The Strange Worlds of Coffin Joe

Up until a few days ago, I'd never even heard of Coffin Joe, who is (or was?) apparently something of a weird horror-host-esque superstar in Mexico. Basically, he's a character, seemingly indivisible from the actor/director who created and plays him, at the center of a series of weird transgressive cult horror films starting way back in 1964 and with a new installment supposedly coming out this year (after a nearly twenty-year gap). The overarching plot, as I understand it, is that our buddy Coffin Joe is out to find the perfect woman who can bear him a perfect child. Which he seemingly pursues through all manner of torture, weirdness, psychadelia, and other exploitation/cult film standbys.

But none of that is relevant to what I'm here to talk about. I've not seen the movies, and they'd probably be a little too transgressive for my tastes if I did, though some of the stills I've seen have been pretty iconic looking. No, I'm here to talk about something else entirely: titles. The Coffin Joe movies have the best collection of titles (as culled from the wikipedia entry linked above) that I have ever seen.

Hold your breath, because there's a lot of them:

• At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul


• This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse


• Strange World of Coffin Joe


• Awakening of the Beast


• The End of Man


• Sex and Blood in the Trail of the Treasure


• When the Gods Fall Asleep (my personal favorite)


• The Bloody Exorcism of Coffin Joe


• Women of the Violent Sex


• The Strange Hostel of Naked Pleasures


• Hellish Flesh


• The Woman Who Makes Doves Fly


• Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind


• Perversion


• The Secret of the Mummy


• Fifth Dimension of Sex


• Fatal Hours


• 48 Hours of Hallucinatory Sex


• The Embodiment of Evil

(Note that those titles actually constitute a partial filmography of actor/director Jose Mojica Marins, and he doesn't seem to play Coffin Joe in all of them. In fact, in one of them he seems to play the tituler End of Man. Nevertheless and all other things notwithstanding, that list of titles as presented is some of the best reading I've ever come across.)