Blood Beat (1983)

directed by Fabrice A. Zaphiratos

USA

85 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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This is a hard one to review because it is so unique and has an almost non-linear narrative (which I'm not sure was intentional), and also because I personally love it so much that it's difficult to explain why. A lot of people like it because it's familiar to them; it's from Wisconsin and apparently that fact is very obvious if you know the area. So it's got that charm that exists only in extremely low-budget, shot-on-video horror movies that make no attempt to hide their regional roots, but there's something else about it that makes it compelling that's harder to put a finger on.

This was my second watch because I barely remembered anything from the first time other than that I couldn't hear what anybody was saying. I think this requires two or more watches because, while it may seem so nonsensical that it's easy to dismiss as simply being bonkers with no logic, it actually becomes a whole different thing if you watch it already being at least vaguely familiar with it. For one thing, the plot makes sense in its own way. Or I guess I should say that on second viewing one notices that it has a plot, which is something. It's at its most conventional at the beginning, when it sets up the general idea, and from there it devolves slowly into stuff that you just have to go with because it's not going to even attempt to explain them in the slightest.

I was struck by my own love for this specific type of unique, non-traditional horror film upon rewatching Blood Beat because I could tell exactly where things would have changed if this was made today. The boyfriend's daughter and his mom, the two characters whose intensely clashing vibes basically set off the entire storyline, would have been introduced much more gradually, with flashbacks showing us snippets of their past and giving us context for their apparent psychic abilities. If this movie cared about convention, we would be given backstory about this guy's mom's extra-sensory abilities and why she immediately gets such a bad vibe from his girlfriend, and vice versa. But I love this movie still, even though it doesn't provide any of those aspects of a normal narrative, because we do understand these people, possibly even better than we would had the film gone through the requisite motions to introduce us to them the way most movies do. The mother paints these weird paintings and it's just something she does, we don't need to be introduced to it delicately; we just know that she's a painter and that's an accepted fact. Everybody is exactly as they are, like the cameras just showed up in their lives one day. A somewhat notorious scene, where a couple who eventually get murdered by the ghost samurai (we'll get to that) bicker inconsequentially, him bitching at her from a waterbed to make him a Tang and her muttering to herself while fixing generic Tang in an ugly kitchen, shows what feel like real people doing real things, even though it is scripted. These two have no plot relevance and both end up knifed, but that look into their boring life is shot and set up so well.

So, yeah, there's a samurai ghost. No, I don't know why. There is a war flashback that appears to show some generic bombings and chaos, so if one of the characters had some professed connection to the bombing of Japan, then maybe we would be able to make the link between this archetypical Japanese spirit and its need for revenge on these specific people. But none of that is ever made clear. When the samurai speaks, it/he/whatever just boasts about its own power (in a super racist accent - no one in this movie is Japanese, by the way). The reason why there's a samurai wandering around stabbing folks at random in rural Wisconsin is never disclosed, but, like the way the characters aren't set up but instead just exist in the here and now, the samurai is a fact that Just Is.

The mother and the girlfriend, in addition to having some connection to each other, also have some connection to the samurai ghost. The mother's is stronger, as she’s able to directly communicate with it, but the girlfriend seems to be able to awaken the ghost through, uh, orgasms? Or maybe her orgasms and the ghost weren't connected and the director just chose to show the two at the same time as a stylistic choice? It remains unclear. But regardless, the two women are entangled in a strange triangle with the murderous ghost of a samurai in Wisconsin. The depiction of psychic power is what I loved most about this movie because something about it does feel so raw and eerie even in a low-rent film such as this. It could have just been that I was really into the vibe, but there's something so good about those dated glowing hands effects, and the way the psychic aura overwhelms people, the way it grows more and more powerful until not just the mom but also everyone around her who's blood, and eventually just everyone around her, is psychically awake. Honestly, the only thing keeping this from being a psychedelic masterpiece in the vein of recent hits such as Mandy or Possessor is that it never explains anything. I love this movie, and it's a Christmas movie too - I think it's going to be a yearly tradition for me. This is more of a niche cult film with little mainstream respect, but I don't even think it's bad objectively or subjectively. It's just one of those movies that uses a different language.