be described as ‘jeer’ acting (esentially a lot of people just making noise and writhing around) its a bit of a dissapointment, but then at the same time, in some scenes, it actually kind of helps support the mindlessness that the films trying to instill in vibe and atmosphere…so I’ll give it some credit on that front.

And the soundtrack? for GODS sake, PLEASE, someone by José a few more records. as we’re once again stuck with the dozen or so operatic choral tracks he’s been using since 1964, and they’re now sounding incresingly warped and worn. You’d think this would add to the uneasy atmosphere…But they dont. It just sounds like his cassette players slowly running out of batteries, it was annoying 3 films ago…its insufferable now.

‘The Strange Hostel of Naked Pleasures’ is really more of a visual experience than a narrative led one…if you come to this film expecting a solid story, you’ll be seriously dissapointed…But given his previous offerings, this film on a technical and creative level is largely a step in the right direction and if you can let the visuals wash over you and tell their own story. I think you’ll have a pretty okay time. My only hope going forward is that José actually begins to modernise a bit more…as while this kind of film making was acceptable at this point in time. it REALLY wont be for much longer as the 80s draws ever closer…

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/the-strange-hostel-of-naked-pleasures/