Flesh And Blood (Paul Verhoeven, 1985)

 

There is something deeply appalling with this movie. And I don't mean that the movie is bad, on the contrary is an excellent movie. There is something deeply appalling to the story, to the characters, to the flavor of the movie. A highly cynical, misanthropic, bleak and depraved movie that seems to picture a world where there is absolutely no room for morality of any kind. The first English-language film of the Dutch director Paul Verhoeven is something to admire really, even after all these years that has come out. Paul Verhoeven during the 80s and the 90s was famous for his films that had tons of nudity and that movie over here is not an exception. Filled with naked bodies that go together with that sense of absolute decay, seem to make a combination of black and white. The beauty that you get from nudity is been "brutalized" by the lack of any kind of decency. Flesh And Blood is definitely a dirty movie, a movie that speaks about the things that people want to forget that they exist to the human character. A stink of death and rot is hovering above the movie, like the plague. I have come to understand that the most interesting movies are the ones that provoke the viewer. We are so used nowadays to so fucking "soft" movies, movies that don't touch anything and anyone, that we have forgotten that there was a time when Hollywood really made movies that meant something. I think that if you look back in the 80s and 90s you will understand that cinema back then was a media of clear provocation. Even the campy, stupid 80s comedies had something to offer. Something much better than today's comedies.

Flesh And Blood comes to the viewer with power and violence. It comes to the viewer to clearly corrupt him, to make him think of bad things, guilty things. And that of course is the way that movies should work. Who cares about the superhero epidemic, when films like this one exist. I really wonder how people would react if this movie was shot today? How the audience would feel? Are they so hypnotized by the stupidity of the politically correct cinema that they would be appalled by the movie or they would embrace it? All these questions rise answers that don't seem to reassuring. People are addicted to stupidity in the movies. They are addicted to watch crap in the movies. And when a movie differs from the recipe of stupidity they seem to react in a bad way towards that movie. I don't know what to say really, I always thought that I belong to another era and to another planet.