Strange Hostel of Naked Pleasures, The (1976)
* 1/2 (out of 4)
Brazilian horror film has Jose Mojica Marins, the man behind Coffin Joe, running a hostel where a mixed group of people, ranging from hippies to gamblers, show up with nightmarish events to follow. I've heard some call this a Coffin Joe film but I don't see it as such since Marins' character, the hostel owner, is never called that nor is it ever implied that he's Coffin Joe. With that said, I found the film pretty hard to get through for a variety of reasons but the biggest being the dialogue. It really seemed like they were going for some type of Bob Dylan like lyrics because Marins' character is constantly coming up with various sayings, which are meant to be thought provoking but they left me wanting to laugh. After a while these sayings stop being funny and instead just come off as lame and this is what happened to the film as it kept going. For the most part we've got a twenty-minute movie spread out to 78-minutes and that means we get a bunch of scenes, which just replay over and over. This includes one of the dumbest orgy sequences I've ever seen where the hippies are just passing around bottles of vodka while canting an incredibly stupid line about getting naked. The final twenty-minutes is when the violence starts to kick up and we get countless more lines trying to be deep. I'm really not sure what the killings were about since the lines are so dumb but we get a wide range of events with a couple nice sequences. One such sequence is when a man is shot in the head only to have firework sparks come out before the screen turns all red in blood. We have other scenes involving the likes of a snake and crab but these add to very little. The entire movie is strange as you might expect and there's a certain level of atmosphere, especially the first ten minutes, but in the end the movie is just too dull to really work. Fans of the bizarre or surreal will want to check this out but others should certainly stay clear. Original title: A Estranha Hospedaria dos Prazeres.
