Movie Details
| Title: | The Blood of Heroes | |
| Director: | David Peoples | |
| Year: | 1989 | |
| Genre: | Apocalypse | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 04.21.07 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (0)
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 04.21.07 | DVR | With all the older movies I've been watching since moving to town, I have a constant sense of "catching up" where pretty much everything I see has been heavily recommended by lots of people. So if I like the movie, it's kind of like a "well of course" thing and if I don't then it's a "huh, that's strange." So it's really really nice to revisit a movie that I firmly remember seeing on the video shelf all on my own, loving the crap out of it even though none of my friends did, and watching it over and over because I loved it so much, completely independent from any outside knowledge of its general consensus of cool. Freakin Blood of Heroes. A Post-Apocalyptic sports movie, Blood of Heroes is about a band of "juggers" who go from dogtown to dogtown playing this awesomely violent game kind of like a mix between and football and hockey and rugby. Each person has a role on the team, like one guy has a netted barbed chain to swing around in defense of the "quick" whose job it is to handle a dog skull and place it on the opposing team's spike. There's also slashes which use a half-jousty thing/half irom hook and a couple other players with pugil sticks or whatever they are. They play for money (pieces of metal) and to collect winning dog skulls to eventually take to one of the nine existing cities and challenge the professional league. It's all in hopes of going pro and turning into a gladiator superstar. So after the games in these little dogtowns, there's a big party where everyone gets along, gets drunk and gets fucked before moving on the next morning. Leading this band of badasses is Rutger Hauer, with Delroy Lindo, Vincent D'Onofrio, and Joan Chen in lieu. It's pretty much the awesomest movie ever made. It's so great, man. It's all Australian outback-y and desolate and there are flies on everyone's face and the whole world is just dripping with tough guy macho brutality. It's not a movie unless you see Twin Peaks-era Joan Chen biting an ear off a guy, I tell ya. It's the past, it's the future, it's all over the place. I love post-apocalypse movies, i think, largely because of this one. It was truly a forming experience for me and I'm really happy that watching it again tonight made me just as happy as it did the first time. Until I checked IMDb and found out that there's always been 10 minutes cut from the American release. All this time, I've been missing 10 minutes! Although since this cut's ingrained in my memory I bet seeing the long cut will just mess with me, like seeing Leon after already falling for The Professional. Some guy in the message board listed out the missing scenes. Some of them seem cool but others sound like they might ruin the subtle inferences that exist in this cut. A lot of the human stuff is never actually addressed with dialogue (because in this world, if you talk about your feelings then they will crush your skull) but still communicated through looks and small moments. I think that's a big part of why I love the movie so much... how it manages to convey so much information about the world and the characters with so little exposition. Well... either that or the insane amounts of violence. AWESOME! |
