Sitges Film Festival 2008: Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid

Officially known as the Festival Internacional de Cinema de Catalunya, the 41st annual festival is the premiere celebration of Fantastic Cinema on the planet...and, probably, the entire solar system. The 10-day marathon held in the Catalan coastal town of Sitges, Spain, located about 20 miles Southwest of Barcelona, features sci-fi, horror, gangster, animation, action, Asian, underground, B-movie, fantasy and exploitation movies. It's like an endless night of renegade thrills at the greatest drive-in theater ever. And the beer cooler never runs dry.

This year’s fest, which wraps up Sunday, has its shortlist of Grade A art cinema (Blindness and Synecdoche, New York, for example) but it’s also the kind of place where a Blaxploitation hero like Fred Williamson (a member of the festival jury) is as significant as Stanley Kubrick (whose 2001: A Space Odyssey was honored by a special screening and a cast reunion). Such an encyclopedic embrace of the weird, the wild, and the wondrous is rare in the high-minded circuit of film festivals. But at Sitges, there’s always something in the closet.

Perhaps the biggest surprise was the return of Jose Majica Marin, aka Josefel Zanatas aka Zé do Caixão: Coffin Joe. The 72-year-old Marin is a legend in Brazil, where he invented the maniacal character Coffin Joe after a nightmare vision. Donning a top hat and a black cape, Marin embraced the persona of a sadistic undertaker who is, literally, hellbent in his mission to find the ideal woman to bear his spawn. The films At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1964) and This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse (1967) invented Brazilian horror. Marin, his untrimmed fingernails curling in grotesque spirals, came to Sitges to screen the final chapter in the Coffin Joe trilogy: Encarnação do Demônio, a title that sounds perfectly spine-tingling intoned in Marin’s 4 a.m. vampire DJ voice.

In the 2008 film, distributed in Brazil by 20th Century Fox, no less, the demented Josefel Zanatas has been sprung from the mental hospital where he has been sequested the past 30 years. And he immediately sets to work, seeking the perfect vessel for his demon seed. The cast, which features an assortment of committed S&M devotees, enacts dark rituals that are quite authentic, including one scene of auto-cannibalism, and another where a woman has been sewn inside the carcass of a pig. As outrageous grindhouse fare goes, this makes Dario Argento’s Mother of Tears look like a car commercial. One hopes, at least, that the eyeball gouging was a stunt. But throughout every blood orgy, rat attack and sepulchural incantation, Marin remains larger than life. Or in Coffin Joe’s parlance, “Higher than God and lower than Satan.”

Encarnação do Demônio wasn’t the strangest artifact on display in the festival’s midnight movie series. That honor goes to Snake Sisters (1984), the product of a brief episode in Filipino film history when Imelda Marcos, the island’s shoe-loving dictator, eased censorship restrictions to encourage the production of films with softcore and hardcore sex scenes. The phase didn’t last long, and even the more imaginative (indeed, deliriously bizarre) efforts were eventually banned by the government. The negative of Snake Sisters sat in a desk drawer for 20 years, before British distributor Pete Tombs of Mondo Macabre managed to acquire it and begin restoration.

A mythological riff on an Edenic fall from grace into serpentine destiny, the film traces the sexual initiation of three girls hatched from snake eggs whose blissful existence changes forever with the onset of menstruation. Confused and frightened, the sisters call upon the wisdom of the Snake Father (evoked by green squiggly lines etched into the film stock and ectomorphic double exposures), who basically tells them: don’t have sex or you’ll turn into snakes.

Like typical adolescents, the girls dispense with their virginity almost immediately through the agency of a sailor whom they rescue at sea. What happens next? Well, you’ll need to get the DVD to witness the amazing transformation, and the surprise appearance of, yes, an island of monkey men! Just as impressive is the transformation of the actual film. Decades of decay created unintentionally psychedelic visual effects in the haphazard stretches of ruined negative. That much of Snake Sisters, shot by the singular Filipino sex and supernatural auteur Celso Ad Castillo, survived intact, with many beautifully lensed sequences, is a minor miracle. Let us all bow to the mighty Snake Father. And offer a tip of the hat to the ironically named Mr. Tombs, for an act of resurrection that even Coffin Joe would appreciate.