BLOOD BEAT (1983)

 

(a.k.a. BLOODBEAT; director/screenwriter: Fabrice-Ange Zaphiratos)

Storyline

In rural Wisconsin, a young woman meeting her boyfriend’s family starts having sexual reactions when the ghost of a vengeful samurai starts attacking and killing everyone around her.

Review

This strange film opens with a hunter (Gary) shooting a deer with an arrow, bringing it home to his off-putting, psychic artist wife (Cathy, convincingly played by Helen Benton) and her getting upset─it seems she’s been having migraine-inducing visions again. While Gary guts the deer in the yard, his son (Ted) and daughter (Dolly) arrive for a Christmas stayover with girlfriend and boyfriend in tow. Uncle Pete also arrives about this time.

Sarah, Ted’s girlfriend, is a less neurotic and a non-artistic version of Cathy. Sarah does not understand why Cathy silently stares at her with spooky, hostile intensity when they first meet. Other family members brush off this clash, chalking it up to Cathy’s sensitive, mood-flip ways. Sarah, however, is unable to shake off Cathy’s attitude. Cathy tells Ted that she knew Sarah, a surprise guest, was coming because “a mother knows everything.”

While putting sheets on their bed, Ted tells Sarah that the people who lived in the house prior to Cathy and Gary were psychoanalysts “or into meditation or something” before abruptly moving out without saying why. He says this after Sarah, also psychic, gets a reddish negative-print vision of the room, accompanied by the sound of a crying baby--a baby that is no longer in the house. Sarah, further unsettled, looks about the room at Cathy’s abstract, disturbing paintings and the gold-colored Asian figures scattered on shelves around the room.

Bad events occur. Sarah wakes up during the night and finds samurai armor and a sword in her bedroom trunk. Cathy, downstairs, has a vision and starts painting the black figure of a samurai warrior and recalls when she─then a girl─ found the same samurai armor and sword. When Cathy, like Sarah now, told her family about it, there was no blade and armor! One thing that seems to be different in Sarah’s case: she is multi-orgasmic when the samurai kills.

The family panics, their lights start flickering, kitchen knives and soda cans fly (as if by their own volition), and Cathy does her spooky psychic routine while they, separately and together, battle the samurai.

I read that BLOOD BEAT is considered a cult classic by some viewers. I see why. It’s nutty. That said, it lags in pointless, extended scenes with bad dialogue made worse by flat acting and jarring soundtrack choices (classical music). Many of the actors are one-time cinematic performers. The director (Zaphiratos) wrote and directed one other film, LA GRANDE FRIME (1977). The limited filmic output of these people is not surprising.

Is BLOOD BEAT worth seeing? If you have the patience to sit out its flaws, yes. It’s not the worst film I’ve seen, there is a weird intuitive flow to it, and it’s unique for its setting-storyline combination, so I’m glad I’ve seen it. Chances are I will not watch it again, unless it’s with a make-fun-of-it friend.