Dr Jorge Mediero (José Mojica Marins) thinks he has a happy marriage, but his wife Raquel (Luely Figueiró) is actually scheming against him. Tonight, once more, he is busy with his experiments on concocting a new type of ultra-destructive acid so cannot take her to a concert, with the result that his best friend Olver (Oswaldo De Souza) escorts her there. But he is not only taking her on a night out, he is in fact having an affair with Raquel, and it is his idea to bump off the doctor and keep his vast fortune for themselves. They will use this new acid against him - according to Raquel it is powerful enough to dissolve "a big arm" - and see their plans come to fruition...
I'm not sure if the acid is powerful enough to dissolve "a big arm", it's simply that the subtitles on prints supplied to English speakers are notoriously poor, and evidently not written by someone with a capable command of the language. Still, it does add to the entertaimment value when you try to work out what it is that is being said through the fog of misunderstandings. What this was turned out to be a relatively restrained José Mojica Marins horror, so there were no nightmare sequences to be seen in a plot that could have easily have been derived from an old E.C. comic, complete with big twist at the end.
All it needed was Coffin Joe to come on like the Crypt Keeper for the wrap up, but he was conspicuous by his absence this time around. There was, however, the same dark morality which saw the villainous receive their comeuppance in a cruel fashion, although you can guess what the outcome will be. Marins didn't really reach the hysteria of some of his previous efforts with Hellish Flesh, or Inferno Carnal as it was known in Brazil, meaning that it doesn't have the stature amongst his fans that some of his other films do, but it was as if he couldn't completely offer up an entirely sober cinematic exeprience, and therefore there are a handful of instances of the director getting carried away.
First and foremost among those is the amount of times you hear the Jorge character yelling "RAQUEL!!! WHY?!!!", which happens roughly every couple of minutes after he has acid poured over him and the lab set on fire in a murder attempt. He doesn't expire, which will have you pondering over why he hasn't called the police, or even if he didn't want them involved why they didn't investigate anyway. Nevertheless, he is operated on and for some reason Marins saw fit to include footage of an actual eye operation in this, overlaid with Marins' yelling, which is meant to be chilling but is in fact hilariously inappropriate. Much as you'd expect with this filmmaker, naturally, and once it's over we can get down to the revenge.
Well, the lovers do a different kind of getting down as there follows what feels like half an hour of the actors grooving the night away in a club to the worst version of Do You Know the Way to San Jose? ever heard on celluloid. As if that were not bad enough, the wicked Oliver starts using his vast quantities of extra cash on prostitutes unbeknownst to Raquel, so when she finally begins to catch on she realises that as her husband has not pressed charges and is indeed still funding her lifestyle, then perhaps she has made a mistake. This is the ideal movie for the cuckolded, as it is all leading up to an act of vengeance which would indicate that you should always check the label before you try to murder someone, although you might have preferred Jorge when he was suffering nobly. If it was not for the excesses, it would have made a neat half hour on television. Music by Solon Curvelo.
