Bloodbath

One of the undeniable pleasures of compulsive movie-watching is discovering obscure stuff such as this one which not only managed to rope in a surprising number of talents but the end result is so oddball as to make one wonder how it ever came to be written, shot and distributed!; indeed, in comparison to the stream-of-consciousness nature of the film under review, the same director's would-be arty Western BLUE (1968; which I have just watched) seems like a walk in the park!

For leading man Dennis Hopper (called "Chicken" here!), it was no big stretch to play this after his self-directed THE LAST MOVIE (1971) and TRACKS (1977) – what is more, he seems to have kept his APOCALYPSE NOW (1979) look for it – nor, for that matter, appearing as a junkie. For his co-star, too, Carroll Baker – here sending up her own image of a has-been Hollywood diva (dubbed "Treasure" in her case!), it was basically a continuation of her "Euro-Cult" outings of a few years earlier. Way-past-his-prime Richard Todd, however, must have kicked himself for accepting to appear in such a 'depraved' film, where he has to call his hard-drinking suicidal wife a "bitch", gay hanger-on Alice a "whore", and is even seen ogling an Oriental girl about 40 years his junior! Todd's wife is Faith Brook, an unknown name to me but, looking up her resume' to IMDb, she has been featured in films as diverse as Alfred Hitchcock's SUSPICION (1941), Joseph Losey's THE INTIMATE STRANGER (1956) and Anthony Mann's THE HEROES OF TELEMARK (1965)! With respect to the transvestite, apparently the actor was himself so inclined, since he went by the name of Win(ifred) Wells: actually, it was the latter who supplied the script and that of another strange Narizzano film i.e. the Italian-made REDNECK (1973)!

What plot there is essentially develops into a quartet of couplings: Hopper with a good-looking blonde, Baker with a bland-looking macho (who's almost always stark naked), Todd with the afore-mentioned Asian and Wells with a black stud (unflatteringly referred to as "Turd")! For what it is worth, a fleeting character in the film announces herself as "Carrie Nation", but whether this was a direct nod to the pop group at the center of Russ Meyer's BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS (1970) is hard to tell under the circumstances! Anyway, all four protagonists come to a sticky end: WWII vet Todd goes willingly before a firing-squad, spurred on by his girl, in full official regalia(?!) – his wife is thus left alone; Wells is gored by a bull in his lover's shack (how the animal came to be there is anybody's guess); Baker is drowned in a pool following an orgy; and Hopper stumbles dead on the beach, having shot up once too many (he frequently hallucinates about his parents, with whom he seems to have had an oedipal relationship – worshipping his mother while hating his evangelist father).

The rest is a semi-improvised wallow in hedonism: this Spanish production bore the original title LAS FLORES DEL VICIO – which, translating to THE FLOWERS OF VICE, links it with Jose' Ramon Larraz' no less outrageous THE COMING OF SIN (1977); the BLOODBATH moniker, then, is hilariously misleading and, for the record, the film is also known as THE SKY IS FALLING (an appropriately bleak line in a song Baker is constantly crooning). In fact, it is overflowing with local color in the form of peasants' toil-ravaged faces and solemn religious rites, to say nothing of violence – animals being nonchalantly slaughtered or beaten and, in the best (if tellingly irrelevant) sequence, the Bunuelian image of a child getting trampled by a crowd (even if we had already witnessed the discovery of the same kid's drowned body!). That is not forgetting the expected moments of Hopper lunacy: notably, squashing a handful of eggs early on squarely in the face of his black lover and then forcing her to sing a traditional 'from the old plantation' tune(!) and a remarkable dialogue exchange by the sea-side between him and his latest partner, which I quote verbatim: "You look beautiful like that" – "What?" – "I said 'You look beautiful like that'" – "I can't hear you" – "I said 'I wanna rape you'!" – "Then you should!"

This bizarro cult thriller has a bunch of languid American expatriates dwelling in a dreary Spanish village on the sea. Among them are a hippie junkie with mommy issues (Dennis Hopper), a has-been Hollywood glamour queen (Carroll Baker), and a jaded gay man (Win Wells). The presence of a religious cult infiltrating the community has dire consequences as the American outcasts meet their individual demons.

"Bloodbath," also known as "The Sky is Falling" and "The Flowers of Vice," is, in a word, obscure— it's been rarely seen in North America, and is often quietly shuffled in with all of the really odd career choices Dennis Hopper made in the late seventies/early eighties in a substance abuse stupor. While this is a fair categorization, what's not fair is that this film deserves an audience that has no reasonable access to it.

