RIP: José Mojica Marins (1936 - 2020)

Your Humble Blogger, with José Mojica Marins and Barbara Steele.
Chiller Theater Expo, New Jersey, October 1994. 

I've just heard that the great, impossible, absolutely individual Brazilian actor, writer, and filmmaker José Mojica Marins has passed away. He first made his mark in South American cinema with his Zē do Caixāo character in the early 1960s and some stray, bizarre photos from them drifted up North, but the films themselves remained lost to us until Mike Vraney's Something Weird Cinema came along and struck up a deal with him. As a perk of that deal, I got to meet him in 1994 at the Chiller Theater Expo, where Barbara Steele was also guesting. José extended me the gift of being allowed to gently shake his left hand, the one with the very long, highly brittle nails of which he made such chilling use onscreen - something he did not permit the eager general public. A bonafide original, a revolutionary, Hellfire incarnate, a master of narcissism and the darkest satire, we will not see his like again. He was 83.

You can search this blog for earlier postings about this important figure.  

(c) 2020 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.