Zé do Caixão (or "Coffin Joe"), the cinematic alter ego of Brazilian film maker Jose Mojica Marins, is an odd phenomenon. Apparently, the Coffin Joe movies are pretty well known in Brazil, which I find sort of amazing. Not because they are terrible, though they are by most standards. It is because they are so very, deeply weird (and famously censored), and I just find it hard to imagine anything so weird finding renown beyond the ranks of cult film enthusiasts. Then again, Cannibal Holocaust was supposedly the highest grossing film in Japanese history, so maybe we Americans, with our conventional ideas of propriety and, oh, plot, are the outliers.

Well, for a Coffin Joe movie, The Strange Hostel of Naked Pleasures is downright conventional. The plot is not exactly linear, but because it is clearly allegorical from the start the deviations from realism are easier to swallow. There are relatively few long speeches on the nature of immortality, faith and sin (though lots of short ones), not too many scenes are completely abstract representations of heaven or hell, and, for the most part, you know more or less what is going on. In fact, the basic plot is one that I've seen used as the framing device in multiple "horror anthology" films.

It starts off in more typical Marins style, though, with a (long, long) scene of Coffin Joe being raised from the dead by shirtless drummers, dancing negligee wearing women and some sort of priest. That may sound salacious, and it is supposed to be, but the disrobed people are mostly seriously unattractive (and not just in the usual "in the '70s no one worked out" way), so much so that you are actually sort of relieved to occasionally see what appear to be people in a mutant gorilla suits in instead.

Then, the action moves to a remote inn, presided over by Coffin Joe on a dark and stormy night. The vast majority of the film is then just set-up. For the next hour or more, he checks in various groups of people who, unbeknownst to them, already have reservations in his book: a group of thieves, gamblers bilking a mark, businessmen negotiating a contract, a pair of lovers (who could be father and daughter given the age difference), and drunken motorcycle hippies (my personal favorite). One businessman is turned away because there is no reservation for him, and he angrily says he will return with the police. The guests basically cavort and debauch all night, while Coffin Joe gives various speeches about the nature of life and death, and then they all notice that their watches, and time, have stopped. They are of course dead, and this is Hell, and their deaths are then shown in more and less gory (and goofy) tableaux. Only one guest escapes, walking out naked into the rain where the others can't follow. The denouement is the angry businessman who was turned away arriving the next morning with the police to discover that what he thought was a hotel was in fact … a GRAVEYARD!!! Coffin Joe walks among the headstones, but when he turns his face is … a SKULL!!!

Marins' films inspire a fair amount of analysis of their religious and metaphysical content, and their obsession with the nature of religion, death, immortality, sin and innocence, but I can't decide if they are really much deeper than the poems written by the Goths I knew in high school. (If not, at least he had the balls to go out and make his movies instead of moping around in his parents' basement.) Even though it is filled with lots of nudity and general debauchery (which is usually enough to pass the time), The Strange Hostel of Naked Pleasures is too long. The September/May couple engage in inept foreplay for so long even that gets tremendously boring. The whole thing could probably have been shoehorned into a 1/2 hour Twilight Zone episode, maybe without even losing much of the philosophical stylings of our friend Coffin Joe. However, a Coffin Joe movie is definitely not about the destination but the trip (da-dum-bum), so I can't really complain that it is 2 hours of my life that I won't get back.

I think this movie stands more or less on its own, but you might consider seeing one of the early Coffin Joe films (This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse is probably my favorite) before trying this one. (If you want a completely tripped-out abstract Jose Mojica Marins movie, check out Awakening of the Beast.) Even though they are rather more confusing, they do a better job, through long metaphysical soliloquies, of explaining who this Coffin Joe guy is, which makes this film make a little more sense. And, truly, this will be enjoyed more by those who are already fans of the strange, strange world of Coffin Joe. Who knows, maybe you are one and you just don't know it yet.

5 out of 10, but that's giving it 3 extra credit points for sheer weirdness.