For fans of bizarre, surrealist thrillers and horror films from the bygone acid era of the sixties and seventies, "Bloodbath" is quite an experience. Narrative cohesion here takes a backseat, while the individual stories of these characters weave in and out of fantasy and consciousness. While on one hand we have a sort of surrealist thriller, or even a giallo, we also very much have a tragedy, and that's one of the more interesting things about the film. Remnants of American culture are tormented by their own failures, and their successes. The fluid unspooling of the narrative framed in the context of the religious cult festival is strangely sublime.

Dennis Hopper plays up his role as the drugged-out hippie tormented by his upbringing; Carroll Baker, who oddly enough co-starred with Hopper in 1956's "Giant" alongside Hollywood royalty Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean, arguably outshines him, and is fantastic in the role of a forgotten Hollywood starlet; the role is half-truth for Baker herself, and she uses this to her advantage. The fact that these two wound up together in such a production so many years later, both ostracized from the industry, would be a weird twist of fate in any other film, but it's almost an inverse normalcy here.

Overall, "Bloodbath" is a strangely eerie and thoroughly bizarre endeavor. It is a film that admittedly has a limited audience, but it is a pleasantly befuddling ninety minutes, and is prime viewing for anyone who has an affinity for some of the seventies' weirdest offerings, complete with child sacrifice, drugs, and tragic beauty queens. Definitely an "out there" flick, but for fans of bizarro thrillers, it's definitely worth seeking out. 7/10.

A junky (Dennis Hopper), a retired Hollywood actress (Carroll Baker) and several other misfits live in a run down Spanish village. Suddenly they begin turning up dead! A strange and violent film, almost like an Italian "giallo" as if it were directed by Andy Warhol! I dug it!

BLOODBATH opens with a woman walking the world's ugliest pig. No, really, you've got to see this thing! Next, a woman pulls the head off of a chicken. We get the immediate impression that something wonky is going on here, since none of the locals seem to have been born with the ability to smile. That is, unless they happen to be leering maniacally.

In total contrast to this, a very non-twelfth century-looking woman appears, dressed in groovy threads. She enters a building where western music plays. Her name is Susanna (Alibe Parsons), and she's met by the heroin-filled, racial slur-spouting, Chicken (Dennis Hopper). They're part of a misfit group of expatriates, living together in this tiny, ultra-religious village in Spain, and they stick out like ballerinas in a bowling alley.

These two groups are set against each other, as scenes of a religious festival is intercut with the hedonistic frivolity of the foreigners. Does anyone see a catastrophic culture clash coming?

Enter the fun-loving ex-movie star, Treasure Evans (Caroll Baker). She's sort of a younger version of Nora Desmond, and another part of this oddball bunch of bananas, that includes an aging WWII General and a mega-flamboyant gay man. They're a family, clinging together in order to be themselves, in spite of their increasingly oppressive surroundings. We get the impression that none of them could survive alone.

When these exiles gather for a Good Friday celebration, their drunken revelry flies in the face of the solemn procession going on beside them. Things have been tense and creepy all along, and the atmosphere gets really thick from here on out!

Soon, the darkness, religious insanity, and death take over completely.

This is one of those wonderfully weird, disturbing films that could only have come out in the 1970's. Filled with bizarre situations and an overhanging sense of gathering, unstoppable doom, the horror bubbles up like a corpse in a bog!

Mr. Hopper is as good or better here than in many of his outings, playing it natural, and letting it fly! For those who've never seen him go absolutely berserk, well, he certainly does that here!

SOME NICE TOUCHES: Watch for the red telephone! And, what's up with the pregnant woman with the umbrella?...

A decrepit little Spanish village is the setting for this terribly overlooked artsploitation gem, wherein a diverse grouping of screwball characters begin to serially meet mysterious and violent ends...among them, a faded Old-Hollywood bombshell, a poetry spouting drug fiend, a stuffy WWll vet and his unstable wife, a couple of muscular gigolos, a bitter, mincing queen, and two waifish young girls.

Prepare yourself for mind bending surrealism, gore murders, cryptoglyphic metaphors, and a standout scene which may be the most politically incorrect in any film made after the Great Depression. Stir in some gay sex and dead animals for good measure, and voilà...an indescribable head-trip that fans of freak cinema won't want to miss. It's surprisingly well mechanized in most technical aspects, and the off-kilter characters are aptly effectuated by an appropriately eccentric cast(Baker, de Santis, and Hopper, most notably).

6/10...recommended.