I've written a lot of reviews, and in them I've made no secret of the fact you can get yourself an extra half a star or more just on weirdness. So let's talk about 1983's spirit slasher oddity, Blood Beat. The backwoods of Wisconsin are a strange place to tell this story in which a girl meets her in-laws around Christmas, is "recognized" by the psychic mother (leading me to think there's a reincarnation element to this, but the film does a poor job of explaining itself), and later manifests the ghost of a samurai that goes around killing people more or less timed with the girl's powerful orgasms. When the killer eventually attacks the house, things go completely crazy, with a scene out of Poltergeist making its way into the proceedings, and cheap video effects smothering everything until it's straight up wizards firing magic bolts from their hands, yo. Subtitles during the noisy climax give you a little more juice, but not much. Without them, you have no idea what the mom and the samurai are saying. And while the acting is the cheapest thing here - practically no one on either side of the camera made any other film - the direction is actually pretty effecting, achieving an eerie atmosphere mostly through the music. At first, it's weird electronica (it's like the composer watched a lot of Classic Doctor Who), then rights-free edge classical, and both work, but seem at odds with one another. But that's this movie all over. There's just too much crammed into it for it to make sense. What's the whole thing with the hunting creeping out the immortal warriors? Is the samurai a ghost or a psionic manifestation, and either way, why does it act like a poltergeist and then a possessing demon? Why a samurai, for Pete's sake? (I'm guessing they had access to that armor and that's the whole of it.) But I love bizarre movies that should probably never have been made.
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Siskoid
I've written a lot of reviews, and in them I've made no secret of the fact you can get yourself an extra half a star or more just on weirdness. So let's talk about 1983's spirit slasher oddity, Blood Beat. The backwoods of Wisconsin are a strange place to tell this story in which a girl meets her in-laws around Christmas, is "recognized" by the psychic mother (leading me to think there's a reincarnation element to this, but the film does a poor job of explaining itself), and later manifests the ghost of a samurai that goes around killing people more or less timed with the girl's powerful orgasms. When the killer eventually attacks the house, things go completely crazy, with a scene out of Poltergeist making its way into the proceedings, and cheap video effects smothering everything until it's straight up wizards firing magic bolts from their hands, yo. Subtitles during the noisy climax give you a little more juice, but not much. Without them, you have no idea what the mom and the samurai are saying. And while the acting is the cheapest thing here - practically no one on either side of the camera made any other film - the direction is actually pretty effecting, achieving an eerie atmosphere mostly through the music. At first, it's weird electronica (it's like the composer watched a lot of Classic Doctor Who), then rights-free edge classical, and both work, but seem at odds with one another. But that's this movie all over. There's just too much crammed into it for it to make sense. What's the whole thing with the hunting creeping out the immortal warriors? Is the samurai a ghost or a psionic manifestation, and either way, why does it act like a poltergeist and then a possessing demon? Why a samurai, for Pete's sake? (I'm guessing they had access to that armor and that's the whole of it.) But I love bizarre movies that should probably never have been made.