Bloodbeat (1982)

Directed by Fabrice A. Zaphiratos

If you’ve heard of this movie at all, then what you’ve heard about it is this: “This movie is so weird, it’s a Christmas movie set in Wisconsin where a woman gets possessed by the spirit of a Samurai warrior!” That much might be true, I’m not completely sure because very little is clear about Bloodbeat, but it completely glosses over 99% of the actual weird stuff in this movie. It is impossible for me to overstate how aggressively strange Blood Beat is on every single level and I still don’t know if I love it or hate it. Probably both. Anyway, when siblings Ted and Dolly return home for Christmas it is a joyous occasion, that is until their mom meets Ted’s new girlfriend, Sarah, who she seems to take an instant dislike to. After a failed hunting trip, Sarah is possibly possessed by the spirit of a Samurai who kills people and I think she has sex with the Samurai ghost while he’s killing people, or he’s feeding off her sexual powers to take corporeal form? It’s unclear. But what is clear is that this happens halfway through, and the majority of the first half of the movie is everyone’s terrible relationship drama because everyone is miserable and weird. Oh, also Ted and Dolly’s mom is a psychic painter. Because that really matters in the second half of the film.

I don’t want to give the wrong impression with that introduction. The first half of this movie is really really hard to get through. Everyone’s dialogue is redundant and awkward, sequences go on for waaaaaay too long, and there are many scenes discussing stuff that has either already been talked about or stuff that we don’t care about. Sometimes there are other problems, many scenes towards the end have such bad audio that the subtitles just gave up, and entire sequences look so bad that they must have either been shot on a different camera or there was some kind of problem  with the film negative. This isn’t a high energy bad movie where anyone could enjoy the insanity, this is a movie for people who like unlikeable cinema. This is an experiment to see what would happen if a director put forth a movie that had no structure of any kind. Blood Beat bonelessly flops forward, sometimes being a haunted house movie, sometimes being an erotic arthouse piece, and sometimes being a terrible slasher movie with not nearly enough Samurai action. Once you get through the first half, the second half really ramps up the insanity and introduces a ton of stuff that should have been in the first half but now feels even more like a jumbled mess when everything happens at once. I desperately wish the first half of this movie was more enjoyable because no one is sitting through that in one sitting, I couldn’t even do it. I’d recommend Blood Beat, but only for people who want to see something really out there and who have a lot of patience.