If you ever wanted to watch a movie that feels like being cornered at a bus stop by a man who smells like kerosene and won’t stop explaining his theories on sex, drugs, and Satan in excruciating detail, then congratulations: Awakening of the Beast is your cinematic nightmare come true.
José Mojica Marins, Brazil’s self-crowned king of sleaze and his alter ego Coffin Joe, decided to make a “pseudodocumentary” about the effects of LSD. The result looks less like a film and more like a college sociology project shot by someone who just found their uncle’s Super 8 camera and a case of cheap cachaça.
The first half is in black and white, because apparently the budget couldn’t stretch past the cost of film stock from 1952. We sit through psychiatrists debating sexual perversion like it’s an academic lecture nobody asked for. “Is LSD making people horny and depraved?” one asks, while the audience stares at the screen wondering if it’s making them bored and depressed instead. The panel drones on and on, while Coffin Joe himself sits there smirking like the kid who showed up to class high and still thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room.
Then the “experiment” kicks in: four junkies are given what they think is LSD, told to stare at a Coffin Joe poster, and—surprise!—their minds unravel in lurid, hallucinatory vignettes. Suddenly, the film switches to color, but don’t get too excited—this isn’t The Wizard of Oz. It’s just Coffin Joe cosplaying as everyone’s worst acid trip: sadism, freaky sexual tableaus, and enough bargain-bin surrealism to make you wonder if Salvador Dalí accidentally dropped his sketchbook into a puddle of vomit.
And here’s the kicker: at the end, Dr. Sergio reveals he never gave them LSD at all. Just a placebo. Yep, all that screaming, sweating, writhing chaos was apparently caused by staring at a movie poster. Meaning the entire second half of the movie was basically an advertisement for how terrifying Coffin Joe’s graphic design department is. Imagine spending 90 minutes just to be told, “It was all in their heads.” That’s not a twist—it’s cinematic catfishing.
Marins clearly wanted to make a statement about morality, society, and drug use, but the execution lands somewhere between a public service announcement and a carnival freak show. It’s equal parts preachy and perverse, like being lectured about sobriety by a man who’s actively chugging cough syrup.
The tragedy here isn’t that Awakening of the Beast is bad—it’s that it’s boring in its badness. It promises depravity and madness but delivers endless talk intercut with cheap color dream sequences that look like rejected Monty Python animations. It’s sleazy without the fun, experimental without the brains, and lurid without the payoff.
If LSD actually produced this kind of experience, no one would have touched the stuff after 1965. They’d all be demanding refunds.
