Blood for Flesh — Blood for Flesh( DVD)
From the late 2010s Blood for Flesh is a Mexican arthouse horror film, which is evenly peppered with moments of extremity- be it the bloody or the transgressive. It’s a decidedly murkily filmed, at times quite confusing ride- which at points seems to jump around in time scales in a rather erratic manner. Though there is certainly a grim, if puzzling pull to the whole thing, which keeps you locked in/ curious throughout the films just under hour-long runtime. Here from SRS Cinema, as part of their, extreme and unrated series- is a region free DVD release of the film, bringing together directors' commentary and interviews.
Blood For Flesh (aka Sangre para la carne) appeared in the year 2019- it was the first film by Mexican director, writer, and producer Alex Hernández. He’s since gone on to helm extreme horror anthology XXX Dark Web (2019) and a modern version of de Sade's Justin- which is at present in post-production.
After the credits- the film opens with low light red and black footage of someone giving birth, over the top of this we get a series of bulky and arty texts, which detail both the love and hate for the child being born. As we move on the film takes on a roman numeral broken up segment structure- though we do still jump back and forth in timescales.
The film has a fairly loose/ abstract structure, so it’s difficult to fully tie-down and understand the plot- but here’s what I get, a father(Juan Manuel Martínez), his daughter (Erika López), and son (Luis Navarro) get attacked by a group of fairly well-fed and naked Caucasian cannibals, who proceed to rape and abuse each just as dusk is fall in a stark county area. Along with this recurring(flashback/forward), we have the daughter attacking her father in a kitchen beating him down, the sister and brother having sex with close-up ejaculation, the sister seemingly gets oral pleasure from a deformed baby, the son ties the father to a tree upside down before brutalizing him. And the father beats up the daughter in a backroom, then drags her out to a tree, to brutalise her…in-between we get snapshots of other transgressive/ shocking imagery.
Over the film length its soundtrack by either discordant drones, barren wind billowing, or fairly harmonic classical music. It's largely lacking dialogue, save for a few sudden bursts here and there. The small cast is all rather put through the emotional and fake blood-covered grinder, and for the most part, they carry it off in a convincing manner. I’d say you need to come into Blood For Flesh from the arthouse angle, as for all its gruel, shock and extreme-ness, it’s an arthouse film- both in its structure and flow….so with that in mind, if you are just looking for straight extreme horror, this won’t be for you, as it has too much arty weighty to it.
Moving onto this new DVD release- and we get a few extras a commentary track, around twelve minutes of onscreen interview with cast members, and a trailer. The track features a female translator relating what the director says about the film- this is very sporadic, but there is some interesting things here- he talks about issues with filming certain scenes, initial problems with the pigs head in the film, commenting on favourite scenes, how the film changed from the script to screen- including the introduction of the son/ brother character. He talks about filming in a remote location the cannibal scenes, and a few more things.
The on-screen interviews run for twelve and a half minutes- this is with both the actress and actor who played the daughter and father, this is sub-titled, and again we get some interesting input on to been in such an extreme film. Lastly, we have a trailer for the film.
It’s good to see SRS releasing work from the arthouse world film side of the extreme horror genre- and I do hope they release more. As mentioned, this is firstly for the arthouse viewer, and second for the extreme horror fan- so do take that on board when thinking about picking this up!.