Review of The Awakening of the Beast

I am a fan of the iconic Brazilian Horror filmmaker José Mojica Marins and his most famous creation and alter ego Zé do Caixão aka. Coffin Joe. I liked the first two Coffin Joe films "À Meia-Noite Levarei Sua Alma" ("At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul", 1964) and "Esta Noite Encarnarei no Teu Cadáver" ("This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse", 1964), in which the macabre gravedigger is looking for a woman to bear him an heir, and I absolutely loved the fantastic third film, the extremely morbid anthology "O Estranho Mundo de Zé do Caixão" ("The Strange World of Coffin Joe", 1968). This fourth film, which isn't really a 'Coffin Joe' feature (neither is "The Strange World of Coffin Joe", in which the character just gives an introduction) isn't nearly as good as its predecessors, and neither is it a Horror film. "O Ritual Dos Sádicos" aka. "Awakening of the Beast" (1970) is a very bizarre, but nonetheless very tiresome film about drug orgies in which a doctor makes an experiment involving LSD... or something; the storyline really is too confused and too slooooow to pay attention. Granted: The film must have been rather controversial at the time, and some sequences involving drug excesses gone wrong are weird enough to watch the film. Still, I was disappointed, also due to the lack of anything creepy. As said, this isn't a Horror film. It seems like a curious mix of Mondo pseudo-documentary and bizarre Art-house cinema, all that in a way that is a lot less interesting than it sounds like. In some parts of the film, people proclaim things like "Zé do Caixão is a genius" and "Zé do Caixão is a great artist". Like "This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse" this film is in black and white but has an 'infernal' color sequence towards the end, only that the sequence isn't nearly as great as it was the case in the earlier film. This is only recommendable to hardcore Coffin Joe fanatics; while I consider myself a fan, this film bored the hell out of me.