This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse (IFC, Monday @ 12:00 midnight)
In his second film, unleashed like a virus in 1967, Marins sharpened his very weird, vary amateurish, very crazy psychotronic fangs, playing "Coffin Joe," a sadistic, megalomaniac scourge in a bowler hat (later a signature top hat), running amok in an exploitation-movie version of Sao Paolo. You've never seen anything quite like it -- Marins's films are chintzy affairs, but because they occupy a rule-free outlaw zone beyond the perimeters of "normal" filmmaking, you never know what could happen. This one was a big hit in Brazil, institutionalizing Coffin Joe as the Freddy Krueger figure of his place and time.
Awakening of the Beast (IFC, Tuesday @ 12:00 midnight)
Marins on a roll and going semi-softcore -- Coffin Joe's hypnotic powers of control compel a shrink to experiment on four helpless mind slaves with LSD, essentially releasing Marins from any responsibility toward narrative coherence. Arguably the looniest and "best" of Marins (though Guy Maddin, for one, staunchly defends Marins' subsequent psychotic act, 1971's Finis Hominis).
Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind (IFC, Wednesday @ 12:00 midnight)
A 1978 assemblage, strung together by a wisp of plot, made up of outtakes and best-of sequences from Marins' previous dozen or so movies. Perhaps only fit for converted Coffin Joe fans, but isn't that everybody by now?
This is the movie in which Marins bridges the gap like a colossus between Ed Wood and Fritz Lang -- Coffin Joe is a Mabuse-like figure controlling the dooms of various other characters, their stories edited together so crazily and seemingly by accident that the film ends up feeling like it is itself the result of a sinister plot. Released in 1975, and the world is still not ready.
China 9, Liberty 37 (Encore Westerns, Tuesday @ 8:00 PM)
Another rare thing, at least in unedited form, this 1978 Monte Hellman western is a hash-head mess of aborted hangings, betrayals, railroad-magnate evil and fleeing outlaws, with Fabio Testi as a wisecracking pawn, Warren Oates as Warren Oates, and Jenny Agutter as the occasionally nude object of frontier desire. Look for Sam Peckinpah's appearance as a pulp writer.
Legong: Dance of the Virgins (TCM, Wednesday @ 12:00 midnight)
Rare, too, this 1935 ethnographic Paramount dance-fest was shot entirely in Bali with a topless "native" cast -- and then cut it down to almost nothing for its nominal release. The UCLA Film Archives, knowing well how important this kind of thing is, recently restored it in full.
Anthony Mann's 1957 combat-zone genre classic is still the best film made about the Korean War. Robert Ryan, Vic Morrow and Aldo Ray hump the landscape.
Boy on a Dolphin (Fox Movie Channel, Wednesday @ 12:00 noon)
The Mediterranean adventure flick that, in 1957, introduced U.S. filmgoers to Sophia Loren. Rising out of the sea. Very wet.
The Entity (Fox Movie Channel, Thursday @ 2:00 AM)
Not rare, I suppose, but a terrifying freakazoid still underacknowledged, a 1981 based-on-a-true-story-please-be-kidding ordeal in which Barbara Hershey plays a woman who is repeatedly -- for years -- raped and raped again by a giant, invisible spirit. Or something. What in the hell is going on is what everyone's trying to figure out -- including pragmatic psychologist Ron Silver -- but the film (and its punishing soundtrack) is an outright assault. Supposedly in development to be remade, but don't hold your breath.