Every Thursday, the Casa França-Brasil in downtown Rio de Janeiro has been presenting a film series titled "Malditos Filmes Brasileiros!" (Damned Brazilian Movies!).
Those are cheap Brazilian productions — cop thrillers, erotic comedies known as pornochanchadas, horror flicks, Feijoada* Westerns (aka "bang-bang movies") — made from the 1960s to the 1980s, and dealing with sex and/or violence in a manner that outraged and/or titillated the Brazilian filmgoing public and the local censors.
August screenings include Raffaele Rossi's Seduzidas pelo Demônio / Seduced by the Devil (1974), the story of a laidback university student who, after becoming possessed by an evil spirit, turns into a brutal psychopath ("forget Ed Wood," the festival's schedule says about this "trash pearl" of São Paulo's B-moviedom); Adriano Stuart's Bacalhau (Bac's) / Cod (1975), a semi-erotic satire on Steven Spielberg's Jaws ("Bac's" is a — meaningless in Portuguese — pun on the American film's English-language title), in which a hungry, overgrown cod scares the wits off a bunch of tourists at a São Paulo beach resort; and Milton Alencar Jr.'s Escalada da Violência / Escalation of Violence (1981), a violent Rambo-esque tale about a man's determination to avenge the bloody death of his family. (Escalada da Violência was filmed at the Beco da Fome, or Hunger Alley, a sort of poor Brazilian man's version of the American Poverty Row studios of yore.)
The screenings are free.
More information (in Portuguese) at Malditos Filmes Brasileiros!
More of those Damned Brazilian Movies!
Nordesterns: Damned Brazilian Westerns!
Getting to Know Your Brazilian Pornochanchadas
* Feijoada is a typical Brazilian dish made with mashed black beans and pork meat. The thing is so heavy that after eating it, you won't be able to walk for weeks.
AltFG Quiz of the Day: What was the first fully Brazilian film to receive an Academy Award nomination?
62nd Venice Film Festival – Golden Lion Line-Up
Quiz Answer: O Pagador de Promessas / Keeper of Promises / The Given Word (1962, directed by Anselmo Duarte), which was nominated for a 1962 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.
In 1959, Marcel Camus' French-Brazilian Orfeu Negro / Orphée noir / Black Orpheus was the Academy's pick for Best Foreign Language Film.
I want to see Cod so bad. I hope these someday get an international release.