It started, like it does a lot more than is probably apparent from the individual offerings here at Shards of Delirium[1], with Joe Bob. The first episode of The Last Drive-In this month was a sequel movie about Coffin Joe, a Brazilian villain (or anti-hero, back before that was a thing people said) I had never previously heard of. The two-pronged catch was, a) I have of course never seen the first movie, and b) I could not stay awake past the first 20 minutes of the sequel because of having had three vaccines earlier in the day.

Obviously, I decided to watch the first movie first, which I now have. My conclusion is that the choice to not air At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul was the correct one. Joe is a mortician, and he’s a pretentious self-absorbed dick, but in a way that is initially hilarious. He strikes dramatic poses from on high, he mocks the superstitions of the plebes (including faith), he beats his wife at only period-appropriate levels, that kind of thing. …okay, the last one wasn’t hilarious, but ultimately this is my point. Coffin Joe of this first movie is, as soon as his plan kicks off, supremely unlikeable.

That plan is to have a son. The downside is, his wife is barren. So he gets rid of her, picks a new girl, gets rid of anyone standing in the way of acquiring her, and so on until he gets caught up in some kind of consequence, and I ultimately did not understand why people like him or would watch sequels. Then I did watch the sequel, wherein he’s an anti-hero with likeable qualities instead of just a wife-beating dick, and even though he’s still clearly a villain, he’s a lot more fun, and so ultimately, I would say it’s fine to give This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse a try, even if it has one of the worst endings of any movie I’ve ever seen. (But that was not Joe’s fault[2], and is undone in the third movie [which I have not seen], so yay.)

The sequence in which Joe is walking alone at night on All Hallow’s Eve[3] and runs into or maybe hallucinates the annual procession of the Dead is pretty great, though.

[1] And like is probably eminently apparent from the site in aggregate
[2] Joe the director, not Joe the character, although it turns out they are portrayed by the same human person.
[3] or maybe it was the Day of the Dead, but since it was at night and what I’m about to say happened, I assume it was the night before